What, you may ask, is this about? Well, it’s quite simple really. The day before a scheduled post releases, I always do a final proofread to just run through and catch any spelling or grammatical errors, or to make last minute additions. I caught a big one for the post I released this past Friday, ‘Here’s Looking at You.’ It’s a rather long post as it is though, and I didn’t want to drop another big wall of text on you in an already lengthy post, so I just decided to release this addendum.
I said in the end of that post that even though I got kinda sidetracked, I ended up accidentally making my point. I made a point, but in retrospect, it wasn’t the one I originally set out to make. I wrote ‘Here’s Looking at You’ initially not to figure out why movies have changed since then, but how it is we differ, and what specific characteristics we can point to that reflect that change. So I’m gonna try to do that here now, as briefly as I can. To see the post this is an addendum to, click here, although you could just scroll down a little bit to the post just under this one…
Those of you who read the post may remember me saying the following: “In classic Hollywood, as much as they were grounded in a realistic world, the movies were prone to flights of fancy and exceptional optimism.” I ended up making one point with that statement, when there was another one in plain sight: flights of fancy as they were, classic Hollywood movies were in a way more grounded in real life than today’s Hollywood movies because it was so much more commonplace for them to be realistic fiction, for lack of a better term. They were set in the real world based on real life situations and problems with a little flare tossed in; they were relatable because they were predicated on a more believable setting. The fantastic elements brought themselves to our attention as, “Hey, you’re watching a movie, look at all the cool things we can do because it’s not real life.”
Now fast forward to the post-New Hollywood world; we’ve had our Rocky Horrors and our Total Recalls (self-parodying and otherwise). We have our intentionally over-the-top comedies like Superbad and The Hangover, and dramas like Friends With Kids, and rom coms like New Year’s Eve, but I always feel like at the back of my brain while watching those is a constant “it’s Hollywood” alert. It’s entertaining and escapist, but it doesn’t feel relatable, and it almost seems like there’s a less-than-conscious merging of reality and fantasy that causes this feeling, like we woke up one day and suddenly forgot Hollywood endings weren’t as commonplace and ordinary in real life as Tuesday’s meat surprise in the school cafeteria. Maybe it’s just the movies I’m watching, but I can never shake the feeling that there’s something more distinctly personal and human that I sense in Golden Age Hollywood films; hey, that’s probably why it’s considered such a golden age.
I can’t really put my finger on what this subtle difference is (actually it’s explaining it I’m having trouble with), but I definitely know where it came from. In the early days of Hollywood, their drawing source was theater, and more specifically vaudeville. But apart from that, they had only real life to pull from; it was the reference point, which is why it feels different. The generation that currently makes and watches movies has never known a time when there were not movies, so the source material for modern films are other films. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; everyone needs sources to pull from, and even the great creative minds of history did it (as you probably know, Shakespeare was a shameless plagiarizer). That may be why action films today feel perhaps a little more fantasy or out of touch with reality, even as they try to get hard-boiled and more “realistic.”
And while we’re on the subject of action movies, how about the heroes of those films? I mean, who are they, how do they become heroes, what makes them heroic? I did a small spot about this on my last blog, I Couldn’t Think of a Witty Name, when I was raving about The Avengers (which don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie, but I was disturbed by some of the implications). The last time, I made reference to a pair of clips my old ‘Hollywood in American Culture’ professor showed my class on the first day of the semester, from the Errol Flynn film Robin Hood from 1938 and Kevin Costner‘s Robin Hood from 1991; I’m going to present this same exercise again today. In both films, Robin Hood meets Little John at a river he must cross, and Little John will not let Hood pass unless he fights him with the use of a wooden staff. If Robin Hood can beat him, he may cross the river.
In the 1938 film, Robin Hood is defeated handily by Little John, who flings him into the river. A beaten Robin Hood gathers himself back to his side of the land and sits down to dry off, and Little John approaches him and tells him he’s heard of him and his cause. The two shake, and Little John offers himself as a new companion in his cause, because he sympathizes with Hood’s crusade and would like to take part. I’ll let you watch the 1991 version for yourselves (it’s quite a show):
As you can see (actually apparently not, the clip fades to black moments before), after a great struggle, Robin Hood finally defeats Little John, and it is because of this that Little John joins Robin Hood. Because he was defeated, not because he believed in Robin Hood’s cause of taking from the rich and giving to the poor or whatever else – in fact he may not have, but his defeat rendered that a meaningless consideration. This, my professor said, exhibited two fundamentally different themes that each belonged distinctly to their respective times. In 1938 was exhibited democracy: Robin Hood won an ally because they both were fighting for the same thing; he won because his values were righteous and just. In 1991, it was tyranny: victory of the strongest.
This isn’t meant to reflect on our values as a society; I don’t think we’re more tyrannical than in other periods of history. I do think we’ve grown rather accustomed to a more traditional kind of hero though in our action movies, one that is easier to create and to wrap our minds around because it’s an archetype that’s been used for so many thousands of years. I think that’s why nowadays we get so many lone male heroes and anti-heroes, maybe with a female lead and a spunky sidekick, but in a film mostly centered around him. And more often than not, this lone hero is a “chosen one” of some sort, who may or may not be the one foretold by the prophecy of old. Flawed but nevertheless compelling heroes like Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation are much more complicated to create and articulate, especially over the course of a two-hour movie, and it’s a tough sell because a hero like that has to be convincingly formidable and vulnerable at the same time. I don’t know if that sounds like an easy thing to pull off, but it sure doesn’t to me. It’s much easier I think to whip up dashing, cynical badasses with witty one-liners.
And then there’s the power of one bit as opposed to the power of the many. One is obviously more democratic in nature, but it’s hard enough to create one heroic character that embodies convincing human-ness; can you manage that with two or three more support characters, let alone a dozen more? Again Star Trek is a brilliant example: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy embody this power of many idea, but they themselves are assisted by an endless supply of crewmen, who are supported by the red shirts in front of them (more on this in the future). Not only is this probably hard to write, but I can understand how it can get a little exhausting for the viewer. The power of one with a little help along the way is much easier to grasp immediately, which is great if you want to not trouble yourself with that and just get right to the meat of the movie or whatever else. I’m not endorsing one type of hero arrangement over the other, but I would say the reason we’ve shifted towards this power of one mentality coupled with victory of the strongest is because we’re deeply accustomed to it, so it’s easier and quicker to grasp when stepping into a world; nothing needs to be explained because we’ve all seen it so many times we’ve practically internalized it. Call it laziness or convenience, but that’s where we are today (as action heroes are concerned).
You can read more about this in David Brin’s Salon article, ‘”Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists,’ but hold your horses because I promise to get to that in a future post. But for now, I think I finally got out what I wanted to say. I’m sorry this turned out to be such a huge monster; it didn’t look like that on my notepad! At least now I can be satisfied that I got my point across, so please enjoy this addendum. I hope you all got something interesting out of it, because I find this stuff fascinating. Well, if that’s all there is to say, I’ll see you on Friday!
Hopped on Pop 
One thought on “Addendum!”