The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Why Mainstream Movies Suck

Now this comes mostly from my refusal to believe that so many Hollywood movies suck simply because the people making them are really sucky at what they do. It seems a too easy, not too mention a too circular, explanation. Suck is the result, not the cause. With no guarantees (Chris) that I’ll stay completely on topic – why do mainstream movies suck?

I mean this is their job, this is their life, this is an extremely competitive business, and it just doesn’t seem reasonable that anyone could get anywhere for very long by just being incompetent. On some level it stands to reason that they are making these films this way deliberately.

There are certainly plenty of reasons why things can go wrong:

Hollywood is very political, so a very collaborative medium can go very wrong if the various parties are pulling in different directions. Hollywood is also a business, so if you are very good at convincing people to part with their money you can carry on making films if, perhaps, only on the low budget outskirts of the industry. Hollywood is also very glamorous, which is presumably why so many would enter it instead of the infinitely less risky businesses of investment banking and the like, so people can be there for the sex, drugs and power rather than the tedious business of actually making a movie. Hollywood is very corporate, so film-makers can be put in straight-jackets by licensing deals, strict release dates, and the mandates of stock-holders. Hollywood, for that matter, is full of humans, who are always capable of just genuinely fucking up.

I am not a Hollywood insider and have no reason to expect to ever be, so I can not claim expertise in these business matters. It is not these things that interest me here, however.

What of Wild Hogs, or Night At The Museum? These were very successful movies. For want of a better term, they ‘worked’. What of Crash, the winner of so many Oscars while at the same time being a lunk-headed, patronising, racist, turgid work of ‘serious’ cinema. What of the Star Wars prequels? George Lucas is a man of great vision, ability, resources and freedom, yet the films really blew.

So here’s my theory and, I guess, what it was I wanted to write about in the first place. This is all about our relationship with ‘Story’.

We are belief machines. Our higher brain functions seek to connect the various things we experience. We make ‘sense’ of the world in this way. This is how we give the world meaning, beyond the ‘hungry, eat, horny, fuck’ instincts of animals. A story is a complicated set of connections between many things. Our reality is the story we tell ourselves about everything. This need for story, common to all peoples, isn’t just an accident in us, and it isn't just a liking for 'cool stuff' - it comes out of the way our brains are structured. Without story, we have no world. Story is fundamental. Deep down, we really believe in them. It’s important.

This is how film editing works. Put two images together and we will try to connect them and create a relationship between them. Take the famous experiment where an image of a man’s face is juxtaposed with an image of a baby, then an image of a corpse, and the audience will read the man’s face as having different emotions. The viewer has created a narrative connection in his mind. The connection is not in the images themselves. The ‘film’ is the story we tell ourselves about the images we’ve just seen. ‘Reality’, I’m arguing, is the same. This is the metaphysical root of all post-modern philosophy from Nietzsche on.

Religious types will say that the defining characteristic of a human is the divine element – the one that allows them to discern the ‘true’ story, and the ‘real’ connections between things. I’m not religious, so you’re getting my take on this. Religion is the ultimate story – the one that connects everything, and gives us complete meaning. It is that which answers that neurological need to connect most fully. It is just another story, but one that proves that us lot have a really, really big need for a really good story.

We don’t even need to bring in different religions here – just the different sects of Christianity show that changing some of these connections can lead to very different ‘stories’. Focus on the ‘turn the other cheek’ stuff and you get a very pacifist, liberal religion. Focus on the ‘eye for an eye’ stuff and you get gay hating, war-mongering fascism.

Religious leaders, politicians and salesmen of all stripes know that if you arrange the connections in the right way, you can get people to do all sorts of things like murder abortion doctors, drink poisoned Kool-Aid or buy snake-oil.

We are hard-wired to believe in Story. Humans need a story to make sense of the world, and these people seek to give you one, with an added dash of agenda thrown in underneath. That it so often works speaks to the power of a good story.

And the other lot of people who know this ‘secret’ is artists and, hey presto, we’re back at movies.

Movies are a far more benevolent form of this, as it is a medium happy to admit it is only ‘a’ story, and only asks you to give yourself up to it for 2 hours or so, but the process is the same.

Now the romantic, artistic ideal is that the film-maker tells the audience a story they genuinely believe themselves, that expresses something they feel is ‘true’ and that they just ‘had’ to tell.

More often, though, these stories are created deliberately and consciously, just as religions were carefully developed and evolved over hundreds of years instead of, I don’t know, coming in a sudden bolt from the sky.

And here we get back to Hollywood.

Producers look at a script and say (grossly simplified, but the process is well documented) ‘It’s too miserable, give it a happy ending. It’s not funny enough, put a ‘comedy’ character in there. Not enough for the ladies, put a love interest there. And a dinosaur, they’re cool right now, right?’

The idea behind this is that if stories are just things you connect together, you can connect together anything and it will be a story. This is the mistake.

“If we just shove these things together,” says my made up producer, with some white on his top lip. “The audience will lap it up. We’ve just got to put them together, and the audience will connect the dots. That what audiences do, the credulous fools! Mwa Ha Ha!”

Then he fucks an actress and kills a writer.

Anyway, z-grade dialogue writing aside, it’s that ‘us and them’ that is the killer. How many times do you read in an interview someone say ‘I don’t really watch too many movies’. I can remember quite a few, though not many recently – maybe PR person has had a word in Hollywood’s ear. Stories are not something that they believe anymore, stories are things only the huddled masses believe. Their job, and their definition of good (if we accept that it isn't just money), is just what collection of things they shove together on screen.

Perhaps this is why Crash won so many Oscars. It connected many important things together that didn’t get connected in most Hollywood films before it and it did it very elegantly (Paul Haggis is, if nothing else is a very technically adept screenwriter). By this definition it was a good story.

Of course, by ours, it was a load of contrived, didactic, speechifying, glaringly obvious, dishonest tripe. It did not tell a believable story.

How about the Star Wars prequels: Lucas certainly filled them full of stuff – mythology, space-ships, much-loved characters, sfx and light-sabers – yet they weren’t very good.

He didn’t care about the story. It was something to do at arm’s length, something those creatures called ‘fans’ would do. It was simply his job to parade all the things he wanted to say across the screen and that, by definition would be a story.

To an extent he was right. Message-boards are filled with fans ‘fan-wanking’ – bending over backwards creating the links and connections between the various bits so they make sense – so that they actually tell a story. But those who don’t put ‘Jedi’ on their census forms couldn’t be bothered doing the work, so revealing the rather cynical half-job the prequels actually were. There were no connections made between the different bits, only lots of different bits shoved next to each other, and it is not the same.

Take this story from The Guardian, all about the furore in England over the shocking reveal that a lot of 'reality' TV is, in fact, made-up. It displays the arrogance of the programme-makers, certainly, but it also shows how important these programmes are to the audience. The programme makers, one can sense in their interviews, are exasperated, desperately wanting to say: 'but of course it's just a load of nonsense! It's TV! None of it's real!', so missing the crucial point that, to the audience, yes it is real.

So that’s why I think mainstream movies suck – this disconnect that occurs when the story-teller believes they are different from the audience. They actually believe what they are doing is ‘good’, which is why they aren’t going to get ‘better’ any time soon – they don’t realise they are making a mistake. This is why religion and politics suck too, but hey, I did at least answer the question posed by the title of the article.

Eventually.

We are all bound by ‘Story’, even the story-tellers. It is our conception of what the world is like, and so runs far deeper than some check-list of talking points or focus-grouped plot points. It is this cynical idea that we are above ‘Story’ and that ‘Story’ is just something to appease, cajole and lead the unwashed masses that leads to such suckiness. Of course, as with the example of the Star Wars fans or, I don’t know, our war in Iraq, it’s our fault if we are so lacking in our own stories that we end up working really hard to fill in all the blanks in their incredibly bad ones.