Uncle Orson Looks at American Culture 1996 - Jaded Hollywood
Jaded Hollywood
The "jadedness problem" among reviewers is that, having seen so many films, they get tired of certain kinds of films even when they are done well, while they get excited by something that strikes them as new, even when it's actually loathsome or badly done. This explains the critical success of the products of puerile "talents" like Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton, while lovely, well-crafted, but traditional films like One Fine Day are treated with genial disdain.
Jadedness especially applies to films that demand a strong emotional willingness from the audience. Many filmgoers want a cathartic experience, but few reviewers are willing or even able to achieve catharsis. They get an intellectual epiphany and think they've experienced catharsis. But they're wrong. They've seen a light or solved a puzzle, that's all, and as most writers learn, sooner or later, the effects that wow critics are much easier to bring off than the effects that move the mass audience deeply.
As a result, a film like Spitfire Grill, which only works if you're willing to get emotionally involved, leave reviewers cold. When they enter the movie theater (or screening room), they're going to work, and despite their honest efforts to pretend to be normal movie-goers, they are who they are. An analyzer sheds no tears at Spitfire Grill because he isn't looking for an experience with redemptive love, he's looking for interesting things to say in his column or show.
I'm not immune to jadedness myself, of course. Even as I laughed to the point of misery during Dumb and Dumber, I knew it was a stupid, stupid, stupid movie. Nevertheless, no one had ever dealt with snot frozen on your face when it's really cold, or the agonizing postures one takes on the toilet during violent diarrhea. Do I want to see these things again in a movie? Never. But they were new and worked once. (Warning to Jim Carrey: Nobody laughed in my local theatre when the Ace Ventura sequel used butt ventriloquism again. Funny once, my friend.) Some jokes count on jadedness in order to be funny, just as many arty films only appeal to a jaded audience. But the true classics, the great films, work on a completely different level that transcends the moment of their creation. In a world that includes (just for starters) Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, and Steve Martin, it is disturbing that our critics give their acclaim to Tarantino (last year's news, of course), Tim Burton, and Jane Campion.
Oddly, jaded reviewers tend to use inapplicable cliches in responding to films that did not please them. Thus we have movies with good characterization accused of having cardboard characters, simply because the reviewers didn't like the characters; they mistook their subjective distaste for an objective flaw in the work. Instead of recognizing that the reasons they didn't like One Fine Day were primarily within themselves, they had to find something wrong with the movie itself. Thus Ebert and Siskel complained that the audience knew immediately that these two characters were in love with each other and they grew impatient at the characters' failure to recognize the truth. To which I can only reply, "What do you think a romantic comedy is?" It's like complaining that in a western, you knew right from the beginning that the bad gunslinger and the good guy would have a showdown at the end. Furthermore, Ebert and Siskel complained about the quality of the writing! Apparently, their utter inability to get involved in the film blinded them to the fact that the dialogue actually achieved that mystical thing called "charm." But because they weren't willing to commit to the film, they gave us the standard charge of bad writing when in fact the writing was very good, and of a sort that is devilishly hard to succeed with.
Blindest of all were the comments about Pfeiffer and Clooney not having "chemistry" or "sparks." What does this mean? Frankly, I suspect that it means that these jaded reviewers can't tell that there's an attraction between characters unless they see clothing being feverishly removed. The English Patient was absolutely faithful to a morally vacuous book that almost worships adultery, suicide, and mercy-killing — but reviewers commented on the chemistry between the lovers in the film. Apparently, they took off enough clothes around old-fashioned bathtubs. And while Jerry Maguire was a good film, it was in spite of, not because of, the "cute sex" scene on the porch, and I'm not the only one in the audience who was disappointed when they slept together. (Several groans were audible.) In contrast, for the nonreviewers I know, One Fine Day had plenty of sparks between the leads. But theirs was the chemistry of romance — these were people longing to intertwine their lives, not just their bodies.
This is not exclusively a problem of reviewers, of course. Many filmmakers and studio officials have been sucked into the same mindset. I was shocked to learn of and, occasionally, see for myself how many times Hollywood decisionmakers push for nudity and sex, the kinkier the better. When one sees things like Garry Marshall's recent sex fantasy (mercifully, I have blocked out the title) one can only ask, What was he thinking? This man knows how to make good movies. And the answer is: He lives in a culture (Hollywood) where sex is constantly in the forefront, where his storyline could seem interesting instead of merely repulsive. In another recent case, a noted "money" director had a chance at creating a Twilight Zone-like tv anthology series, but because it would be on pay cable he got obsessed with the possibility of nudity and pushed to get more more more of it into every show. The result? Trashy scripts that cheapen the general American culture, bringing it more in line with the worldview of this adolescently oversexed and undercivilized man.
These filmmakers, jaded themselves and surrounded by other jaded people, keep trying to create something "fresh" and "new," not realizing that the freshest, newest thing they could create is something so old-fashioned few know how to make it anymore: stories about the lives that real people live. Here's a clue: Most of us don't spend every waking moment trying to live out our sexual fantasies. Most of us are thinking about our families, our jobs, and our friends; and our lives are enriched by affection, by religion, by commitment, by achievement, by romance, by warm and genuine humor. Who is making films for us? A few. A few. But their work is almost inevitably treated with disdain by the jaded reviewers.
Believe it or not, the vast missing audience, the kind of people who stopped going to the movies in the 1960s when nudity began to rule the screen, aren't staying away because they're prudes or because they love TV — they come back whenever they find out that a movie has been created for them. (E.T. Poltergeist. Indiana Jones. Lucas and Spielberg, for a time at least, promised and delivered storytelling at a mythic rather than sensual level. Storytelling for humans rather than beasts, to put it bluntly.) The trouble is, that audience can't trust the reviewers to tell them when such a movie is found. While You Were Sleeping brought to the theaters, again and again, people I know who otherwise do all their viewing by renting videos of pre-1967 movies. But they didn't learn about this film from the reviewers. They learned about it from their friends who took a chance. Or from the TV ads.
If I believed reviewers, my wife and I would think that The Piano was a great movie, instead of the most hate-filled, ugly experience of dishonest, unfair storytelling we've ever sat all the way through together. In the end, one wonders whether the jadedness problem shows that reviewers can't see story content anymore at all, leaving them to review only the manner and style of filmmaking, or shows instead that they really do prefer films that degrade the human spirit for two hours in the dark.
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/reviews96/jaded.shtml
