Today’s Hollywood is full of eccentricities and extremes—there are unambiguously crass and demagogic movies that wear their product-hood like a badge, and then there are movies of an extremely personal idiosyncrasy, some of which have had surprisingly high budgets (“Hugo” and “The Tree of Life” are two examples among many), such as could never have been made in classic Hollywood. Nonetheless, the “Death of Movies” think piece is, by now, a familiar genre, in which digital technology, as employed by Hollywood, has become a stock villain. Last year, Mark Harris wrote one for GQ and Manohla Dargis offered one at the Times in a back-and-forth with A. O. Scott. (I responded to them at the time.) Now, there are two new cinematic endgamers in the current issue of The New Republic, one by my friend and colleague David Denby, the other, by David Thomson.
David Denby’s piece, ”Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?”, has a sociological focus. He’s concerned, by and large, with what he considers the aesthetic decline of “mainstream American movies.” While seeing much of the authentic merit in contemporary Hollywood (his list of current luminaries includes Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, and Terrence Malick), he worries that studios don’t finance such filmmakers often enough or lavishly enough for these filmmakers to realize their full potential. As I wrote last week, I don’t agree that the best and most ambitious directors would be helped by increased studio involvement; with financing from independent producers, they have a free hand that they wouldn’t be likely to get from studios (and, with a measure of self-production, an existential commitment that often brings tangibly practical results).
David Thomson’s piece, “American Movies Are Not Dead: They Are Dying,” is different. His golden age of movies was the forties and late fifties, and he blames the filmmakers themselves for its collapse. By the end of that era, he claims, even the greatest filmmakers had lapsed into “the abandonment of narrative earnestness.” The final stake, he says, was driven by Jean-Luc Godard, who, with his “deconstruction of genre, story, screen acting, narrative sequence, and the attitude of movies to the public,” ultimately “treated the audience with contempt.” (I’d say he treated the audience to “Contempt,” but that’s another story.)
Thomson also doesn’t see much of merit in contemporary Hollywood; most of the few recent movies that Thomson praises come from overseas, and most of those harken back with unblinking devotion to his prelapsarian cinema. (Actually, many of today’s most banal popular entertainments—as well as the bland, pseudo-literary movies that shuffle out at Oscar season—could do with a wink and a nod.) He laments the passing of images made with “silver salts,” as if he had a seat on the commodities exchange. Whereas David Denby takes note of the industry’s artistic luminaries and wishes that more people would see and discuss their movies, David Thomson has pretty much given up.
It isn’t the movies that are dead, but Thomson who is deadened to movies. He looks back nostalgically to a time before “the self-consciousness of disbelief,” before “undermining the innocence of sincere sentiment.” There’s still plenty of sincere sentiment in movies these days (whether in romantic comedies and melodramas or in ready-for-public-television Oscar bait), but I doubt that there was ever the innocence of his nostalgic fantasy. It’s hard to believe that anyone ever took the stories as seriously as Thomson thinks they did. His cultish lament for a lost faith sounds less like a description of any time that ever existed than like a recipe for collective psychosis. Imagine viewers parked in front of name-your-classic—he likes “Rear Window”—who would not recognize James Stewart and Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr and Thelma Ritter, or who, doing so, would forget that they’re watching actors at work, ones they recognized from dozens of other productions.
The mere fact of the star system punctures the story, even at the heart of the studio era, more forcefully than any New Wave deconstruction. (The New Wave, by the way, understood that watching a movie means being both inside and outside of it, and that the emotional power of a story is undiminished by the presence of quotation marks and virtual frames-within-frames—and that these implicit fourth-wall-breakers have been present from the start of the business.) The movie-smitten New Wavers, Godard at their head, found that they could make use of these devices—and of their movie-love—to evoke a new range of emotions and ideas, and to convey their movie-love to a new generation of viewers. But Thomson, who fetishizes a terribly small range of movie devices, of visual rhetoric, is immune to these emotions and ideas. He’s interested only in movies that tickle his personal cinematic pleasure-spots with just the right toys.
And, as for digital technology, some of the best recent movies, from “Benjamin Button” and “Black Swan” to Alain Resnais’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” (coming next week to the New York Film Festival) have been made possible by digital technology. Many of the classics of Hollywood’s (so-called) realism are also the work of elaborate artifice, involving miniatures, painted backdrops, rear-screen projections. And silver salts brought about not just “Stagecoach” but also “Triumph of the Will.” No device is intrinsically more moral than another, no technique is intrinsically better than any other; a fixed-focus shot isn’t better than a zoom, a dolly shot isn’t better than a hand-held move, direct sound isn’t better than dubbing, color isn’t better than black-and-white, and film isn’t better than digital.
Film is certainly different, it’s used differently, it evokes a particular variety of moods and connotations on its own, and many filmmakers have the imagination to make personal and artistic use of them. But there are other filmmakers who lazily wallow in nostalgia by way of film, just as there are some filmmakers who make astonishingly imaginative use of digital technology and others who lazily wallow in the manipulative conveniences made possible by digital recording and editing. Different directors, different movies, different tools. The different, and constantly evolving, viewing experiences offered by those possibilities is one of the ongoing joys of movie-watching; discovering and conveying the manifold beauties of the best of them—including, just for starters, such recent releases as “Moonrise Kingdom,” “Margaret,” “The Master,” “To Rome With Love,” “We Have a Pope,” “Damsels in Distress,” “Magic Mike,” “The Deep Blue Sea,” and “Red Hook Summer”—is one of the great privileges of working as a critic. Without such joys, I couldn’t imagine bothering.
Photograph by Niko Tavernise/Courtesy Focus Features.