I wonder if kids still want to grow up and “Make Movies.”
This is not the same thing as wanting to be a director, mind you. When you’re a kid, if you love something, the odds are great that you want to do it yourself. If you love video games, you dream of creating your own video games. If you love comic books, you’ve probably drawn more than a few in your time. And if you love movies, you almost certainly wanted to make one yourself. This is, of course, before you learn how friggin’ hard it is. Before you learn about proper lighting, sound recording, editing; before you even know that there are writers who are paid to put all those words into the actor’s mouths. And once you know all that, if you still want to do it, you usually go from wanting to “Make Movies” to wanting to be a director.
Modern life being what it is and all, pretty much everyone knows what goes on behind the scenes on a movie set. The veil has been lifted, which means that even casual moviegoers have a sense of how difficult it is for any movie to get made, which to me reads as the death of that childhood ideal, the simple act of “Making Movies.”
Which brings us to the basic concept of mumblecore.
For better or worse, mumblecore artists are the ones out there who are Making Movies for the sake of Making Movies. Going in, you should know: this is not necessarily a pleasant experience. There’s a reason we call it “the ugly truth.” But if film itself is a beautiful lie, then the opposite (and mumblecore very much exists in opposition to what we consider ‘film’) must be equally true, and equally valid.
In a best case scenario, the breeding ground of mumblecore leads its adherents into the so-called “real world” of film, where their particular grasp of humanity finds application in a more acceptable guise. Talents as varied as Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha; the upcoming Computer Chess), Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture, Creative Nonfiction) and the Duplass Brothers (Baghead, The Puffy Chair) are considered to be part of the movement, even as they have moved away from it into more mainstream territory.
The main linking thread is the focus in on the emotional upheavals and romantic travails of often thuddingly inarticulate young, white, passive aggressive, upper middle class men and women, extremely low budgets (generally under ten thousand and often less than five), and a small pool of talent that take turns directing in and starring in one anothers films. Now, just from the description, this probably sounds like something to avoid with everything in your power. But… for me at least, there’s something about these movies, some kind of appeal in the way they strip away the artifice; the forced quirkiness you usually find in movies of this kind.
It’s the humanity.
There is a version of the world that exists in movies. Sometimes it can come close to being our world, and oftentimes we readjust our reality so we can allow ourselves to believe this is our world, but it just isn’t so. Our houses and our apartments aren’t art directed. Our skin isn’t perfect. We don’t come up with the perfect speech to win someone back, with thematic parallels to our paramour’s favorite book. And we sure as shit don’t date in montage form, scored by a catchy pop single. We’re not as articulate, charming, or good looking as the people on the big screen, and that’s the way we like it. Everything is magnified, that much bigger and better than reality, because reality is free, and movies cost $12 a pop. More, if you need to hire a babysitter.
So we go and we watch the beautiful people, and try to put ourselves in their shoes, probably not intuiting the damage this can do to our sense of self. When there are monsters or aliens, or effete British terrorists, it’s easy to tell yourself “It’s just a movie…” But when the main concern isn’t fulfilling an ancient prophecy or killing all the zombies; when the concern is getting that promotion or finding somebody to love, it’s much harder to separate the circumstances onscreen from the ones in your life, even though the inherent lack of reality is almost exactly the same.
We compare ourselves to the idols onscreen, and their adventures, and we find ourselves wanting. Mumblecore presents itself as an alternative to all that. That alternative being real life, in all its imperfection.
Maybe it’s not your specific reality, but it’s certainly someones, and that is a valid, noble thing.
