An abusive relationship with Hollywood
Peter Wicks
Englishman Abroad
I'm trapped in an abusive relationship with Hollywood. I'm in love, but for some time now Hollywood has been treating me very badly: abusing my trust, insulting my intelligence and taking my money.
Some people are temperamentally inclined to see decline everywhere they look. It's important to remember that bad films are nothing new — they have existed as long as the medium itself. Nevertheless it was not until the 1980s that we saw the birth of "high concept" films which positively reveled in their vacuity.
For a film to qualify as high concept it must be possible to describe it (and thus to pitch it to a studio executive) in a single sentence. "Top Gun" is like "Rocky," but with planes; "Days of Thunder" is like "Top Gun," but with cars; "Red Heat" is like every other Schwarzenegger flick not directed by James Cameron. You get the idea.
The high concept phenomenon culminated in "Independence Day," a movie which is most famous for the scene in which aliens blow up the White House. After seeing the film I left the theater wishing that aliens would destroy 20th Century Fox Studios in a lethal but just act of intergalactic film criticism.
In the '90s high concept films took second place to what I like to think of as no concept films, which can cost $80 million but give the impression of having been made entirely by accident. If you watch "Swordfish" with sufficient care (and I'm not suggesting for a moment that you should) you can actually see the point at which the film gives up even trying to make sense. In the past, films were sometimes badly written, but even in the worst cases you could tell that a writer had at least been involved in the process.
Some recent films are so dumb, so sublimely devoid of the merest hint of an idea, that I can actually feel myself getting stupider as I watch them. It's a good thing I took the GRE before watching "Resident Evil," otherwise I'd probably be at Arkansas State right now, struggling to keep up.
I don't mean for a moment to suggest that to be good a film must be a profound meditation on the human condition. A well made piece of entertainment ("Ghostbusters," say, or "Back to the Future") is a wonderful thing.
The problem seems to be that at some point in the late '80s Hollywood executives noticed that however execrably bad their films were, people came to see them anyway. Since then they've been behaving like a boy who, having recently discovered that his dog will eat paint, is frantically searching the house for ever more indigestible things to feed it. My guess is that the executives' epiphany happened in 1988, shortly after the release of "Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach."
Somehow, good films do still get made. The difficulty is finding them. The critics are no help at all. It's not that they are always wrong (which would actually make them quite useful, like a clock known to be exactly six hours slow), but they are in the habit of tossing out praise with a wanton abandon which ultimately devalues the currency. The Critic Who Cried "Masterpiece" could almost be a modern version of the boy who cried "wolf" were it not for the ending; the boy got eaten, but the critic made a tidy living and retired to Florida.
There are a number of reasons why critics overrate films. One is good old-fashioned corruption. The distributors may offer exclusive information, images or interviews in exchange for a rave review. But a sizeable amount of reviewers seem to be genuinely enthusiastic about the awful films they praise. They give the impression of being so awed by the miracle of moving pictures that they feel that to demand anything further — witty dialogue, character development, even a minimally coherent plot — would be churlish in the extreme.
In addition to these factors, the sheer number of critics out there makes it almost a statistical certainty that for any film — however awful — at least one of them will write the sentence "If you liked `Star Wars,' you'll love this."
So all I can do is to keep going to the movies in the blind hope that I will see something that reminds me why I keep coming back. Once in a while I get lucky and see a film so wonderful that it reminds me why I fell in love with Hollywood in the first place. But more often what I get is a film so awful that I can almost hear its mocking voice addressing me, "Go on, leave! I dare you! What are you going to do without me, read a book?"
Peter Wicks is a graduate student in the philosophy department. If you have not already done so, he suggests that you watch "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Brazil" at the first opportunity. Peter can be contacted at pwicks@nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, March 20, 2003
