By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times is
bored with American popular culture, and echoes literary critic Christian
Lorentzen’s lament that, “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring.
Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from
big publishing are boring.” She warns:
An obvious caveat: I’m a white
middle-aged parent, so whatever is truly cool is, by definition, happening
outside my purview. Still, when I go to coffee shops where young people are
hanging out, the music is often either the same music I listened to when I was
young, or music that sounds just like it. One of the year’s biggest hit singles
is a Kate Bush song that came out in 1985. I can think of no
recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate. Public arguments people
do have about art — about appropriation and offense, usually — have grown stale
and repetitive, almost rote.
I would note that the Kate Bush song Goldberg is
referring to became an (overplayed) hit this summer because of the new
season of Stranger Things, which as a series is both an antidote
to, and a reflection of, our sense of cultural stagnation. Here is a hugely
popular television show that isn’t based upon a book series, or a comic book,
or a reboot of an old television show or movie. By contrast, five of the
top-ten highest-grossing movies of 2021 featured comic-book heroes; the rest
were the ninth (!) offering in the Fast and Furious series,
another James Bond movie, and sequels to A Quiet Place and Ghostbusters.
Only Free Guy was based upon an original concept.
But the inspiration for Stranger Things is
glaringly obvious from its callbacks and homages — Steven Spielberg’s early
work such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and Jaws,
the horror novels of Stephen King, The Goonies, and other 1980s adventures-in-suburbia
movies. (I’d argue that what elevates Stranger Things is that
the Duffer Brothers know their audience’s expectations and then do the
opposite. The rich-family high-school jerk turns out to be a decent and
charismatic guy who wants to be a better person, the hard-drinking small-town
sheriff is actually a good detective, the weird loner teenager is a caring
family member. The show’s continuing theme is that appearances can be
deceiving.)
Cultural critics debate whether we’ve seen the death of
the monoculture, the sense that, despite all our differences as Americans,
there are a few cultural offerings that are enjoyed coast to coast, highbrow to
lowbrow, and everywhere in between. When there were only three channels, the
odds that you and your neighbor enjoyed watching the same television show were
much more likely. (In other words, there may be some TV shows, movies, books,
and music out there that would thrill Michele Goldberg, but she just hasn’t
found them yet.)
The four most-watched broadcast-television prime-time shows
today among adults from ages 18 to 49 are football games. The fifth
is Yellowstone, averaging 2.7 million viewers, and the sixth is the
NBC drama This Is Us, with just over 2 million viewers. By
comparison, back in the 1980s, The Cosby Show regularly had
more than 30 million viewers. As Variety has observed, Nielsen
ratings, the traditional measurement of a show’s success, have become
increasingly irrelevant:
How much longer can we even keep
reporting young adult demos, when the numbers become microscopic? When there’s
a 12-way tie for 19th place with a 1.0 rating, and the top 100 chart ends with
a 28-way tie for 89th place with a 0.5 rating . . . the numbers lose any real
meaning or value.
Those low numbers reflect that people from 18 to 49 are
much less likely to watch live broadcast television anymore. They’ve got
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, and a lot more,
where the show begins when they want, can be paused whenever they want, and
often the next episode is available immediately. So Stranger Things was
a hit, but there was a chance that your friend was an episode ahead or an
episode behind.
Americans have more offerings and options than ever,
which is good news. But one of the consequences is that it’s rarer and rarer to
feel like you’re sharing in an experience where “everyone” is watching the same
show.
But there’s another factor that Goldberg’s column doesn’t
acknowledge at all, and I have a hard time believing it isn’t at least a
contributing factor to that sense of cultural boredom and stagnation: The rules
of “woke” pop culture stifle creativity.
It’s not just that woke doesn’t leave room for nuance; it
often drains characters of what makes them fascinating and intriguing and
exciting to watch. In almost every memorable story, the heroes are flawed, but
find it in themselves to rise to the occasion and be heroic anyway. The
villains or antagonists are bad or obstacles to the hero, but in their minds,
they’re convinced they’re the heroes of the story. But in a political polemic,
a flawed hero and a nuanced villain means that the opposing political side
might have a point — and woke creators can’t allow their audiences to think that,
now, can they?
There’s a difference between writing a story about a
strong female character — Ripley from the Aliens movies, Sarah
Connor from the first few Terminator movies, Clarice Starling
from Silence of the Lambs, heck, even Maria from The Sound
of Music — and writing a story deliberately setting out to feature a
“strong female character.” You may have noticed that certain modern “strong
female characters” are rarely allowed to have flaws, that other characters are
often gushing about how amazing they are, and that they struggle less than you
might expect in the second and third acts. The nickname for this type of
character is “Mary Sue,” and as protagonists, they’re usually really
boring.
Do we need another pop-cultural offering where the creative team or actors say the villain is inspired by Trump or his politics?
We get it. You think Trump is bad. This is not exactly a
new or groundbreaking position in our politics. He’s been the center of our
political world just about every day since mid 2015. Do we need to rehash all
of this in our television shows or movies? Trust me, screenwriter, your thinly
veiled fictional version of Trump isn’t as clever as you think it is, and it
certainly isn’t original or all that entertaining.
What’s that? You say your story’s fictional version of
Trump will be a vivid demonstration of the danger and power of lies? Just what
is your fictional story going to demonstrate that is more powerful than, say,
the events of January 6?
If Hollywood’s working screenwriters collectively believe
that all evil in the world traces back to powerful straight white men and big
greedy corporations, after a while, every villain starts to look the same.
Everyone remembers Gordon
Gekko’s “greed works” line from Wall Street, but no one
remembers that in the scene, he’s ripping into the board of directors of a
failing paper company because it has too much unproductive middle management
and vice presidents, and the company’s leadership has gotten lazy and
complacent. Your villain is much more interesting if they have a legitimate
point! If your villain gets too much like Snidely
Whiplash, no one relates to him or finds him all that interesting to watch.
If your villain needs to be irredeemably evil and can’t
have a legitimate point, at least give them some traits your audience will
envy. Hans Gruber is fascinating because he’s sophisticated, smart, meticulous,
and even charming — even though he’s doing something bad. The Joker is usually
intriguing to watch as a villain because he’s so unpredictable; he’s free to
ignore all of society’s written laws and unwritten rules. Femme fatales are
usually blisteringly sexy and fearless and determined in pursuing what they
want.
A little while back, National Review’s old
friend Rob Long, who’s worked in Hollywood for a long time, shared what felt like a really revealing anecdote about how
Hollywood thinks:
Lionel Chetwynd, the gifted writer
and director, tells a wryly funny story about pitching a World War II movie to
room full of studio executives. The project was about a Canadian regiment on
D-Day that had to invade a heavily fortified German redoubt on the French coast
to divert Nazi forces away from the actual invasion at Omaha
Beach. It was a suicide mission. A crucial suicide mission,
but nevertheless one designed to result in catastrophic casualties. In his
story, the brave men of the Canadian regiment ultimately know exactly what
their fate is and face it with bravery. I’ve heard him give that pitch, and
it’s a stunner. When he winds it up, there are lumpy throats all over the room.
“Love it,” one of the executives
said at the pitch meeting. “But tell me, who’s the enemy here?”
“Um, Hitler,” Chetwynd replied.
“Yes, yes, right, of course,” the
executive said. “But who’s the real enemy?”
All Chetwynd had to do was say
“bloodthirsty American generals” or “munitions makers” and he would have walked
out of there with a green light.
The military-industrial complex, rogue military
contractors, hard-liner generals who think our heroes have committed some crime
— these can be classic villains. But this is also well-trod territory,
difficult to make fresh or new. In the real world, we can find menaces
everywhere — from drug cartels to serial killers to abusive spouses and parents
to gangs to terrorist groups to foreign spies to hostile foreign powers. Or you
can look beyond reality to make up genocidal
population-control enthusiasts or a rogue’s gallery
of mad scientists or occult terrorist groups with seemingly otherworldly motives or rogue mercenary virologists, or you can make uncovering the identity of the antagonist a key part of the
plot.
By the way, if you ever want to feel what a liberal feels
while watching message movies all the time, watch 2012’s Won’t
Back Down, a docudrama about the opening of a charter school in
Pittsburgh. It hits a lot of familiar notes about underdogs taking on “the
system,” but in this movie, the teacher’s unions and school-administration
bureaucrats are the lazy, callous villains, and it’s up to a plucky and
determined mom and frustrated teacher to fight the system.
At the risk of undermining everything I wrote
above, Won’t Back Down is utterly, deliciously, hilariously
one-sided; the sniveling, weaselly teacher’s-union representative repeats
the contested Albert Shanker quote, “When school children start
paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school
children.” The film’s tagline is: “A system can fail, but a parent can’t.” I
remember watching this movie and thinking, “Wow, is this how liberals feel all
the time? You would think they would be in a better mood.”
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