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Recession art
I’ve been racing to see all the Oscar contenders before I go home for Christmas. In the past few weeks I’ve rushed through The Reader, Doubt, Australia, Good, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Rachel Getting Married, and Frost/Nixon. I saw Slumdog Millionaire a while back, and Revolutionary Road is on the list for later.
It’s been an emotionally taxing experience. Oscar contenders are notoriously depressing because apparently for art to be serious it also has to be angsty and dark. Maybe the litany of depressing movies will end with Oscar season, though. According to the New York Times, “If moviegoers have delivered a message in the last few months, it is that they want their films, for the moment, at least, to be a lot more fun than their lives.”
NYT says we may see more comedies, just like directors starting make more comedies to lighten the weight of the Great Depression. It’s true that the 1930s were the golden age of romantic comedies that are still worth watching, with stars like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It seems that most of those movies didn’t mention at all the pain people were experiencing everywhere, but they must have eased the pain a little.
I wonder if we feel less of a need to validate our significance with dark, angsty art when we’re actually facing uncertainty and hardship ourselves. What do you think?
back to top14 Comments to “Recession art”
I lost what little respect I had when “Shakespeare in Love” beat “Saving Private Ryan”.
I quit being interested when“American Beauty” won.
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I would say that it’s more the symptom of a culture lost without God. I just reread Watchmen this past week, and I was wondering why I liked it so much when, thematically, it’s 5 different nihilist viewpoints arguing with each other.
Really, without God, the most intelligent and true thing that art can say is, “We are lost and the world is a dark, terrifying place. We have longings for something greater, but the sin within us keeps us from that. We know there’s something good about sacrificial love, but we don’t know where that comes from or how to hold onto it.” Now many times they won’t say what sin is, but if you look at some of the best movies made in the last two decades, their themes are pretty similar: sin hurts and we can’t save ourselves from it. There’s also a lot of good art that’s more “positive,” but even then most of the times it’s pointing to some version of the Christ story.
So there are still, by God’s common grace, good artists making excellent art. But they are hindered in what they can make movies about because if they want to tell the truth without God, they have a very dismal truth to tell.
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Is it just me, or does it seem like the same people who consider any bit of art that doesn’t leave you wanting to slit your wrist as shallow and naive, are the same people who fall totally apart when face with a real personal problem.
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You’re braver than I am, Alisa (and you look adorable in your elf costume, BTW). I surveyed the the movies coming out and thought, “no way. The only one I want to see is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (in part because of World’s review), but I have not been able to get myself in the right frame of mind to see yet another WWII concentration camp film, no matter how charming it’s purported to be.
While I loved Shakespeare in Love (it reminded me of my newlywed days) and doubt I’ll ever see Saving Private Ryan (can’t stand the brutality of war anymore), I agree with Bob about American Beauty. Am I old or just discriminating these days?
Don’t answer that!
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How many of you have watched “To End All Wars”?
Yeah, I know, it’s another WW II prisoner of war movie. It starts out with a bang and is really hard watching. Try it. I liked it.
It is a true story.
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Alisa wrote; “It’s true that the 1930s were the golden age of romantic comedies that are still worth watching, with stars like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
There was none better than Irene Dunne.
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Alisa wrote; “I wonder if we feel less of a need to validate our significance with dark, angsty art when we’re actually facing uncertainty and hardship ourselves.”
I tend to agree. It’s takes an era of incredible blessing, opportunity and luxury to get the kind of cynicism and ingratitude that we see today in the arts. And they often want us to pay for their angst and cynicism.
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I took an 8-year-old boy to what was supposed to be a normal art museum last weekend. I wanted him to see my enthusiasm for great art.
Of course, he liked the death masks, mummies and a painting of Salome with John the Baptist’s head.
But those things were mild compared to a lot of the other ugly & angry trash that gets passed for “art” these days in museums. My young friend showed far more wisdom than any art critic I have ever read in the NY Times when he used the word “creepy” to describe it.
We are living in an age of extreme aesthetic poverty.
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The recently popular Dark Knight is a very good example of what our culture wants. The movie is so dark, that even though it only had a PG-13’s worth of violence, I believe it could have received a R for it’s intensity. The Dark Knight’s sales very clearly show that America is looking to be fed with darkness.
It’s up to Christians to bring light this Christmas season.
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Calls to mind John 3:19.
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”
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JTornado #9,
It’s intriguing that you mention The Dark Knight because while it is certainly one of the darkest superhero movies ever made (almost on the level of the Biblical book of Judges), it is also one of the clearest Christ-stories I’ve seen in cinema lately– especially the end, when the “outcast” who can do no wrong takes the blame for the sins of another character.
We cannot escape the truth of salvation in the stories we tell, because the story of Jesus saving us is the very best story ever.
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While The Dark Knight was certainly dark and rather intense, it ended on a sort of hopeful note when (SPOILER) the two boats refused to kill each other. The villain, who was the very embodiment of all that is bad about chaos, seemed a little confused at this. I don’t think people like the movie because of its darkness, but because of the little bit of light it shines in spite of the darkness.
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I was surprised by the amount of good that was portrayed in the move (i.e. Batman taking the blame for everything, although he was the one who defeated the evil.) My qualm with the movie is how much darkness you had to dig through to see that good. And what bothers me even more is that when I talk to my peers about it, they don’t reference the good parts of the movie, they reference the memorably dark parts of the movie; like: “want to see a magic trick?”.
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I was on one of those movie-reviewing websites that critisizes everything, and I was reading an article about Narnia. The commentater scorned how devoid of love Narnia was, even though it was supposed to be a Christian story. I wanted to send him an email, ask him if anyone’s ever died for him, but then I remembered that someone already had, and it didn’t seem like it made a difference.
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