Save the Movies, Kill Hollywood
Essay for the Stranger, 6/22/93
The biggest movie of the year is about dinosaurs, and the movie business is a dinosaur. It’s addicted to the big-budget, little-boy formula, a genre that can produce a few monster hits a year but on the whole is a recipe for self-destruction.
The industry knows that fewer people, especially younger people, are going to theaters (20 percent fewer admissions than a decade ago). They want to solve it by formulating vehicles with different demographic targets, or retooling their ad campaigns. They won’t address the real problem: that most Hollywood movies are insipid, overproduced, overhyped pro-violence orgies bereft of charm or substance, that treat their viewers as idiots.
I’ve just about given up on any movie favorably described as “a roller coaster ride.” A movie’s quality today is usually inversely proportional to its budget. A thousand El Mariachis could’ve been made for the budget of Last Action Hero. Even if I never saw all 1,000 of them, I’d enjoy most of the 10 or 20 I would see, more than anything with Arnold or Jean-Claude or Charles or Chuck.
Today’s movie “heroes” exist to promote the joy of murdering people. Their plots exist to give a righteous excuse for their slaughtering. Hollywood bigshots speak out to save the trees and the whales, but make films that treat human beings as expendable. Then the hotshots look aghast when violence breaks out in their own city, and respond by moving to Montana or the San Juan Islands.
Action and spectacle don’t have to suck. Hong Kong films have colorful images and enticing fantasies. Even in the ones with gangster plots, the combatants don’t just aim and shoot; they struggle to get what they want, bringing out their characters. Those movies movein ways bloated U.S. movies can’t.
Hollywood, full of current and recovering powder-cocaine addicts, makes movies according to a cocaine aesthetic: relentless aggression, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money. Even non-violence movies feature short scenes, simplistic dialogue, garish visuals, shallow emotions. Watching one can be like a snorting roommate who makes you listen to him scream harshly and incoherently.
Note the “him” above. Females get only 30 percent of big-studio roles, says the Screen Actors Guild. The Oscars just had their “Year of the Woman”; three of the five best-picture-nominee clips were all-male scenes.
In the fifth grade, boys who only want to play with other boys are treated as real men, while boys who like girls are called sissies and even faggots. This is the presexuality of the “action” movie. Guys shooting guys, guys kickboxing guys, guys chasing guys, guys buddying up with guys, guys playing sports with guys. When sex appears, it’s either as a hero’s conquest or as a villain’s cruelty that the audience is invited to “get off” on, while still giving the hero an excuse to kill the villain. (Despite its “realism,” Unforgiven did for women what Mississippi Burning did for blacks: use their plight as an excuse to depict white guys fighting.)
Yo, studios! Some of us are past puberty, and we’re not all are boys. Many of us boys like girls; we want more girls in the movies, doing more interesting things than just getting dispassionately screwed or shot. Some of the boys among us like boys, but in different ways than you’ve been willing to show. Many of the girls among us like boys, but don’t like to see ’em killing all the time.
If Hollywood won’t overcome its fetish for killing, maybe we should kill Hollywood. We’ve made the equally-pathetic music biz notice quote-unquote “alternative” bands. It’ll be harder with film, ‘cuz even cheap indie features cost so much. But there’s hope. Screening spaces like 911 provide a forum for indie films. Short films are moving beyond the non-profit ghetto, thanks to the music-video scene and animation festivals. Directors in those two scenes aren’t making films that people have to “support;” they’re making indie films that people actually like.
That’s the foundation. Make stuff that really reaches people without being corporate/stupid. Learn by doing and viewing; avoid film schools and screenwriting classes that just tell you to do things the stupid way. Find new ways to get it out. Build new spaces and video stores; show stuff in clubs, cafes and the nether regions of cable. And don’t let LA take it over.
