I don't believe that Oppenheimer, Barbie, or Top Gun 'brought back the movies’. They are the tail-end of an era, not the beginning. In the series of jolts the film industry recently experienced, we can’t even discern “a movement” unless it is a rotative spin on itself from having received too many ideological and financial slaps. This industry has been wobbling like a bewildered drunk lately or like a boxer at the end of a bad round. Maybe even both, like the excellent Stacy Keach in Fat City. And I am not talking about the strike, the uncertain future with AI, or the impossible hurdle of making truly independent movies. I am talking about what happened to American movies.
Yes, what exactly happened for them to give me this eerily persistent feeling of obsolescence?
Nothing.
We are facing an art form that has been stalling since the mid-nineties. There were a lot of good movies released in this interval but it’s still a good twenty-eight years of nothing really new under the sun.
Wait.
Something new happened: women and minority directors were finally authorized to access financing and find their place in the film industry, literally allowed overnight to have a film career. This is a revolution and a wonderful one. It's also a shame that it came so late and was somehow forced upon the industry out of fear rather than welcomed out of human decency. Also, the irony is not lost on me that this happened precisely at a time when the whole industry started to fall apart and film festivals have much less impact than before. This is a bit like breaking into a fortress and finding not much inside. Sure, the large Oscar table is still there, but the food is cold and the few drunk people left behind are prone to slap their neighbor for a lame joke.
Still, new people now stand around the table and they are making their own movies. The problem is that when what’s new is the people rather than the art form, the art form keeps quietly getting old.
Let me explain.
What we were given as “New” is the replacement of one set of storytellers by another. In other words: a revolution happened on a social and ideological level but not quite on a creative one. While everybody has been so preoccupied with ‘new stories’ and ‘new voices’, the form itself has barely evolved.
American film festivals played a definitive hand in that. For the last six years, they have revolved around only one question: what social evil are we healing? Every film, project, and screenplay had to answer this question. One look at the list of Sundance Awards winners after 2017 is more telling than anything. To select and greenlight projects deemed ‘adequate’, the film industry used a new metric. Let me call it “Authenticity”.
In this case, Authenticity means two things: the story must be authentic, meaning based on real facts, but even more importantly the director of the movie must be ‘authentically connected’ to the story. What we saw happening then is that the imperative of authenticity superseded the one of originality. It was not enough to write a story, you had to justify filming it with your own gender, sex, race, or personal history. For example, Rebecca Hall who looks completely white but made a movie titled Passing with a black cast made all her promotion about her grandmother being African-American and “passing”. She had to justify her subject choice biographically for fear of being accused of stealing “someone else’s story” and exploiting the Zeitgeist. Every single article published about her movie contained a carefully crafted emphasis on her “personal narrative” with photographs of her grandmother proving the story’s authenticity.
Notice the double shift from form to person and from imagination to authenticity. This naturally led to an extreme focus on the director's persona. Who are they? Where do they come from? What is their biographical background? Most importantly: what is their connection to the story they tell? Eventually, what the industry pushed as “new” shifted from the creation (the film) to the creator (the filmmaker).
Of course, there is a logical fallacy in making us believe that because a new director is given the microphone, what they say is new too. It may or may not be. Most of the time it's not, simply because true novelty is a rare creature. What is novel in this case is not what is said but this shift and the accompanying emphasis on authenticity.
The problem with authenticity, besides being a dubious notion, is that it limits directors to a very narrow range of stories. “Why are you the best person to tell this story?” is the most damning question of all American film grant applications. This shackling of the directors to their past cuts off one essential part of filmmaking which is to explore the Imaginary. It also erects invisible walls: Jordan Peele would not be allowed to make Little Women just like Greta Gerwig cannot dream about making If Beale Street Could Talk. Everyone is presumed to stay in their own box. Take one step out of it like when Ava DuVernay made A Wrinkle in Time, and the backlash is swift.
In the case of women directors, the box is labeled “female narratives” and the set of stories you find inside is pretty sad: abortion (Little Woods, Call Jane, The Glorias, Unpregnant, Never, Sometimes, Rarely, Always), abuse/rape (Alice, Darling, Promising Young Women, Women Talking, She Said, To the Stars, Revenge), prostitution (Zola, Monster), caregiving (The Kindergarten Teacher, Clemency, A Thousand and One, CODA, Nanny), bad pregnancy (Together Together, Clock, Egg, A Mouthful of Air).
Minority women directors have a little bit more wiggle room if they stay within their 'racial box'. Ava DuVernay has been ‘punished’ for making A Wrinkle in Time but celebrated for Selma, When They See Us, or 13th. Dee Rees was hailed for Mudbound, Chinonye Chukwu for Clemency, Gina Prince-Bythewood for The Woman King, and Kasie Lemmons for Harriet or I Wanna Dance with Somebody. But when constrained to tell “my own people's story”, the options are limited. The American film industry gave women and minorities a seat at the table but also told them exactly where to sit. To be fair, women and minorities pigeonholed themselves too. They saw what kind of films were celebrated and answered with similar projects, perpetuating a positive feedback loop.
If defined as the possibility to create a universe that has nothing to do with its creator, the Imaginary can be a weird place. ‘Weird people’ (women, minorities) making movies about it seems to be too ‘weird’. On the other hand, if the directors are foreigners, then the ‘weirdness’ comes with the package and is accepted. Jane Campion, Maren Ade, and Claire Denis have all been celebrated here. So why is it so hard for American women and minority directors to step into the Imaginary? For one thing, it’s already packed with their male counterparts, some of whom found shelter in a very specific part of it: the Past.
Why the past?
Because "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The Go-Between’s opening line has never been so appropriate. Move a story to the past and you can show anything from rape (The Last Duel by Ridley Scott) to psychological or physical torture of a woman (Seberg by Benedict Andrews, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Tarantino), and no one can object. The past is the perfect safe place.
And this is how over the last few years…
David Lowery made The Green Knight, set in medieval times.
Robert Eggers made The Northman, set in the Viking age. His previous film, The Light House, took place in the 1890s.
Damien Chazelle made First Man, set in the early 60s, and then Babylon which was period Hollywood. Even Lalaland oozed the 50s and Chazelle seems to love the past so much that I nicknamed him The Gravedigger.
Barry Jenkins made If Beale Street Could Talk, set in the 70s., then a mini-series, The Underground Railroad, set in 1850.
After a failed Sci-Fi (another way to escape the present), James Gray made Armageddon Time, set in the 80s.
Paul Thomas Anderson made Licorice Pizza set in the 1970s. His previous film, Phantom Thread, was set in the fifties.
Wes Anderson made The French Dispatch, set in the 1950s, and then Asteroid City, again in the fifties but this time somewhere in America.
David Fincher made Mank, set in the 1930s.
Andrew Dominik made Blonde, based on Marilyn Monroe’s life from 1933 to 1962.
Joel Coen made The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Quentin Tarantino made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, set in the 70s.
Pablo Larraín made Spencer, mostly set in the 90s, and is now finishing Maria, based on Maria Callas's story.
In the same biopic vein, Benedict Andrews made Seberg.
Ridley Scott made The Last Duel, set in 14th century France, next will be Napoleon.
Steven Spielberg made West Side Story, set in the mid-1950s, and then The Fabelmans based on his memories from the fifties to the sixties.
Michael Mann made Ferrari, set between the 20s and the 60s.
Paul Verhoeven made Benedetta, set in the 17th century.
Martin Scorcese made Killers of the Flower Moon, set in 1920.
Christopher Nolan made Oppenheimer.
Even Noah Baumbach abandoned his habitual contemporary New York with his adaptation of Don DeLillo's White Noise.
The Past is also a box, a very solid and very full one.
For a film director, the Imaginary protects and can make you rich while Authenticity limits your story range and makes you discardable. Film festivals want “new” and authentic stories but directors can’t go back to the well of their biographical trauma forever without tiring the audience. To sustain the audience’s attention on authentic stories, festivals speed up the turnover of film directors. It’s a bit like fast fashion: once an ‘authentic slice of life’ has been told, let’s move to another director. This is how the very same tool that women and minorities used to break in also makes for short under-valued careers. In the end, only The Imaginary allows directors to reach deep into the audience's psyche and strike gold. Authenticity, by definition, is barefooted.
And you know what they say…
“Don't worry, they won't get far on foot”.
I finally found you on a recent comment on Ted Hope's Substacks. This is a very interesting post. I have had to deal with the state of the industry for decades. People say that I am so far outside the box that sometimes I forget where the box is and what was in it. Making movies that are more than movies, but movements, is not only difficult, but hard to explain. I remember getting scripts to producers at the major studios, "because they were so different," and once they read them, hearing that they could not even tell what genre I was writing in, and that they were so different they could not take the risk of making them, because they were in the business of making money, and my writing had no track record for success. Now, I am in the process of putting together an International Studio Without Borders or Walls that specializes in this new genre and yes, we work in today's world, not the past or the future. I believe more in "making history" and "making change" than reminiscing or fantasizing. Perhaps we could work together.