20 Nov 2018 - Graham
previously: the not-so simple tomato
On the subject of power and sexual violence, Mekela P. rightly recommends Elizabeth Bruening’s harrowing story of an all too ordinary rape:
“Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl. Journalists, activists and advocates began to uncover that very same imbalance of power from Hollywood to Capitol Hill in the final year of this reporting, in an explosion of reporting and analysis we’ve come to call the #MeToo Movement. But the rot was always there – even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes.”
I neglected to credit Mariana C. who sagely recommended the tomato poem.
Rachel T. recommends The Gardener’s Year, by Karel Čapek:
Čapek was an early 20th century Czech writer and humanist. He was considered public enemy number 2 by the Nazis at the time of their invasion of Czechoslovakia. Perhaps fortunately for him, he died of natural causes just a few weeks before the Nazis showed up at his door to arrest him.
Anyway, he’s a fascinating fellow, and his book about gardening is delightful. It is a series of tongue-in-cheek essays about the trials and travails of suburban gardening. It includes jaunty little illustrations by his brother Josef, who did get arrested by the Nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945. A lot of it is light and breezy and airily funny, like a P. G. Wodehouse novel, but then he’ll drop these little truth bombs into it in unexpected places. So you just roll right along reading about pretty flowers and soil and things and then out of the blue, bang, you get this little explosion of something brilliant. It’s like strolling through a quaint little neighborhood, and you’re admiring the historic corbels or whatever when you suddenly get a sight of a great work of art in someone’s living room. It’s just for a second, because you’re not supposed to go staring into other people’s windows, but you don’t forget it.
I got interested in Čapek after I decided to re-read his play “R.U.R.”, which I first read several years ago. “R.U.R” is the play that gave us the word “robot”. I highly recommend it. It’s about a future in which most labor is done by robots, which puts the working class out of work and leads to massive global instability: a worker’s uprising, followed by a robot uprising, and ending in the complete destruction of humanity. In some ways it’s extraordinarily dated (especially in its treatment of female characters), but in others it is very prescient and relevant. It’s also a ripping good story and very well told. It’s worth tracking down a really good translation – the version from the Dover Thrift Editions is horrendous, and leaves out a lot of the best stuff. Best one I’ve found is in a collection called “Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader”.
Since rediscovering torrenting, I have watched far too many movies and TV. I write today to share a spreadsheet collecting my reviews so you might avoid the plentiful duds and share in the gems I stumbled on. And I also have some theories about why so many movies are mediocre today.
(archivists note: the spreadsheet has been lost to time)
When I say movies are mediocre these days you should know that I can watch just about anything. Screens transfix my gaze. I have trouble maintaining conversation if there’s a TV in sight. So my standards are very low, or at least I thought they were.
Perhaps my expectations have changed. Maybe I’ve become sentimental - overly fond of the middling movies of my youth and too harsh with the present.
But sentiment does not explain my dissatisfaction. In watching all these movies, I conducted an accidental experiment. I sampled movies from the present, movies I had missed 1998-2008, and even a few favorites from 2000-2008 (itself remarkable because I had, until then, never intentionally rewatched a movie). I found that today’s hits are, in general, worse than yesteryears’. Boring movies have always been made, but today they occupy more of the box office.
So what’s the difference? The problem is that the top movies today are lazy. They rely too much on violence for conflict resolution; they somehow continue to fail (or just barely pass) the Bechdel test; and they are almost always sequels, remakes, or adaptations.
Sequels are never as good. Take, for example, Ant Man 2. The romance in the first film was not, to be fair, a major plot point, but the movie did rely on it for a good deal of tension and humor. The resolution at the end was very sweet and hopeful. Then, the beginning of the second movie informs us that the romance has ended, and proceeds to build it up in exactly the same manner as the first movie. Did the writers not know any other ways to create tension between characters? I think many sequels make this mistake, they follow the same script.
Well maybe Ant Man 2 isn’t the most generous example. The Dark Knight is a sequel of a gritty remake, but it’s still really good. And despite pledging to never watch another Spiderman movie, I found that Spiderman: Homecoming is the best version of Spidey yet. Perhaps we could conclude that reboots tend to be better than sequels, but the newest Batman is just plain awful.
One reason Homecoming was so good is that there were major problems (his crush, the elevator scene, the warehouses) that weren’t solved with punches and or lasers. And oftentimes when Spidey intervened he made things worse and put other people at risk. Homecoming’s relationship to violence sharply contrasts with almost every other modern superhero movie, and even movies generally. Despite introducing superheros with ever more varied powers, these movies nearly always resolve the primary conflict with bigger punches or lasers.
To be fair, I just rewatched Casino Royale and damn that’s a fine movie with a lot of punches, projectiles, and sexism. But, to be really fair, when Daniel Craig isn’t throwing his impossibly muscled shoulders back and forth and shimmering out of the ocean, he spends a fair amount of the movie convalescing from testicle injuries. And the tension between good and bad guys isn’t just strength against strength. In the parkour scene the bad guy seems to glide through the set while Bond crashes his way forward and comes out much worse for the wear.
The difference, I think, between say Bond and the Avengers (or even between the early versions of Iron Man and the later Avengers) is that Bond (and the early Stark) is still human.
The most recent Avengers are too super. They make super-jumps, take super-hits, have super-willpower, and super-technology. Their power is an exciting fantasy and serves effectively as an escape from our acutely limited present, but it is unrealistic and repetitive.
Take for example, Thanos, the baddest bad guy yet in the Avengers. Thanos obtains stones that allow him to master reality and time and he mostly uses them to shoot different colored lasers. The best plan the good guys come up with involves slightly trickier and more coordinated punches and lasers. Moreover all of the subplots are solved with violence: the politics and the romance, and even father-daughter tension. If these super-capable-beings solve most problems with violence, can we expect anything more from ourselves?
At their core, these repetitive, unrealistic, and regressive movies fail to perform the function of art; they tell us no new truths about ourselves.
What social forces give us so many awful movies? Well Nerdwriter has lots of smart artistic reasons for the epidemic of mediocrity. I’d like to add that the law is also at fault.
Laws like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act dramatically expanded the scope of Intellectual Property protection. As intellectual property rights increase in strength they gain a sort of gravity. Thus, we end up with Disney, which already owned most of Marvel (itself a horrid agglomeration), buying 20th Century Fox (another super-corporation). This merger allowed them to obtain the remainder of the Marvel rights, a ton more IP, and control over 30% of the movie market. But the gravity that leads to these mergers is not an unchangeable law of economics, rather it comes from the laws of men.
Consolidation could lead to bad movies for several reasons:
Brian H. has many lovely spotify playlists to get your next party started.
Allie A. has two recommendations. One, Che Apalache, who are both fun to listen to and hang out with. Two, if you’re like me you overdid Arcade Fire in college, and then kinda forgot about them, but Allie reminds us they are amazing.
next post: homelessness