Give Me Something That Goes Boom
Imagine if people in Beirut or Kabul heard that. I’ll take Billy Wilder movies any day.
“Action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on.” Sylvester Stallone
Here’s something I found on Vulture, a social media pub claiming they’re “devouring culture.” Under the title “The 50 Best Action Movies on Netflix right now,” they wrote: “Sometimes you just need to escape. You just want to watch things blow up or crash into each other, but it seems like Netflix is always trying to push a serious drama or docuseries on you. Just give me something that goes boom!”
Can you imagine what it takes to be that bored? I remember my stepdaughter years ago saying Ronin was the best movie she’d ever seen. I asked why. “Because of the chase scenes,” she said, “and the crashes.”
I told her there was a movie called Crash (1996, David Cronenberg) where people intentionally totalled their cars for the erotic thrill. Rosanne Arquette, one of the stars, had so many crashes, she wore a leg brace under her leather, much like Mel Gibson did in the Mad Max series.
“You need the effects,” she explained to me. “It makes it so much more real.”
“Cool,” my stepdaughter said. “I need something shocking like that.” I tried introducing her to Dracula and Frankenstein, figuring Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley were the original shock jocks. My stepdaughter read the books but preferred the movie versions. “You need the effects,” she explained to me. “It makes it so much more real.”
Sure, just like Jordan Crucchiola and Brian Tallerico, those two reviewers with Vulture, need things “to go boom!”
Imagine if people in Kabul or Beirut heard us talking like that. “You want boom?” they’d say. “Last week, a bomb blew the side off our entire apartment building. Now it looks like a huge inhabited ice cube tray.”
I doubt they’d be that poetic, but you get the idea. In war torn cities around the world, the level of destruction is such that thousands — possibly millions — of people would give anything for a romantic comedy.
We, on the other hand, require so much visual stimulation, if we don’t get it, we feel we’ve lost out, we aren’t experiencing life.
Think of the misery created by a hurricane. Do we search out a docuseries to understand hurricanes better, or watch Sharknado and rationalize it by saying “I’ve had enough reality for one night?”
The very screwball nature of Sharknado is somehow comforting, much like it was watching movies during The Great Depression.
Back then, newspapers filled their pages with bankruptcies, crop failures and soup kitchens. Hollywood filled their theatres showing madcap comedies, often with rich ditsy idiots. Character actors like William Powell suddenly became box office sensations because they were funny.
In fact, escapism was so popular during The Great Depression, movie theatres gave a dinner plate with each viewing. Some families had to see movies weekly just to get a full dinner set.
As one woman wrote on Facebook the other day, “Any movie suggestions? Preferably something light and stupid. I just want to veg.”
Today we’re seeing a paradigm shift that’s both disturbing and bizarre. Despite showing a wide array of “boom” movies, reviewers at Vulture contend that Netflix is “too busy shoving serious dramas and docuseries down our throats.” God forbid we learn something. As one woman wrote on Facebook the other day, “Any movie suggestions? Preferably something light and stupid. I just want to veg.”
No doubt, moviegoers of the 30s wanted to veg, too. What they liked were shoot’m-up gangster films staring tough guy actors like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Forget deeper meaning or history. Vegging in its truest sense is, well, vegging.
Then along came two directors who weren’t crazy about death, destruction and poverty. They’d seen it in real life. To them, movies didn’t need to be thrill-a-minute chase scenes. They needed humanity.
One of these directors was Frank Capra. He and his family came to the United States in the hold of a steamer. Upon seeing The Statue of Liberty, Capra said, “I felt like it was God and light.”
Capra decided he wanted to show the good in people, starting with a comedy called It Happened One Night. The movie was about a rich girl escaping a man she didn’t want to marry. At first, nobody liked the idea — including Clark Gable, on loan from MGM. Despite his reluctance, the film was made, audiences loved it, and Gable won his only Academy Award.
Wilder fought every production code, creating films with men in drag, loveable hookers, unethical reporters and the occasional alcoholic.
The other director was Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew who escaped persecution in Europe by the Nazis. Wilder fought every production code, creating films with men in drag, loveable hookers, unethical reporters and the occasional alcoholic. To many at the time, his themes were considered box office suicide. Wilder proved them all wrong, winning nine Academy awards, and earning the ultimate accolade for Some Like It Hot, what many reviewers have since called — and with good reason — “the perfect comedy.”
Eventually, of course, Hollywood would revert back to violence with the likes of John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and more recently, Quentin Tarantino. In each case, death represented the ultimate good over evil, although movies like The Searchers, The Wild Bunch or Once Upon a Time In Hollywood made you wonder.
I remember walking out of a theatre one time after seeing Scarface (Al Pacino). Brian De Palma — like Martin Scorsese — claimed that violence was necessary to register its hopelessness. Anyway, as I left the theatre, I heard two young men say, “Pacino needed a bigger gun.”
Hollywood claims audiences don’t see violence as something you emulate. If anything, it pacifies us. And, hell, if a ruthless cyborg saves the girl in the end, isn’t all that death and destruction justified?
Besides, we need the shock, the adrenaline rush, something to take the edge off our daily lives. When the credits come up, even if hurricanes threaten us, and COVID is a pest, we’re safe on our couches. Hollywood won’t let us down. It’ll give us an acceptable ending.
Maybe that’s been the biggest problem with the present pandemic. When people call it a hoax, isn’t it because they want a hoax? Wouldn’t it be nice to know we’ve all been punked?
Surely Arnie or Vin or any of The Avengers will one day jump out of the screen and destroy this silly virus and anything else that threatens us.
No wonder these people don’t want Netflix shoving serious dramas and docuseries down their throats. Surely Arnie or Vin or any of The Avengers will one day jump out of the screen and destroy this silly virus and anything else that threatens us.
And don’t talk about history repeating itself. Everyone hates reruns and deeper meaning. I saw a short movie the other night, a Nigerian film called The Nigerian Prince. It was well produced, well acted. To me, it could have been a series, much like Breaking Bad. Yet most reviewers panned it, saying it was “too slow” and the actors “wooden.”
Let’s face it, we aren’t interested in subtlety anymore. We don’t need to know that history repeats itself, that life doesn’t always have a happy ending. We can wake up tomorrow without stupid history, or someone reminding us that pandemics are real. Who cares about real?
Let’s devour culture the way it should be devoured.
With a boom. We need that boom.
Robert Cormack is a satirist, novelist, and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores. Check out Robert’s other articles and stories at robertcormack.net
