A friend and I were talking the other day about the general depression in many recent films. Rampant pessimism and despair emanate from movie studios and film distributors these days, which is not entirely surprising given the tone of public discourse, the war, environmental fears, etc., etc. Four of this year's five nominees for Best Picture (No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Atonement, and Michael Clayton), many of this year's other highly-acclaimed films (American Gangster, 3:10 to Yuma, Gone Baby Gone, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, I Am Legend), not to mention the past two Best Picture winners (Crash and The Departed) all contain, at the least, strong themes on the hopelessness of the human condition. No Country and There Will Be Blood wallow in this realization and relentlessly assault their audiences with it.
Classic film noir of the 1940s and 50s manifested the anxiety of World War II and the terror of the Nuclear Age with themes of fatalism, moral ambiguity, and paranoia. Characters fight corrupt authorities and suffer the violence of random chance. These films radiated the premise that individuals are helpless against the largely random and unforgiving machinations of the world in which they live.
It seems to me that the recent films I cited aren't concerned as much with a merciless external world, but instead focus on the darkness within us. Most often, these films show characters capable of anything, willing to sacrifice anyone and anything for selfish gain, or at the extreme, for no reason at all. Characters in these films have few redeeming qualities; they lack conviction, morality, compassion, judgment, self-control.
Where noir used the shadowy nature of black and white film stock to its advantage—visually enhancing its moody themes—the modern films tend to share a different visual style. Many of the newer films adopt a spare, even bleak, visual style, whether in the sweeping desert expanses of No Country, 3:10 to Yuma, or There Will Be Blood, or the desolate urban squalor of The Departed, Gone Baby Gone, and I Am Legend. The images lack warmth, and are often totally devoid of people. At some level (most apparent in There Will Be Blood), the visual style of these films seem to depict an inward view of their characters' souls. Desolate, bare, uninhabited; scorched by sun, littered with garbage. It's not film noir, it's film bleak.
A triple feature of any of the films listed above could cause one to lose all faith in humanity. I've seen the word "nihilistic" thrown around in many of the reviews of these films, but I don't think it really fits this growing genre. Nihilism rejects morality outright, while these films implicitly accept the concept of right and wrong in portraying a world where evil overruns the human soul. These movies are pessimistic, hopeless, and distraught, but they uphold the idea that people could be better. They just aren't.
No comments:
Post a Comment