The Story Behind Epic Failures

Last September, David Denby penned a great essay titled Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies? Denby’s observations centered around the success of mindless movies like The Avengers:

EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Avengers, which pulled together into one movie all the familiar Marvel Comics characters from earlier pictures—Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and so on—achieved a worldwide box-office gross within a couple of months of about $1.5 billion. That extraordinary figure represented a triumph of craft and cynical marketing: the movie, which cost $220 million to make, was mildly entertaining for a while (self-mockery was built into it), but then it degenerated into a digital slam, an endless battle of exacerbated pixels, most of the fighting set in the airless digital spaces of a digital city. Only a few critics saw anything bizarre or inane about so vast a display of technology devoted to so little. American commercial movies are now dominated by the instantaneous monumental, the senseless repetition of movies washing in on a mighty roar of publicity and washing out in a waste of semi-indifference a few weeks later. The Green Hornet? The Green Lantern? Did I actually see both of them? The Avengers will quickly be effaced by an even bigger movie of the same type.

His concern is that this trend changes the nature of cinema: from drama to mere spectacle.

The oversized weightlessness leaves one numbed, defeated. Surely rage would seem an excessive response to movies so enormously trivial. Yet the overall trend is enraging. Fantasy is moving into all kinds of adventure and romantic movies; time travel has become a commonplace. At this point the fantastic is chasing human temperament and destiny—what we used to call drama—from the movies. The merely human has been transcended. And if the illusion of physical reality is unstable, the emotional framework of movies has changed, too, and for the worse. In time—a very short time—the fantastic, not the illusion of reality, may become the default mode of cinema.

And this trend is amplified by the influence of commercials and music videos, neither of which rely upon drama:

Film, a photographic and digital medium, is perhaps more vulnerable than any of the other arts to the post-modernist habits of recycling and quotation. Imitation, pastiche, and collage have become dominant strategies, and there is an excruciating paradox in this development: two of the sprightly media forms derived from movies—commercials and music videos—began to dominate movies. The art experienced a case of blowback.

As everyone knows, we can read an image much more quickly than anyone thought possible forty years ago, and in recent years many commercials have been cut faster and faster. The film-makers know that we are not so much receiving information as getting a visual impression, a mood, a desire. A truly hip commercial has no obvious connection to the product being sold, though selling is still its job. What, then, is being sold at a big movie that is cut the same way? The experience of going to the movie itself, the sensation of being rushed, dizzied, overwhelmed by the images. Michael Bay wasn’t interested in what happened at Pearl Harbor. He was interested in his whizzing fantasia of the event. Nothing important happens in The Avengers. As in half of these big movies, the world is about to end because of some invading force; but the world is always about to end in digital spectacles, and when everything is at stake, nothing is at stake. The larger the movie, the more “content” becomes incidental, even disposable.

…The results are there to see. At the risk of obviousness: techniques that hold your eye in a commercial or video are not suited to telling stories or building dramatic tension. In a full-length movie, images conceived that way begin to cancel each other out or just slip off the screen;

Denby notes the progression of the film medium and how it came to rely upon story:

A long time ago, at a university far away, I taught film, and I did what many teachers have no doubt done before and since: I tried to develop film aesthetics for the students as a historical progression toward narrative. After all, many of the first movies in the 1890s were not stories at all, but just views of things—a train coming into a station, a wave breaking toward the camera. These visual astonishments caused the audience to stare open-mouthed or duck under the seats for cover (or so the legend says, preserved recently in Scorsese’s Hugo). I wanted my students to be astonished, too—to enjoy the development of film technique as a triumph of artistic and technical consciousness. I worked in straight chronological order, moving from those early “views” through Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 experiments in linear sequencing in films such as Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery and then on through D.W. Griffith’s consolidation a few years later of an actual syntax—long and medium shots, close-ups, flashbacks, parallel editing, and the like…

At the beginning, after the views of trains and oceans, movies offered burlesque skits or excerpts from theatrical events, but still no stories. A completed movie was often just a single, fixed, long-lasting shot. It is likely, as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson explained in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, that narrative emerged less from the inherent nature of film than from the influence of older forms—novels and short stories and plays. And also from pressure to create work of greater power to attract more and more customers.

If creating fictions is not encoded in the DNA of film, then what is happening now has a kind of grisly logic to it. As the narrative and dramatic powers of movies fall into abeyance, and many big movies turn into sheer spectacle, with only a notional pass at plot or characterization, we are returning with much greater power to capers and larks that were originally performed in innocence.

His observations are nothing new. Though they may have greater urgency today, the same concern was voiced by Producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields) for years:
Even if a pill seems to look right in the scientific journal Fertility and Sterility suggested that almost 29% infertile couples employ Complementary and Alternative therapies for the commander cialis http://robertrobb.com/congress-is-supposed-to-legislate-not-investigate/ management of infertility issues but the rate is rising at a steady pace. buying cialis cheap You must maintain the fitness and structure of your blood vessels if you are to evade the crisis. Get the buy online viagra via shipping and enjoy with your love partner. levitra professional is the latest in the levitra on line family and is a new generation drug. Body art is very trendy robertrobb.com viagra prescription cost right now and what makes them a leading choice.

Sadly, however, over the past few years filmmakers have failed to tap the real power and influence of cinema. Many have failed even to acknowledge the awesome responsibilities their job entails. There is an underlying pervasive poverty of ambition amongst too many people in this industry. Simply claiming to be a purveyor of entertainment just seems profoundly dishonest to me. Filmmakers have to decide for themselves what kind of society they want to be a part of, and then promote that society through their work rather than take advantage of society’s weaknesses. But film is actually regressing back to the era of the fairground spectacle, when all audiences demanded was the thrill of standing in front of the Lumiere brothers’ screen as a train was rushing towards it.

Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation

Denby continues:

THESE OBSERVATIONS annoy many people, including some of the smartest people I know, particularly men in their late forties and younger, who have grown up with pop culture dominated by the conglomerates and don’t know anything else…  If I say that the huge budgets and profits are mucking up movie aesthetics, changing the audience, burning away other movies, they look at me with a slight smile and say something like this: “There’s a market for this stuff. People are going. Their needs are being satisfied. If they didn’t like these movies, they wouldn’t go.” But who knows if needs are being satisfied? The audience goes because the movies are there, not because anyone necessarily loves them…

But the trouble is real, and it has been growing for more than twenty-five years. By now there is a wearying, numbing, infuriating sameness to the cycle of American releases year after year. Much of the time, adults cannot find anything to see. And that reason alone is enough to make us realize that American movies are in a terrible crisis, which is not going to end soon.

Enter John C. Kwasny’s recent piece at Reel Thinking called The Story Behind the Epic Summer Blockbuster Failures. Summer 2013 has has disrupted the escalation of epic blockbusters Denby verbosely lamented. In contrast to The Avengers, this summer’s movies have largely been failures. Some has suggested market saturation and CGI burnout as possible reasons why, but Kwasny says these are not the real reasons:

Now these are very good explanations to the epic failure of summer 2013.  But I would like to suggest that much bigger than these reasons is the fact that so many of these films tell incredibly lousy STORIES!”

…Hollywood, as with most of our American institutions, seems to want us just to disengage our brains and sit back and be entertained by cosmic destruction, overpaid actors, and a joke or two thrown in for good measure.

So I take it as good news that these movies are failing.  Maybe we are actually longing to be told a good story.

Human beings, created in the image of God, though drawn to distraction, will ultimately desire meaning over spectacle. And therefore Christians have an important role to play in the production of culture (“the attempt to create a system that allows us to live in peace, in pleasure, and with a sense of meaning, a feeling of fulfillment; the web of ways we have of both looking at the world and living in the world” –Horner):

Christians, with our minds being renewed each day, should want stories that will make us truly think and feel in God-honoring ways.  Even non-believers, made in the image of God, really desire to be told a story that will enliven the heart and mind rather than continue to deaden them.  Ultimately, our true longing is for the greatest story ever told–the grand story of redemption in Jesus Christ!

And Kwasny’s final conclusion hits the nail on the head:

As much as we’re all probably getting tired of looking forward to big blockbuster movies only to be disappointed, there is really a much bigger problem out there.  It’s one thing for Hollywood to lose its ability to tell a good story; but the real worry is that Christians aren’t much better.  No, I’m not referring to the so-called Christian movie industry, but rather the main venues of our “storytelling”– the pulpit and the Christian Education classroom.  We too can engage in a whole lot of fluff, joke telling, and entertaining production that moves us away from the amazing stories of Scripture.  Instead of being passionate about the Word and becoming more skilled in the art of communicating it to the world, we can settle for lightweight sermons and Bible lessons that leave people empty.  Our prayer should be that a renewal of quality storytelling take place in our churches first, where hungry hearts and minds can engage with life-giving truth.  Then, maybe some gifted writers will once again give us stories in film that will encourage and engage us!