Film Blog Essay: Film as a Mirror: Our Anxieties on Screen

"This is an election they'll be studying for ages."  Anyone with the boldness to discuss politics with family and friends over the past few months has heard some variation of this thought uttered.  The economists, the politicians, the journalists, the psychologists, the philosophers, and the researchers are all trying to have the foresight - or perhaps the clairvoyance - to see not only how the future will unfold, but how the history books of the next generation will interpret today's events.  Consequently, I can't resist the urge to practice the same anticipation of tomorrow’s textbooks in my own field of interest – cinema.  As a film studies major, I must wonder: how will the current time period in American cinema be remembered?  It would seem that there is already a very common answer to this question  (and it’s the other quote I’ve heard about a thousand times over the past few months) – "Everything is a sequel or a remake now."  We must recognize, however, that this is not true, and perhaps more importantly, this is probably not the main focus of the "2010s" chapter of 2050's film textbooks.

I should be perfectly clear that this is not intended to undercut the significance of the Reboot Movement.  The past few years have most definitely demonstrated a cultural desire to reflect on everything that our culture’s media has given us thus far, revisiting the stories, themes, characters, genres, and franchises that have shaped the way we think about the world.  Just within the past year, audiences have seen the unexplored nooks and crannies of the Death Star, the American side of the Wizarding World, and a universe in which the Ghostbusters are women, not to mention a reworking of the mid-century musical with La La Land and multiple retellings of classic Disney stories.  As nice as it is to think of this as a time when Western culture simply feels like reflecting on its accomplishments, this is clearly the desire of the film industry’s bigwigs more than it is what the audiences are demanding.  Sequels have always worked at bringing in crowds with reliability because people have a strong impulse to return to the familiar and to check up on the people (even fictional people) who matter to them.  It should not be surprising that Hollywood has only gotten better at using these urges to entice us, and it should be expected that Hollywood will continue to stick to what is safe, reliable, and faithful for as long as possible.

What should interest us, then, is the group of original films on which Hollywood is willing to take a chance.  If producing a sequel or a remake is always Hollywood’s safest bet, there must be something about the other films they produce that offers a sense of security for them.  (I am specifically focusing on films made for adults, if only because children’s films rely more on the name of the studio [Dreamworks, Pixar, etc.] to do the selling, so they probably deserve an entirely separate analysis.)  Apart from reboots, the most recent films that are designed for mass audiences seem to be mostly based on popular pre-existing properties from non-cinematic media, giving the studios the sense that they only need to sell a story that has already sold well in another form.  Some upcoming examples of this include Ghost in the Shell, The Circle, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Before I Fall, and The Dark Tower.  That being said, since analyzing these stories would be an analysis of novels rather than the film industry, I think it would be best to focus specifically on the films that seem designed to attract a very large crowd – the “blockbusters” – and find some common themes that run throughout.

I am focusing on themes and motifs because I suspect that future film critics and historians will see this time period’s cinema as trying to address some of our culture’s fears, and my first theme that evidences this is Hollywood’s obsession with big governments and giant corporations.  Obviously, the absurdly wealthy businessman has been the villain in a great many movies going back to Classical Hollywood, but at present, it is the corporations and governments with a very friendly face – or no known face at all – that scare us the most, because they seem more godlike (and yet somehow more realistic) than a “Tex Richman” type.  One family of contemporary dystopian science fiction has been designed by writers who all seem to share the same goal: to come up with the worst ideas for structuring governments as possible.  The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, and arguably Maze Runner are all novel adaptations that exemplify this family, and I think they may be cousins to the films about enormous, omnipotent, and omniscient businesses.  Because we live in a time when Facebook, Google, and other similar services are collecting a frightening amount of information about each and every person who regularly uses the Internet, it is only natural that stories about gigantic technology companies intrigue us.  Consider the upcoming thriller The Circle, which is playing with the idea of an untrustworthy Steve Jobs-type figure, and has a weirdly anxiety-inducing trailer in spite of the fact that it tells us so little about what to expect from the movie.  2016’s Nerve seems to be in a similar vein, with a mysterious game developer collecting all of the protagonist’s data and, in a sense, controlling everything she does.

This theme of the all-powerful technology corporation is closely related to, or perhaps a part of, the theme of technological advancements.  Consider all of the recent and upcoming dramas about surviving in outer space (The Martian, Passengers, Life, Europa Report, Interstellar, Gravity, etc.).  I try to keep up with the news about human activity in outer space and, when last I checked, we haven’t been to outer space in a long time now, and I don’t think all of these films have simply been inspired by the debate about whether or not we should go to Mars.  There is definitely a concern in our culture about whether or not we’re ready for the technology that lies just around the bend, and be it with serious dramas like Arrival or “popcorn flicks” like Independence Day: Resurgence, we moviegoers are showing that human interaction with higher intelligence is one can of worms (or can of Borg?) we’d rather not open.  (I am also considering the idea that films about aliens in the vein of Independence Day or The Fifth Wave could be related to fears in both the U.S. and the U.K. of immigration, but I am skeptical.)

The most interesting form of our fears of progressing technology is almost certainly the return of HAL 9000 anxieties – the fear of artificial intelligence.  Among philosophers and social analysts, and (more recently) a few prominent computer scientists, a fear has been rising over the past few years about the difficulties our species may face should it create a more advanced species with higher intelligence.  Some of these stories make the A.I. into a classical villain, such as the Transformers films and Avengers: Age of Ultron, whereas others explore more personal relationships and make dramas that rest on sci-fi premises rather than sci-fi movies with some added drama.  Spike Jonze’ Her (2013) is perhaps an earlier example of this, and 2015’s Ex Machina is probably the most prominent example.  While I’ve tried to stay away from noting our recent reboots, it must be recognized that one of the determining factors in which franchises from decades ago are getting a resurgence seems to be a relationship to this theme of A.I. – I’m thinking particularly of Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Robocop.  I know it may seem like I’m being too selective or narrow-minded with my focus in order to make my argument, but if even the obscure 1973 cult film Westworld has become a hit TV series on HBO, surely it is this theme of A.I. itself, not just how well these properties are remembered, that grabs us.

Of course, all of this conjecture is rooted in the theory that a period’s cinema reflects its culture’s timely fears, changing with the politics and current events of the time, and I am very open to skepticism of this reading of history.  I would not want to go so far as to say that the current flood of superhero films is rooted in the same anxious desperation for a rule-breaking anti-hero who’ll fix all of our problems that led to the rise of Donald Trump.  Obviously the Marvel/D.C. obsession is worthy of serious analysis, but the Caligari to Hitler method of studying this subject is too simplistic.  What we can say safely, however, is that it is convenient and popular for academics to view the American Western movie and the film noir as responses to post-war anxiety, and I expect the same kind of reading will be applied to the films that come out this year.  This means that now is the time to either appreciate the catharsis that Hollywood is offering us to manage our current worries, or get our counter-arguments ready immediately to preempt any myopic readings that the film scholars of 2040 attempt to apply to 2017.

Or we might all be dead from climate change by 2040, but I’ll worry about that problem when all of 2025’s movies address it.

Submitted by J.D. Hansel.