Special thanks to Professor Tom Doherty for giving me the knowledge necessary for the writing of this post.
That’s really something, isn’t it? Hey poppers, how’s everyone doing? I know I’ve made a big stink in the past about classic Hollywood romantics (and even modern romantics), but man, I just can’t help it. There really is something about that black and white celluloid, that old-fashioned way of talking and acting, those down-to-earth plots. And that’s what I want to discuss with you all today.
Well, not exactly. What I really want to look at is how Hollywood romanticism changed, and what it’s like today. Maybe it’ll be possible to look and then say, “Hey! So that’s how we got here!” But hey, maybe not, and that’s okay. But I hope you’ll enjoy this and find it as interesting as I have, because this is a topic I’ve been trying to write about ever since I started this blog. Ready or not, here we go! By the way this is going to be a really long one.
Whatever you may think of it, what is most commonly known as the Golden Age of Hollywood began with the enforcement in 1934 of the Hays Code (Wikipedia says the 1920s, but I don’t think there’s a strong enough argument for it, given the release of pre-Code movies into the following decade). I won’t go into much detail about what the Code entailed; if you’ve seen a classic movie, you should already have a vague sense of the censorship and the standards set by the moral guardians who demanded it. Anyway, American films really hit their stride following World War II during the post-war economic boom (as happened with many things in the beginning of the American Century). I imagine that boom paved the way for truly spectacular production budgets, because that’s when the musicals really started pouring in (not to say there weren’t any before), and all the epic tales like Ben-Hur and Exodus – which I reviewed in July – began to be told.
And that’s not to say more modest and subpar films didn’t exist in the 1940s-60s, though you’d be hard-pressed to track them down now, given how much they’re overshadowed in the cultural imagination (Turner Classic Movies has kept track of some of them). But the highs of Golden Age Hollywood were high indeed, and most of them pretty huge. And it’s evident even today how the glitz and glamour of those Golden Age musicals, the dark and claustrophobic noir (of which The Asphalt Jungle is a personal favorite), and the grandiosity of Hollywood epics dazzled their audiences, in the same way we are by Avatar, Moulin Rogue, The Artist, or the Matrix.
So how about those modern films? We certainly have tons of genres to choose from: anti-hero action flicks, stoner comedies, bro comedies, rom coms, rom drams, cyberpunk sci-fi, far future sci-fi, and the list goes on and on and… Which isn’t to say there weren’t quite a few types of movies to choose from in the ’50s or Sixties, but it may come as a surprise to some just how diverse the selection is today. But I digress (which I do often, as many of you are now aware); how did we go from Westerns, Flash Gordon, and Gene Kelly to V for Vendetta, No Strings Attached, and Cloud Atlas? Well…
The Sixties were a turbulent time for the American people, and it showed in their cinema. Innovative filmmakers kept pushing at the Hays Code to see what they could get away with, or because they firmly believed in their vision no matter what the moral guardians would say, and…the Code fell apart. New Hollywood, as I said many posts ago, would reign supreme for nearly a decade and a half, until it too was conquered by the Blockbuster system: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg singlehandedly brought it down. And then John Hughes made some great ’80s flicks.
What does this have to do with the transition from classic Hollywood to modern Hollywood? In classic Hollywood, as much as they were grounded in a realistic world, the movies were prone to flights of fancy and exceptional optimism. Look up any of the classic films referenced thus far, and you’ll notice there is something very theatrical about it, and if not that, something that looks like the indomitable optimism of the American spirit (The Asphalt Jungle being a great example of the latter). New Hollywood films injected a colder, harsher realism, even at their most stylistic. Bonnie & Clyde, in which the heroes are criminals; Easy Rider in which our drug dealer protagonists are routinely shunned and ridiculed in an America that’s fallen apart; and the endless list of blaxploitation and crime films set in gritty, ruthless urban centers in which corruption and the criminal underworld no longer keep hidden in the shadows of back alleys. Even Star Wars was set in a far future universe that was dirty and somewhat noirish, despite its hopeful, rebellious themes. In my view, what changed was the desire to depict a more honest reality, one in which there’s not always a solution to every problem and not every dashing hero is such a nice guy or girl, where good and evil is not so black and white.
The America of the ’50s and Sixties is often referred to as an innocent time, and I think this label is rather misleading; rather, it was optimism, faith that we had what it takes to make a wrong into a right. Bear in mind I’m speaking strictly of the movies here; this is not meant to be a commentary on American politics or society as a whole, and frankly I don’t know enough about either subject to make such far-flung assumptions. No, Golden Age Hollywood, like the Hays Code that resulted in its creation, was based on a view of the world and of stories and their endings: things didn’t always necessarily turn out happily, but they always turned out morally (or “right,” if you prefer), whatever that may be under the circumstances (and by whose dictates, well, that was up to the Code). The films that are remembered today and sure to remain immortal were those that saw the world this way.
I feel like New Hollywood came about because there were writers and directors who didn’t see the world the same way. Sometimes the good guys lose, they would say, and sometimes they die horribly and nothing is resolved. Sometimes the good guys aren’t even on the side of the law, and we should root for them anyway. Things may turn out happily, and sometimes they might not, but it was decisively impossible to say what was “right” anymore. Perhaps those writers believed no one had a monopoly in saying what was the “right” way (as with the paradigm shift at the time towards questioning authority and society in general), or as the American historical narrative goes, perhaps we felt like we lost our way (“We blew it.”). It’s not up to me to say. But the effect this change had on movies was profound, as can be seen in ’70s films, and perhaps a little bit in our own.
Modern day movies, if they’re not rom coms or period dramas (and even the latter genre sometimes breaks this rule, as does medieval fantasy), do have a certain tendency toward the gritty. Look at the most recent remake of Total Recall, or the invariably gross-out comedy of The Hangover or Harold and Kumar with their scatalogical and sometimes gory humor. In a way, I’d say in the modern day we’ve skated well past reality into hyper-reality. I didn’t enjoy the latest Total Recall because I thought it was too ridiculous to take seriously and took itself too seriously to enjoy as if it were camp; it was so gritty it lost all touch with reality. That Extra Credits video I posted way back about games being hard-boiled touched upon this briefly, but I think that in the quest to become serious and bad to the bone, we lost the part of that search that was supposed to be waiting for us at the end: being grounded in honest reality.
And yet I think modern Hollywood does have a genuine voice and a way in which they see the world that is just as legitimate as Golden Age Hollywood, New Hollywood, and everything else coming before and after. I think these are the movies that ultimately end up making it: Inception and Super 8 on the side of sci-fi, the Chris Nolan Batman series and The Avengers where superheroes are concerned, Going the Distance and Friends With Kids on the rom com side of things, The Artist and The King’s Speech as period dramas go, Midnight in Paris, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and so on and so forth. What I’m trying to say – I think – is that I feel like in a way, we’re getting closer to moving past the unbreakable optimism of the classics and the unrepentant oppressiveness of the Blockbuster era; we’re finally moving into a period that’s a little closer to a happy medium. And hey, maybe the drawbacks in this phase in Hollywood will become more obvious over time – if anything, this post has been an exercise in recognizing the strengths and excesses of each movement – but that’s part of why they’re gonna keep trying. I know it’s because they ultimately want to turn a profit, but Hollywood studios want you, the customer, to enjoy movies just as much as you want to enjoy them – because you know, that’s how they get you to keep buying tickets to go out and see them. And that isn’t a bad thing.
Anyway, this post is getting long-winded and straying considerably from the point I was trying to make…and yet I think we’ve made that point. How did we get from Some Like it Hot to where we are today? It’s because of the changing tastes of audiences, and the power of the audience to change their movies along the way. Cherish those classics, but keep enjoying new movies, because we get something out of all of them. I slavishly vie after Seventies films, but I always look forward to sitting down with my girlfriend for a night of The Odd Couple, or going out for the latest weekend release. Here’s looking at you, Hollywood. Well, that’ll do it for now. Can’t wait to see you all again next week!
-This week’s post is pretty heavy on the academic stuff. Have I missed something or gotten something wrong? Found any inaccuracies? Please let me know below!-
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