MODERN DYSTOPIA IN AMERICAN CINEMA

Brothers, we is lost!

The grammatical dysfunction there is intentional. It is the voice I hear in my head when I watch movies these days – and most dramatically, two of the biggest films of the year, the ones the critics love most dearly, that is, “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another”.

Filmmakers Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (“One Battle After Another”) are so committed to representation that they’ve lost the art of storytelling.

Anderson’s story-telling shortcomings are baked in to his project. With “One Battle After Another” he has attempted to bring Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” to the screen. I am a big fan of Pynchon, whose reputation as a deep-thinking writer derives from his two most well-known works – “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V”. I didn’t read those books and say to myself that “this should be a movie”. Pynchon, to my mind, is too rich in his literary explorations to ever be successfully distilled into a two-hour, or longer, movie. His works are perfect examples of why books beat movies every time. The cinema existing in the minds of every reader, and in the relationship each has with the author, is exponentially more vast than can be captured and replicated by even our best “cinematists”.

While today’s word processing tools don’t recognize it, “cinematists” is a real word, and stands as a metaphor for what has happened to our modern world’s feel for the literary arts. The word comes from early 20th‑century film theory, and exists as a French‑to‑English translation from “cineaste”. It is (was) used in academic writing that strived for a more elevated or philosophical tone. In everyday English, we have substituted the agent nouns “filmmaker” or “director”, which fall far short of the respect given to “cineaste”, and in doing so classes the auteurs we have making movies today.

We have mastered the craft of movie making, while it seems to me that we have lost the art of storytelling. It mirrors what has happened in popular music, which has jettisoned art in favor of craft. Somehow, we modern humans respond to look and feel, without great regard for narrative and meaning. Today, if it looks good, or feels good, that is as high as we care to set the bar for excellence. We may be too lazy to want to follow a complex story to a well-defined end.

As has long been recognized in Hollywood, “endings are hard”. Anybody can write effective first and second acts, but that third is a bitch. It is where writers have to get down to the hard part of meaning something. That is far more easily done in a book, where the richness of the tendrils of a story can may allow the reader to infer intent, to interpret a mosaic pattern of messaging, and to draw meaning from it. A movie just can’t provide that level of nuance and detail, and movies tend to rely on broad tropes to help clarify the viewer takeaways. This, to my mind, is why films often end stupidly, collapsing entire narratives into a neat bundle of resolution as the “Finis” title displays on the screen. It is over. For what it is worth, it is done.

If Thomas Pynchon is unfilmable, in any way that would do his work justice, then all the things that make that a truism are in play when it comes to Black cinema.

Developing in parallel to the White film industry were a plethora of films that history calls “Race” movies. This began around 1910, in the silent era of filmmaking, when Black films were made featuring Black casts, Black directors and producers, and were shown in Black theaters to Black audiences.

Not a lot is known about this early period in American cinema, because most of those films have been lost to time. There were dozens of Black Theaters in the U.S., that showed these “Race” movies, but relative to the mainstream film industry the Black film business was an underground thing. There are no significant academic books written (at least that I am aware of) that have been dedicated to documenting these early Black films.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that “commercial” films began to be made for Black audiences, but with the intent of also appealing to the interests of White people. As the Hollywood studio system began to collapse, doors opened to new filmmakers, among them being Gordon Parks. I remember seeing his 1969 film “The Learning Tree” and being deeply moved by it. Black people were depicted as much more than racial stereotypes. They were people to whom people unlike them could relate. The characters were deeply human.

The Civil Rights movement obviously played a big role, but Gordon Parks aside, a desire for commercialism tended to promote “Blaxploitation” over deep, thought-provoking works. For every thoughtful Sidney Portier movie, there was a “Shaft” (John Shaft, a bad motherfucker), and movies about “the hood”. Later media attempted to balance the value of Black films through projects like “Roots”, a hugely popular television movie, and films like “The Color Purple”, but it took Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” to puncture the balloon of falsity that had developed with precious depictions and “Mandingo” fantasies. Trapped in urban myth was the “hypersexualized” Black man, and the dark spirituality of the occult African American.

SIDE NOTE: This is untoward of me, but I must add here how much of what I saw in “Sinners” resonated with me because it mirrored the ancestral occultism of the pioneers depicted in my “ATWOOD” trilogy. And, “Sinners” uses the visual wonder of fireflies to suggest a spirit connection from this world to the next. That is the theme of my screenplay “Fireflies”.

Somehow this all came together in “Sinners”, which is, unfortunately, a dumb vampire film. At its best, it is also a film about “brio”, or spirit energy, which is the thing that makes music magical, effecting all people, whether they want it to or not. (Fear the banjo, the boy with the axe.)

It is such a disappointment (to me). I watched the first hour of “Sinners” and thought it was some of the greatest filmmaking I had ever seen. The depiction of early-20th Century Black America, when share croppers were still picking cotton to meet quotas, is fascinating, unbelievably useful in understanding how American culture has shaped Black America.

Then the Irish show up. I guess they are Irish, they seem to “River Dance”, but they are Irish folk who are also vampires, and play banjo. I have no idea why they are introduced to the gangster twins and all those dancing cotton pickers who yearn for the kind of juke joint the brothers can materialize. It became hard for me to know who the “Sinners” were, and weren’t, because it seemed to me that low-bar aspirations had infected everyone in the film. All hope of profound meaning seemed to become lost in service to the bargain basement tropes of cheap horror. I loved the first two acts of the film, hated the third. To my mind, it certainly is in no way deserving of the most-nominated film in Oscar history. It is a mess, a sad surrender to a modern age in which “meaning” has been lost to broad, brazen, bloody metaphor. I hate what this film became.

Even worse is the other big Hollywood favorite, “One Battle After Another”. Director Anderson attempts to depict a world of banal authoritarianism, where activism is of unclear purpose, and where media is a fog machine.

I watched both “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” with an eye on the clock. I wore out on both films at about the two hour mark, when I realized neither film was going anywhere and there was still 48 minutes left to watch. Neither film seems to know when they should end, or what it all means once they do.

This is “craft” filmmaking – meaning “crap” – and the fact that our current film community has embraced these two bombs says all that needs to be known about why movies of today are such duds. Is it any wonder audiences will settle for movies about comic book heroes and conflicted witches tied up in knots over the emerald city, the city of green, which I take to be a metaphor for riches?

We is lost, brother! We is lost and we don’t seem to know it.

P.S. This video below is excellent. There is so much history of interest covered in this that it boggles the mind how great “Sinners” could have been had it not lost its way. Damned vampires.