It is the end of the summer, and I am terminally bored. I have watched civilizations crumble, heroes rise, monsters slain, legends be born, and love triumph. Yet I can barely stay awake.
What you’ve got to understand is this: Yes, I can talk Tati and Fellini and Tarkovsky, and I once spent nine hours in a dark theater watching Matthew Barney play with vasoline. Once I took a 90 minute train ride just to rent movies for a Raoul Ruiz marathon, and yes I did a dance of joy when I found out The Color of Pomegranates was streaming on Netflix…
But the only reason I started loving movies in the first place were the big ones. The alien invasion flicks. The grand adventures. The epic, explosive clashes between those who love freedom and the iron boot of the evil Soviet Empire. Because that’s what I was raised on. That was my gateway drug. You see, I was raised by a dad that loved science fiction, loved comic books, and loved movies; a love that he instilled in me. (I was also raised by a mom that was nice enough to tolerate and even derive some pleasure from the obsessions of her husband and sons…)
We were a moviegoing family. And every Friday night we would be in that dark theater, watching Hollywood’s latest piece of entertainment. And, whether the movie was good or bad, I loved every minute of it. My dad is gone now, and I’m rarely there on opening night anymore, but the child I was is still very much a part of the man I am today. I still want to be amazed. I still want to be carried away by spectacle. And it’s just not happening anymore.
This is the first summer where I’ve been underwhelmed by nearly everything I’ve seen. To be fair, there have been a ton of interesting, funny, smart movies this year. I watched two of them just today. But the blockbusters have not been good. I’m not going to get into the whole thing where people rail against Hollywood and it’s highly commercialized sausage factory of entertainment That is an old conversation, and at this point a very boring one. But I am going to get into the problem I see going forward, the one that we’re not discussing quite as much: Inspiration.
Say what you will about George Lucas, but he took the things he loved in his childhood, and he spun them into an entire universe. The same with Gene Roddenberry. He took history, mythology, philosophy, and with his own imagination, created Star Trek. Roger Corman gave free range to a ton of people who were allowed to let their freak flag fly, as long as they stayed under budget and threw in some boobs. Now, if you look at todays creators, what will you see? Not inventors. Fans. Victims of the arrested development that has spread like a contagion through our pop culture. Whereas in the past, artists would synthesize their loves and obsessions into something new that honored the past but looked forward, creators these days are looking to the past and… cannibalizing it.
They’ve turned Hollywood into a toy box that lets them play with all the fun things they had growing up. Which is not to say that these movies can’t be good, or entertaining. Many of them are. But all we’re seeing is what we’ve already seen. It’s slicker, maybe it’s smarter (though it probably isn’t), it’s certainly more expensive… but it’s also fleeting. And it’s not new.
There’s nothing iconic that can come out of these things, no real, true surprises. The best you can hope for is a clever take on an identity that’s already been established. As movies have moved into the franchise phase, where every movie is like an episode of TV, the familiarity, the repetition, the lack of new blood chokes us. And worse.
Because in passively accepting that nostalgia is the future, we’re leaving nothing for the next generation to hold onto. Nothing to inspire them, nothing to lead them to forge the thing that inspires the creators that come after them. We’re giving them leftovers.
