Pages

Monday, December 15, 2014

Hollywood Killed God and Why That’s a Problem

StarGazer

        Exodus: Gods and Kings opened this past weekend, and as mean-spirited as it is, I have to admit I was disappointed to see it top the box office, beating Mockingjay: Part One and Chris Rock’s Top Five. I’d say I’m boycotting it because of the whitewashed cast, but that implies I would’ve had the slightest interest in seeing it otherwise. Racism and director Ridley Scott being a jerk about said racism aside, this movie contributes to a recent Hollywood trend that I find particularly frustrating: revisionist takes on myths that don’t have any actual mythology in them.
  


  You’re both so much better than this…

        Theoretically, Hollywood’s newfound obsession with reinventing myths – whether it’s fairy tales, Biblical or otherwise religious stories, historical legends or classical mythology – should be right up my alley. Though I enjoy real-world dramas as much as the next person, I have always found these kinds of stories fascinating not only for the way they blend recognizable archetypes with the fantastical, but also for how integral they are to storytelling as an art, revealing the values and deeper truths of historical moments, individual cultures and humanity as a whole. While fairy tales and such have often served a didactic function, teaching children and even adults how to lead a proper, moral life, they also speak to people and shape their understanding of the world around them on a fundamental, almost primal level. Where most stories benefit from specificity, myths feel universal. Just think of how many different ancient civilizations, ones that likely had little direct contact with each other, have similar legends about massive floods, or Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, as simplistic and patriarchal as that concept might be. My point is that these stories are designed to be reimagined and retold, boasting an inherent, abstract fluidity that has kept them alive for, in some cases, centuries on end.

        So, if myths are so open to reinterpretation, then why are Hollywood’s latest versions, with Exodus, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and Maleficient being this year’s most prominent examples, so dull? In part, this could probably be attributed to the mainstream filmmaking industry’s general lack of inventiveness and risk-averse mindset. To an extent, that’s almost understandable in some of these cases. Considering how protective fans can be of something as comparatively trivial as Star Wars or the Marvel comics, commercial productions can only afford to be so radical when you’re dealing with material that’s literally gospel for millions of people. Judging by reviews, Exodus in particular seems to have been hampered by the creative team’s uncertainty over how faithful they should be to the original text, their attempts to mesh together a variety of approaches ultimately producing a final product that will likely satisfy no one.

        Despite the fact that few of these projects have been successful from either a financial or artistic perspective, Exodus et al. appear to represent only the beginning of this trend. Coming up, you can look forward not one, but *two* live-action  Jungle Book movies, a Cinderella “retelling”, two Robin Hood “reboots”, a non-Disney The Little Mermaid, a live-action Tarzan, Joe Wright’s already controversial Pan and Guy Ritchie’s potential King Arthur franchise – and that’s mostly just counting ones currently best known as animated Disney movies. Ridley Scott might even return to the Bible for a King David-related flick. Of course, one or all of these movies could turn out to be good, even great (Sofia Coppola directing Mermaid sounds intriguing), but looking at the descriptions, the one available trailer and the sheer quantity of them, I’m not getting my hopes up. Given that world history is rich with thousands of different myths and folkloric tales, these selections are hopelessly Euro-centric, and Hollywood seems weirdly fixated on the most unavoidably racist stories possible (see: Jungle Book, Tarzan, apparently Peter Pan). I, for one, would much rather see a new take on Aladdin or one of the other tales in One Thousand and One Nights than yet another version of Beauty and the Beast. Still, for most part, my disdain for this trend of fairy tale/mythology adaptations stems less from the source material than from the total lack of imagination in the filmmakers’ and studios’ approach. Instead of embracing the magical or spiritual nature of these stories, they seem intent on scrubbing away any offbeat, distinguishing features, leaving us with a tedious assembly line of what I’ve started to call Three G (generic, grim and gritty) movies.

        This revisionist trend first became apparent to me back in 2012 when we got two Snow White adaptations – the oddly juvenile Mirror Mirror and the Three G Snow White and the Huntsman – within three months of each other. Though this very well could have been just a random coincidence (after all, 2006’s The Illusionist and The Prestige hardly signaled a growing obsession with magician films), it came not long after Universal and Ridley Scott (him again?) attempted a Three G revival of Robin Hood, Disney made a live-action Alice in Wonderland and Robert Zemeckis sent Beowulf through the Uncanny Valley armed with worse graphics than many modern video games.

        In a way, like many tendencies found in blockbusters nowadays, these movies’ general preference for a vaguely “realistic” aesthetic over one that produces genuine feelings of wonder can be blamed on what I consider the 21st century’s best – and, therefore, most influential – franchises so far: The Lord of the Rings and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Now, those movies certainly inspire plenty of awe, but for me at least, that sensation can be attributed more to their overall quality and craftsmanship than to the actual worlds that they created. Characterized by a love of muted colors, portentous dialogue and the use of familiar trappings to ground fictional settings (medieval England for LOTR’s Middle Earth and a New York City/Chicago hybrid standing in for Gotham in the Batman movies), both franchises pushed a generation of fantasy and science-fiction films away from the more whimsical experimentalism that characterized many earlier works and toward a sort of mournful gravitas. None of this would necessarily be bad if it didn’t feel like every project was being forced to follow the template for a spectacle-driven action epic, regardless of how appropriate that tone is for each particular story.

        So, you get a Snow White and the Huntsman that didn’t reinvent either the Brothers Grimm or even the Disney version so much as it grafted the most basic elements of the plot onto a cookie-cutter Chosen-One-defeats-evil-ruler flick. It feels only superficially different from, say, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Exodus, which in turn both seem like rather sad attempts by Scott to recapture his long-lost Gladiator glory. Even the Greek gods got brought down to earth in the 300-wannabe Immortals, and the 2005 Troy erased their presence completely in its retelling of the events of The Iliad. All these stories could not be more diverse in terms of their origins, so it’s disheartening that their contemporary counterparts are so homogenous and lifeless.

        Here, then, is my advice to Hollywood: embrace the inexplicable. Whether that means acknowledging the possible existence of a god (or gods) or incorporating the mysticism of classic fairy tales and myths, refraining from the temptation to rationalize the fantastical would make these stories feel not only more faithful to their origins, but also more adventurous and unique. For example, instead of making King Arthur reboots with essentially the same aim as the last one, why not look to Edmund Spenser’s delightfully surreal yet layered The Faerie Queen for inspiration? Or how about a big-screen adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which is still the most compelling modern reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend that I’ve seen? Actually, what I would love to see more than anything is a movie or TV show to do for King Arthur what the short-lived series Kings did for the Biblical King David. Set in a seemingly contemporary but alternate universe, Michael Green’s Kings combined the grand narrative arcs and dialogue of Shakespeare with political intrigue and moral introspection. Most of all, it dealt with God very directly without ever coming off as condescending or preachy, showing that pop culture is more than capable of exploring issues of faith in nuanced, intelligent ways.

        It’s no surprise that some of the best recent fairy tale-esque films have been ones that use the genre’s tropes without adhering to a single existing narrative. Pan’s Labyrinth emphasized the gothic elements, recognizing that, if fairy tales are indeed the stuff of dreams, then they must also be the stuff of nightmares, and Hayao Miyazaki’s films like Spirited Away realized universes filled with enchantment more effectively than Disney ever had. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus perfectly fit director Terry Gilliam’s madcap sensibilities, blending a dour London with vibrant, absurdist fantasylands and offering one of the more interesting personifications of the Devil that I’ve seen lately. Even more than the fact that they weren’t positioned as the cornerstone for future franchises, these movies work because they know that magic isn’t inherently silly or juvenile, and getting rid of it doesn’t automatically make a work of art more mature or worthy of serious attention. Few things peeve me more about criticisms of Lost’s ending than detractors’ smug derisiveness toward the very idea of religion, organized or not, and anyone who might find meaning in it, their insistence that logical, scientific explanations are always more valuable and better storytelling than spiritual or emotional ones. Magic isn’t a copout. In fact, it’s embedded in the very fabric of storytelling, and it’s time Hollywood welcomed that instead of burying it beneath interminable action set pieces and boring aspirations to “realism”.
             

Photo Links:

No comments:

Post a Comment