Are the 70’s Back? If Only!
- 03.25.2008 - 3:10 PMIn the latest issue of The Atlantic, Ross Douthat has a very fine essay on what he frames as Hollywood’s return to the 1970’s. It puts last fall’s spate of Iraq war films in context, bringing them into place alongside everything from the neo-exploitation slasher flicks of Eli Roth to the Bourne series and mediocre remakes like The Manchurian Candidate. Lots of ink (some of it mine) was spilled last fall dissecting the movie biz’s dreary, self-righteous takes on the war, but his essay paints the clearest picture by far.
I would say, however, he gives short shrift to one point: lame-brained politics or no, the crusading, politically-infused films of the 1970’s were simply better films–and that goes for the prestige pics as well as the B-movies. Douthat notes this in passing, agreeing that the 80’s were “a more middlebrow, conservative decade in pop culture” in comparison with the political engagement of 70’s cinema.
But it’s essential to note that today’s crop–at least in its most explicitly political incarnations–is by any standard rife with unambiguously rotten material. Lions for Lambs, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah were painful to sit through. Even the better stuff, like the 2005 Clooney duo of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were merely average–decent productions that fail to rise to the level of most cable television series. The only recent productions in this vein that stand out at all are the three Bourne films, which tend to use their political framework as a background and succeed mostly on the strength of their dazzling action setpieces.
Contrast this with the films of the 1970’s. There’s little comparison. Apocalypse Now may have little to do with the real-life experience of Vietnam, but it’s a hypnotic, singular vision from an accomplished cinematic artist working at the peak of his powers. All the President’s Men remains one of film’s best detective stories, and probably the best movie about Washington or journalism ever made. Middlebrow fare like The Parallax View and Flight of the Condor sparkled in a way that today’s mainstream thrillers rarely accomplish. And even low-budget films like Death Race 2000 and The Warriors crackled with a sense of outrage, awareness, and energy. Movies like these, as well as the early works of directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, indulged in exploitation flick shenanigans. But they also had a tremendous amount of fun, and maybe even managed to say something about the state of the world, too.
Heaven knows the politics of Hollywood in 1970’s were off the wall, perhaps even wackier and more radical than today’s. But somehow, they still managed to turn out movies that were far less irritating than the artless, self-satisfied liberal consciousness-raisers we seem to be stuck with now.
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March 25th, 2008 at 4:00 PM
There’s a pretty terrible article on the same subject in today’s Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/03/24/ST2008032403372.html
Oh, it’s factually accurate and interesting on that level, but it’s amusing to me how the writer considers just about every possible explanation for the failure of these movies *except* the notion that perhaps American audiences don’t care for an exclusively counterfactual “Bu$hitler Lied, People Died” view of the war, or portraying American soldiers as either hapless victims of Halliburton’s evil or evil rapists and murderers.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:02 PM
anyone who has netflix be sure to check out my reviews
http://www.netflix.com/StrangerReviews?prid=477892184&lnkctr=MDP2RL
lots of 70’s era
March 25th, 2008 at 4:05 PM
Whoops, reading the blog in the wrong order, I missed Max Boot’s post about the Post article referenced above….
March 25th, 2008 at 5:26 PM
The closest thing to a rah-rah pro-warrior, pro-Western Civ film of the last few years, however, was a massive box office success and aesthetically quite interesting - even if the particular aesthetics were roundly rejected by a certain kind of critic. I’m speaking of course of 300. In the meantime, there have been several highly successful and gripping battle accounts from THE WAR ON TERROR that in my opinion, as a former screenwriter and story editor, would adapt very well: HOUSE TO HOUSE, WE WERE ONE, LONE SURVIVOR, and ROBERTS RIDGE all come to mind immediately. If Hollywood was doing its job, we’d certainly know by now whether the moviegoing would turn out in better numbers for real war movies based on these and other stories than for the kind that we’ve had so many of.
March 25th, 2008 at 7:12 PM
CK MacLeod
300 was a terrible film from a historical perspective. Aside from that, it was based on a comic book plot (literally) - it is almost beyond parody if you see this as a postive film for Western Civilisation (except South Park did parody it…).
March 25th, 2008 at 9:01 PM
300 wasn’t pretending to be historiography. I don’t think it really meant for us to think that Xerxes was 8 feet tall and took ogres with blade hands and battalions of ninjas into his service, or that the Spartans stacked their fallen enemies high enough to exploit corpse avalanches tactically. Otherwise, I suppose I could quibble with your dismissive characterization of the source material, and I could refer to and expand upon Victor Davis Hanson’s take on heroic exaggeration, but I wasn’t making an argument that the film was or wasn’t “positive… for Western Civilization.” My point was that it took a positive attitude toward Western Civilization, and toward the heroic defense of it, and that audiences responded very positively in return.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:53 PM
Today’s movies condescend to the viewer much more than the 1970s flicks did. It’s a real treat to watch a lot of the older movies now, just to experience being treated like a sentient adult.
I think a big influence on today’s movies is postmodernism, in which the personal is everything. The ’70s movies, for all their one-dimensional politics, did at least toy with the idea that there were things out there that fell into other realms. You could say “the personal is political” back then, because there was an understanding that “the political” was a valid, separate category. Some attempt was made to parse the “political”: investigate it, deconstruct it, at least hold it up to ridicule.
Today’s movies dismiss the “political” right away as a Big, Like, Total Bummer. It’s not fascinating, not the source of interesting drama and motivations, it’s just common dog poop — and the steaming pile is always left by the middle-aged white men. Yawn. The plot inevitably revolves around some character’s attempt to shovel the dog poop, point it out, photograph it, and maybe heap some dirt on it so it won’t smell so much. There’s only so much you can do with that; it’s a dramatic dead end. We know from the start that it’s dog poop, and that what we’re there to enjoy is not any compelling revelations about the poop, but rather the well-crafted chase scenes and special effects.
It’s a lot like the dramatic problem of Immediate Sex: Hollywood’s unwritten code now requires it, lest anyone appear to be suggesting that (horrors) sex should wait, but it sure isn’t dramatically interesting. All the romantic suspense, and the fun of flirtation, expire promptly with the Immediate Sex, and there is no way to resuscitate the dramatic significance of the heroine for the remainder of the film. As my young nephew says, BO-ring.
The first two Bourne movies avoided these (and other) pitfalls, as did 300, United 93, and such oddballs as Amazing Grace. Not all of today’s movies are awful. But the political thriller does require more tolerant subtlety about, well, POLITICS, than the average modern screenwriter or producer can seem to muster. Chalk that up, at least in part, to their early indoctrination by the Weekly Reader, and all the educational wickets they passed through after that.
March 25th, 2008 at 11:50 PM
Best film about our current predicament:
TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE
The big eyed puppets are actually more sympathetic and emotionally involving then Clooney, Redford etc. And who could resist a cheer when the female character kicks Kim Jong Il up the bum and into the shark filled pool.
And the fundamental message of the necessity of thumos is correct - even if an excess of undisciplined thumos can be very annoying.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:27 AM
If you ignore the hackneyed political films, 2007 was actually not a bad year at all for films: No Country for Old Men was nearly flawless, and There Will Be Blood suffered from the rarest of all film flaws: it was too short.
Juno was charming, if a bit overrated, and even our current John Hughes - Judd Apatow - revealed some conservative leanings in his very funny film “Knocked Up”. What other movie in recent memory is so contemptuous of abortion that it would have the line: “and then she had a real baby!”.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:00 AM
Matt — entirely agree with you. 2007 was a surprisingly good year for movies. There were probably 30 films that I quite enjoyed (enough that I’d, say, see them again, or recommend them to others), and a handful of them (Zodiac, No Country) that turned out to be insta-classics — the sort of films I’m pretty sure I’ll still be talking about a decade or so down the road.