Attack of the clones: Hollywood's mutant movies are on the march
Attack of the clones: Hollywood's mutant movies are on the march | Film | guardian.co.uk
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In the comments section for the first After Hollywood, one user, strawberryrhubarb, suggested: "Why not address the industry-wide 'dumbing down' of American studio features so that they will appeal to audiences that don't speak English?" I don't know if I'd call it "dumbing down", but I'm intrigued by the idea that, as the slice of Hollywood's revenue earnt abroad continues to grow, the raw DNA of its film-making is mutating in strange ways.
The best description I've heard of the subtle shift in Hollywood style in recent years comes from David Thomson, in a recent essay for Intelligent Life magazine: "The computer makes our movies. Its efficient anonymity is the new style: look at the anonymous figures and the metallic sheen of Call of Duty: Black of Ops. That style, a kind of subtle fascism, haunts our films, from Black Hawk Down to Battle: Los Angeles." Call of Duty is, of course, a videogame; and technology, in Thomson's eyes, is the root of the current ills. CGI is the animating force of modern cinema, its impersonal aesthetics perfect for movies half-watched on a laptop, Facebook in the other browser.
I'd go one further: Hollywood films have become stylistically generic because their success depends on crossing into multiple markets with differing cultures. Place and personality the great irreducibles get in the way. The US can still score with stories with exact settings (such as Rio, which did great business in its own South American backyard) and sharp characters (such as The Social Network, which pulled past its arthouse roots to a decent $128m overseas). But these are exceptions. To really understand the prevailing trend, we need to look at the terminally average the Mission Impossibles and the Fast and Furiouses, the GI Joes and the Prince of Persias: the ones that, over the weeks, do a remorseless death march on the global box office, operating in the money-minded limbo where Hollywood's least-questioned habits rule.
I'd like to christen this neutered style Helvetica Blockbuster after the famously all-purpose font face and it's everywhere. It's a post-Matrix thing, indebted to the infinitely malleable videogame universe birthed by the Wachowski brothers' film, which Hollywood has yet to escape. Place, in the Helvetica Blockbuster, is as easily downloaded as Neo's kung fu training; no matter what the setting mythical Arabia, prehistory, the global-city playground the same stylistic ornamentation crops up, flattening out history to the same digital dream. Frozen-reality Bullet Time, panoramic landscape pans of impossible velocity, a weirdly uninvolving CGI showpiece of almost sublime complexity; all as predictably featured as the curlicues and seashells on a rococo border.
Which doesn't leave much room in the picture for human beings. The frictionless facility of the Helvetica Blockbuster experience demands that any characterisation be stripped down to heroic outlines: a generic journey of self-realisation. James Cameron's Avatar is the supreme example, and the title gets at the blank, viewer-proxy role the film protagonist is doomed to fulfil in the PlayStation era. Again, specifics of personality are totally incidental: as long as the modern film hero behaves in accordance with the gospel of international cool: kicking ass, realising his inner self and his true morality helping you nurture your consumer self through product placement.
Mark Cousins, in his book The Story of Film, describes Hollywood's original modus operandi as "closed romantic realism": romantic realism, because Golden Age Hollywood films were usually set in our world, but with a heightened "emotional amplitude"; closed, because they were rarely meta, they rarely broke the fourth wall. The Helvetica Blockbuster is how closed romantic realism has evolved for the globalised 21st century. The glut of superheroes and gods have sped us past the realism of Ford and Hawks, but the romantic faith in the personal journey preferably fanned these days by a stirring Hans Zimmer score is still just about alive.
But American individualism has gone on a round-the-world trip, and Helvetica Blockbuster style is the desktop wallpaper of US soft power. It is to the postcapitalist world what Hellenistic style was to the ancient world: a sign of inclusion in the dream. Back then, it meant an agora and a gymnasium in every city from Syracuse to Heliocarnassus, for those rich enough to participate. These days, the Odeon gives out loyalty points, but watching Robert Downey Jr hymn the power of personal idiosyncrasy and prodigiously expensive technology in Iron Man, or Matt Damon do the same for self-reliance and the enigma of identity in the Bourne films, does the same thing as the Greeks in the Mediterranean: wraps you in the empowering embrace of shared culture. Everyone is invited inside the neoliberal circle of trust, apart from the truly offensive; they get to play the villains in films, now that Russians are too busy imitating Hollywood. So boo-hiss to the terrorists (who don't care), the arms dealers (who've got too much money to care) and aliens (who don't know what neoliberalism is anyway).
The key point about Helvetica Blockbuster is that it's a decadent style, for the twilight of US empire. The "subtle fascism" and the hollow heroics belong to the decade of botched interventions and disingenuous democracy; they cloak a creeping desperation. Helvetica Blockbuster isn't rooted in anything real, just faint reverb of mid-20th-century optimism. I'm impatient for China and India's growing presence on the mainstream film scene: perhaps the collectivism of Chinese culture, or the genre-mashing Bollywood energy can give us a new, dissonant, relevant kind of entertainment.
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Yeah, people bitching about lowbrow CGI-fests is one of my pet-peeves. It typifies a sort of modern set of idιes reηus.
You can see people faking emotions wherever you like. You can pay £2 and see it at your local amdram group. Sure, they probably won't be Olivier, but honestly how many of you out there can tell good acting from bad? It took 3000 years of technological innovation, coupled with the right political and economic conditions to produce the Matrix trilogy, and you're pissed off because it's not Roman Holiday? Did no tell you that cinema is a visual medium? Do you go to the National Gallery and bitch that in Bacchus and Ariadne the acting's overwrought and the story trite? If you like arty films or classic cinema or whatever, fine, but you don't have to hate on CGI to do it.
You certainly don't have to drag fucking neoliberalism into the equation like it was conclusive proof that your opponents have the lurgy.
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