The New Depression Cinema

In the time between Confessions of a Shopaholic's initial wave of advertising and its release, things have (to put it mildly) changed; a lightweight chick-flick parable about a woman with a spending problem who finds love and a way to pay for her material thrills (a frilly entertainment based on a 2000 book to be released in the middle of a mild economic downturn) is now a dispatch from a different age. Even if, as the Wikipedia page claims, reshoots have taken the recession into account, the question stands: do today's depressed audiences want vicarious materialism? Or will they turn indifferently on the film and run back to the more apropos comforts of Paul Blart and its ilk?

Trend pieces are the curse of the constant need to stall for real content; nonetheless, the excuse provided by Confessions is a good moment to think about the many claims being raised on behalf of how this new depression may or may not have an effect similar to the Great Depression's seemingly causal relationship to one of Hollywood's golden ages. Pretty much every media outlet has either weighed in with a variant or will soon enough. Joe Morgenstern tipped his hand by beginning his piece "Where are you, Fred and Ginger, now that we need you?", concluding the only thing that can save the movies is "originality." Unfortunately, Morgenstern's dubious example of the kind of originality we need is Slumdog Millionaire. MSNBC's Alonso Duralde went the hard-times-mean-escapist-thrills route, your basic recycled Great Depression argument. Spout's Karina Longworth conceded "I don’t have the answers! What say you?", but chose Shopaholic and He's Just Not That Into You as initial test-cases, which is significant for reasons I'll get into in a bit. The gloomiest prognosis came from The Village Voice's J. Hoberman, who concluded "Movies are expendable. Folks will give up $12 tickets, cancel Netflix, and cut cable to save their high-speed Internet connection."

Of course, they're all wrong about everything. Below, I'll explain why and offer my own cautious prognostications of the near-future. I was aided in my quest by Robert Sklar, author of Movie-Made America, whose magisterial overview of the scope of American film history is pretty untoppable; and Noel Murray, freelance writer for The AV Club, among other publications, who keeps a discriminating and incisive eye on mainstream American entertainment. My thanks to both.

I. Counter-Arguments: What Won't Happen
Let's get rid of this obsession with the idea that hard times automatically equal good movies (a myth we owe as much to the '70s as the '30s). I don't want to give the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein too much stick as he's an industry observer, not a critic, but in an otherwise well-reasoned piece where he concludes you can never 100% guess what audiences will and won't go for, he signs off with "All we really know is that we know a good movie when we see one, whether the Dow's scraping bottom or running with the bulls." Goldstein, Morgenstern, et al. write with the calm assurance of men who know a "good movie" when they see one, and can be completely certain their readers will, too. For most, I assume, it's not nearly that simple. However, I'm not interested in the quality of the films being produced (well, I am, but not in this context). This is pure pop sociology.

The number one reason this new depression's movies won't resemble the '30s in any way: the studio system isn't built the same way. '30s Hollywood was a much more efficient machine. "When you think about comparing the role of Hollywood in culture then and now, there's no comparison," Sklar notes. "They're producing 400, 500, 600 films a year. They're very structured around stars and genres." The studios had a cultural monopoly, Sklar continues: "Hollywood was the only national medium, in a sense. Radio didn't really go coast-to-coast until '36." Compare the situation now: the proliferation of other media with more bang for your far-stretched buck aside, the studios don't work as hard or as much.

Scanning the release calendars from February through August confirmed what I'd suspected: if we get more than 150 wide Hollywood releases a year, it would be shocking. Virtually every single month clocks in at about a dozen wide releases (except for blockbuster-heavy June, when the studios seem to give each other a lot of space: as of right now, there are only seven wide releases scheduled for that month). Every month follows some variation on the same pattern: two or three loosely defined Films For The Whole Family (Night at the Museum 2 and the like), one or two explicitly female-oriented romantic comedies (next month's Confessions of a Shopaholic, for example, is All About Steve, starring genre queen emeritus Sandra Bullock), two explicitly male-oriented comedies predicated on the boobs-and-farts staples of the Happy Madison formula, two to four action movies (both high-budget tentpole affairs and more workmanlike low-budgeters like the upcoming Fighting), maybe one non-action-oriented thriller, one to two horror movies (sometimes evenly split between a PG-13 loud-noises affair and a graphic slasher), possibly one "urban" release (cf. Tyler Perry and Ice Cube movies), and a couple of unclassifiables (like the mistimed April release of the Oscar-bait-y The Soloist). That's it. That's all there is.

Given this monotonous pattern of releases—how rigidly every assembly-line film has to fit, with rare exceptions, into rigorously-defined genres with their own reliable demographics—two things become obvious: with the exception of event blockbuster movies, there's almost no chance for a film that everyone in the audience feels like seeing (so much for unifying audience entertainments), and that the genres cited as the Depression's most notable achievement—the screwball comedy and the musical—don't exist anymore.

Movie production times have lengthened immensely, to the point where they're simply incapable of keeping up with what's going on in the outside world, even if that was desirable (and studios, as always, seem uncertain how much reality viewers want). As Sklar points out, a film like Footlight Parade "was able to respond to Roosevelt and get him in the picture" (in the infamous "FDR Jones" number at the end) "because the time that it took to shoot it, get it through post and get it in theaters was a couple of months," whereas today even the simplest, shoddiest movie seems to take a year-and-a-half, minimum. (Recall how shocked people were that Oliver Stone wrote, shot and completed W. in a year.) The only film coming out between now and August that could remotely respond to the new climate is the August 14 release The Post Grad Survival Guide, in which Ms. Alexis Bledel (Gilmore the younger) is forced to move back in with her family when she can't get a job. This is apparently slotted to be a Juno quirk-fest, so it's not even a good example. When Stone put out Wall Street two years before 1989's crash, he looked like a genius; now, when Wall Street 2 is announced to be coming our way, it seems predictable at best.

Related to all this is the death of the "poor but scrappy" archetype, because Hollywood's cut itself off from the "let's put on a show" movie. Musicals commonly centered around Mickey, Judy and the kids making good on nothing but their talent and self-confidence. This is impossible now, because the public knows exactly how their entertainment sausage is manufactured. Even the most removed-from-industry person has a fairly good grasp on what a venal, fearful place Hollywood is (in large part because the industry itself can't stop broadcasting the news); the idea of a performer breaking through on talent alone is too laughable to be taken seriously. If the point of the Fred-and-Ginger musicals (or the Busby Berkeley ones, for that matter) was that lucky breaks, hard work, resourcefulness and a winning personality can get you anywhere—the stuff the meta-musicals were made of—that's also not around anymore. It's a safe guess that the industry devoted to "entertainment news" (celebrity gossip) is almost as profitable as the movies they're tangentially related to; in some cases (e.g. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), the gap between the cultural space occupied by a celebrity's off-screen presence vs. their box-office clout has grown unacceptably wide. (There's an argument to be made here that some of the most successful performers are those about whom we "know" the least: see, e.g., the ever-reliable Adam Sandler and his protégé Kevin James. Maybe performers like Pitt—who admittedly chooses some hellaciously uncommercial vehicles—spend so much time being famous for themselves that no one wants to see them off-screen.)

One of the reasons '30s comedies performed so well (and hold up so well) is that they weren't gender-split. There was always a man, a woman, a reason to get together and obstacles to surmount, but the respective partners were placed on equal footing. The gender split went other ways: for women there were the weepies, for men jejune action sagas. Comedies united. As pointed out above, this is no longer the case: while couples might still drag their long-suffering other halves into the theater, it's no secret that the audiences for, say, Bride Wars and, say, the upcoming Fired Up (whose marketing campaign seems to rely solely on the abbreviation "F.U.") are completely different. The stereotyped differences go on and on: bro-oriented affairs emphasize sexual success, self-satisfied slobbishness and gross-out jokes; female rom-coms fetishize clothing-related commodities and chivalrous, sincere men. The only thing everyone can seem to get together for is the latest Judd Apatow joint. Comedy's become an almost-exclusively gender-segregated genre.

Another reason the screwball comedy is dead: they focused on the rich. Depending on whose arguments you buy, this was either to mock them for audiences' delight, or to endear them through their foibles and the vicarious ostentation on display. Either way, the current climate is way too angry to make movies about the wealthy in a genial fashion: contemporary crowds have a much, much better idea of who's responsible for the current woes (or think they do, anyway) and socialite culture is virtually dead, absorbed into the business of celebrity worship. No one will watch any movie that lightheartedly treats of the rich, at least not for a while. In short, virtually every light comic genre capable of absorbing tough economic times has been cut off. Curiously, Confessions of a Shopaholic seems to be closer to this genre than anything else: it's the story of a gal whose spending outstrips her means, but figures out through pluck and luck how to close the gap. For that reason, it'll likely clean up pretty well.

The '30s emphasized working within genres as much as now; there were just more to go around (we no longer have, for example, the prototypical "ripped-from-the-headlines" film, the gangster film, the social melodrama, etc.). Sure, the industry posted a record January, but it's hardly a sign the industry is set for strong times ahead; as widely reported, theatrical attendance is down, while revenue up due only to increased ticket prices. The situation is obviously untenable. If anything, this period in Hollywood entertainment might resemble the '50s more than anything: then, as now, 3D is supposed to come in and save everyone, delivering something you can't get on TV then, YouTube or Hulu now. Hollywood's own personal crisis and declining market share has the bad fortune to dovetail with a horrendous recession; if anything, we're going to be looking at a relentless lust for novelty, the new escapism.

Without the novelties, then, on a certain level, the movies don't matter. "There is a social function for theatrical motion-picture going that will not disappear," Sklar says. "It's more about kids getting out of the house, kids going to the multiplex with their peer group, hanging out and gossiping or whatever on weekends; in a sense, the movie doesn't matter. It matters to a certain degree—Twilight, for example—but the existence of the movie theater is the crucial destination, not the movie itself, for teenagers and people who want to hang out. There's usually a kind of low roar in the theater." If you've been to a multiplex anytime in the last decade or so, you'll notice the waves of theater-hopping teens who come in and out of movies at their leisure; box-office returns can start to seem random.

Ultimately, no one knows anything. Think pieces can forecast in a vacuum of inconsistent data, studios can second-guess themselves, but all you have to do is look at two of the most unexpected hits of the last couple of months to see how little can be predicted successfully. One of those films is Gran Torino, which a fairly hacky AP piece quoted Tom O'Neil as predicting would flop because "Clint Eastwood is an automatic hitmaker and usually a guaranteed top Oscar contender. But Clint Eastwood as a despicable bigot?" What no one predicted was that Gran Torino would be viewed by audiences as a comedy (see it with a packed crowd and you'll hear roars of laughter); another factor is that it's set in decaying industrial Detroit, which seems to be subconsciously resonating with audiences. Another unexpected hit is the shoddy Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which is connecting precisely because it's set in minimum-wage hell among the obese and unhappy; it's a good moment for that, too. Yet it can be guaranteed those weren't deliberated factors when these movies were first proposed.

In short: the genres aren't the same, the resources are different, the entire climate has changed. The '30s are not about to happen again, cinematically.

II. What Might Happen
First up on everyone's mind: where will the zeitgeist materialize? On TV, probably. "When I interviewed The Shield creator Shawn Ryan late last year," Noel Murray notes, "he mentioned that he was developing a sitcom about get-rich-quick schemes. And Shield star Michael Chiklis has been working on a serialized drama about people caught up in a pyramid scheme. But in general, I don't expect that the existing sitcoms and dramas will address these issues except in ripped-from-the-headlines murder-of-the-week plots, as in Law & Order. If anything, we might get more escapist fare." Not necessarily, as schadenfreude certainly has a powerful tug; it's just that TV can simply work faster. I'm personally rooting for the return of the paranoid '70s thriller mastered by Alan J. Pakula: the upcoming The International, with its purportedly overblown mistrust about evil banks, may just hit the spot. Another person who seems well-attuned to the times is Tony Gilroy, whose upcoming release, Duplicity, couldn't be more perfectly titled or timed. If released today, Michael Clayton would perform much more strongly in this climate. The rich and powerful are going to be tarred-and-feathered cinematically.

For a long time, comedies have automatically conflated romantic and personal success: any given Kate Hudson vehicle makes material comfort a prerequisite for love (even as the work is carefully kept off-screen). If the success of Paul Blart means anything, it's that people are tired of this. To be blunt, if Alexander Payne had made Blart, we'd be looking at a thousand separate accusations of condescension; as it is, Blart cross-leverages Kevin James' sitcom following, family audiences needing an outlet for the kids these months, and a powerful (if frankly depressing) portrait of lower-middle-income desperation. In its own artless way, it's come closer to showing how a lot of people live, materially, than anything in a long while.

"Hollywood knows dick about how poor and lower-middle-class people live," Murray notes. "It's always either ratty trailers or $200,000 suburban homes for people who aren't obscenely wealthy. There's a moment late in Marley and Me where Owen Wilson takes a new job as a reporter in Philadelphia and his family moves to a three-story, 4,000 square-foot country house outside of town. And all I could think was: No wonder newspapers are going broke. This dude's way overpaid." How it'll happen is yet to be known, but a slightly more nuanced portrait of American economic life is on the horizon, even as more people follow Apatow's lead in trying to make more gender-inclusive comedies.

9/11 signifiers have been a go-to staple for a long time; that and a clever marketing campaign were all Cloverfield had going for it. The era of falling towers and Bush jabs is over for now; we've got a new disaster to grapple with. "Unless there's another major terrorist attack, those Bush-era signifiers may fade for a while," Murray concurs. "After all, there weren't so many movies or TV shows about robotic communist villains once Reagan left office and the Berlin Wall fell."

A slightly dicier prospect: for the first time in ages, politics will be treated with respect onscreen. President Hope has a lot of goodwill to burn. Murray, again: "I think the key 'change' that the Obama era may bring is exactly that: a return to thinking of government and politics as well-meaning efforts to serve the public, and not as adversarial sport. So perhaps we'll see fewer films and TV shows about institutional corruption and more about people trying to make a difference. The age of The Wire and The Shield and The Bourne Identity may be ending, replaced by a return to shows like Room 222 and movies like Washington Story, where public service is heroic." We're too compromised to go that full-on route—the norm will probably be a little closer to movies like Charlie Wilson's War, where good intentions butt up against constraining circumstances—but the idea of taking politics seriously, as opposed to using politicians for stock villains and easily-mocked idiots, will probably make a return. That's one of the few similarities we might share with that last Depression. "Obama's going to be in office for at least four years," Sklar notes. "If they have liberal president movies, they'll have to get them out in the next four years."

The studios won't collapse. They can't. Many of the '30s studios went into receivership at one point or another, and a contributing factor was that they were their own financial entities. Today's studios are without exception part of huge conglomerates too huge to completely implode. Back then, Paramount was one of the studios that almost shuttered its doors; today, for that to happen, all of Viacom would have to collapse. That's about as likely as Renée Zellweger morphing into Carole Lombard, or Kevin James into Cary Grant. As always, we'll get the movies and times we've enabled and deserve.

Posted by ahillis at February 11, 2009 6:53 AM