New genre in Hollywood town: vintage movies
The glossy representation of old American consumerism.
Talk about decline... As even dive bar psychology teaches us, the more you keep denying something the more it is in your mind, the more it is true. A man walks into a psychiatrist's office and tells his shrink, "Hey, doc, it’s been weeks now that I dream about this woman, that we have sex and stuff, ya know. Now, I can’t see her face in the dream, doc, but I know she’s not my mother! I swear it’s not my motha!” Now, of course it is his mother. So seems the constant denial of decline in Donald Trump's rhetoric. So also in Hollywood, constantly preaching on the virtues of progressivism, which necessarily looks forward to the hopes of a brighter future, and yet cannot help but to wallow in the mud of its own nostalgia for a past it severely criticizes.
Most of the great American directors in activity during the past twenty years or so cannot stand to look to the contemporary world. They’re entirely blind it. What emerges is a trend of expensive period pieces focused on some sort of nostalgia (even if critical) for the American civilization, all but gone. They do not seem able to shoot one damn picture set in today’s world. A list to prove this obsessive trend: The Irishman, Licorice Pizza, Inherent Vice, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, Inglorious Basterds, Hail, Caesar!, Inside Llewyn Davis, A Serious Man, Bridge of Spies, The Fabelmans, Carol, Ford vs. Ferrari, The Tender Bar, Air, Mank, Armageddon Time, Asteroid City, Green Book, Fences, Joker, No Sudden Move, etc. If one includes the uncountable biopics of musicians (Walk the Line, A Complete Unknown, Ray, Elvis, Bohemian Rhapsody, I Saw the Light, Rocket Man, etc), historical dramas (The Trial of the Chicago 7, Selma), as well as clear pastiches of film noir (Marlowe) and westerns (Horizon: An American Saga) it amounts to an alarmingly large part of the films produced in Hollywood in the past twenty years. Why are these people spending so much money to produce period pieces?
That mediocre directors like James Mangold specialize in vintage movies represent no significant loss to the art form: but when the likes of the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, or even Steven Spielberg, seem no longer capable of making a film about this day and age–– something’s amiss. Of these, arguably the most renowned American directors, none of them has ever made a film set in a post-iPhone world. In fact, the last time any of these attempted a take on the contemporary world was in the distant year of 2007, when the Coen Brothers shot Burn After Reading. Scorsese risked contemporary life last time in 2005 with The Departed. The Wolf of Wall Street feels contemporary, and perhaps ever will, given the dynamics of capitalism, but it was set in the 80s. What is going on here?
They just can’t afford to have a look on the world right in front of them. They have to look back to some sort of glorious age, which alone can give inspiration. The obsessive, multi-million dollar recreation of an era provides for a reactionary aesthetics. Films become mere products of a special type of consumption: American nostalgia. Like buying a record player, a hot-rod, a typewriter, etc. Any memorabilia from the past: in this case, the American past. Pawn Stars on the big screen, with insufferable pretention.
Let’s take Quentin Tarantino for instance, the king of vintage movies. He has not done a single contemporary film since Kill Bill, or, if one counts that one out as a genre pastiche, which it is, he hasn’t pointed his camera to the “real” world since Jackie Brown. He’s just not interested in this, our world, going to the point of obsessively recreating with extreme minutiae in Once Upon a Time… (always in film, never in digital, which he refuses to accept) the late 60s Los Angeles of his childhood: the very same songs, the very same colors, cars, radio DJs, TV sets and visuals. Nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia. And utterly uninteresting, except, maybe, if you’re an old American uncle who can’t get over the “good ol’ days”, or if you’re stuck with an adolescent sense of humor. His whole career, up from a brilliant start with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, all crime stories set in contemporary Los Angeles, degenerated into a series of pastiches, childhood manias and reactionary cinematic efforts. He’s like a manchild buying the dreams of childhood: instead of his favorite action figures, he’s got a film set and one-hundred million dollars. The result? The world’s most expensive store of vintage goods.
Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Be sure to notice it: the car and the clothes is what matters.
The Coen brothers, more refined in their film craft, unfortunately embarked in this tiresome fashion a long time ago: perhaps the inadvertently inaugurated it (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There). They achieved the peak of their art with contemporary stories – Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading – and yet gave up on our world in order to revisit their beloved periods in American history: the sixties, the fifties, the thirties, the Old West. Why couldn’t A Serious Man be set in 2009, the year of its production? Why force one’s way into the past, like a gourmet of Americana? Usually that’s how one spots a vintage movie: it has no reason whatsoever to be set in the past. (Take Todd Phillips’ Joker and how absolutely unnecessary it was to recreate 1970s New York.)
As for Spielberg… Always alert to the movements of the industry, few of his films are not set in the past. In fact, aside from fantasy films or science fiction, only Jaws and The Terminal are contemporary stories – and excellent ones at that. One can safely say these are his finest cinematic achievements. His last pictures, however, especially The Fabelmans, indulge in juvenile homesickness, unbearable to the viewer. One more broken family in a Spielberg film and it’s death from fatigue… The coming-of-age story is a favorite of the vintage movies and Spielberg can’t get over them. This man is almost 80 years old and still haunted by puberty.
Mr. Scorsese, a superior talent, is more difficult to box in as a vintage movie director. He’s been there, to be sure, in that childhood antique shop of American nostalgia: The Aviator, The Irishman, Shutter Island. Only his yearning for the past is more sophisticated. First, it’s not US-bound: Hugo, for instance, at least has the courage to cross the Atlantic for a change. Second, the key-periods in American history chosen by Mr. Scorsese are simply more interesting, for they aren’t so clichéd nor overused by pop culture. He goes, for instance, to 1920s Oklahoma in Killers of the Flower Moon, which makes it short of a western and yet not quite into the 20th century. Third, Scorsese remains a moralist, that is, an examiner of motivations and their psychology, as in Killers…, diving deep into circumstances of moral hell from the perspective of devils. Killers… is not a tasting of Old America (the songs, the cars, the clothes, etc, like The Irishman, for instance). But at the very end, purposelessly, Scorsese succumbs to this temptation: he himself delivers an afterword on the events depicted in the film in the form of an old radio drama!
The completely unnecessary old timey radio show in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Why do this? Why did he think necessary to recreate, just as it was, with a silly perfectionist approach, an old radio drama? This is akin to Tarantino’s exact recreation of a 1960s western TV show in Once Upon a Time…. What’s the cinematic gain from it? It might be fun, just like a record collection is fun; or having an old jukebox in the living room, or a 1958 Cadillac–– it’s fun, indeed, but is it art?, asks the devil. Well, the devil is often right when it comes to aesthetics.
Killers… is not a vintage movie, that is, it does not rely on the nostalgic reconstruction of a period in American history, savoring each scene with the zeal of an antiques collector, nor is it a pastiche of an old style in filmmaking (e.g. noir, western). But its final scene is as vintage as it gets. The reason? The necessity of it, or: lack thereof. Again, usually in vintage movies, there’s absolutely no necessity for that story to be set in the past.
This is not to say that any period piece or historical epic is a vintage movie, then. It’s certainly not the case. The classic Western was not vintage – they were not self-conscious enough in their realism, innocent of nostalgia. A vintage movie is usually a nostalgic trip, obsessed with everything American, or: everything Americans could buy and have with very few dollars. A vintage movie, much like its peers in the vintage market – records, cars, home appliances, electronics and so on – is a type of commodity: Americana. More precisely: it’s a huge fair of Americana, where all the great things Americans used to have are displayed, used, abused and, ultimately, worshipped. They treat American history as a civilization of the commodity. It’s above all a nostalgia for a standard of living, when a few dollars could buy great stuff: radio, television, refrigerators, cars, records, clothes, Super 8 cameras, etc. All of which lasted a lifetime, before the days of planned obsolescence. Most of which were made in America, and usually very expensive for non-Americans to buy. Therefore it’s also a nostalgia for a kind of American exceptionalism. But above all, vintage movies yearn for all things American, that is, all that Americans could buy. It’s not political nostalgia: racism and the other ugly facets of American history are usually lamented in these pics, though never enough to condemn the whole era. “Those were glorious days to buy and do things with the US Dollar, but surely not everything is a picnic…”, vintage movies say. They brush it off, conveniently. It is an irony, then, that Hollywood town, in all its overt despise for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, actually shares the same Made-in-America nostalgia. In fact, a lot of Trump voters probably grew up around this sort of American-type obsession with the great things their dollars could once buy. An obsession espoused by the so-called culture industry, especially in films, nourishing in the minds of increasingly impoverished Americans the idea that this was once a great country for one to have lots of fun–– and with just a few bucks. They grew up in a country where it’s common place to hear that “back in the day” not only things were cheaper, but they lasted longer as well, whereas now everything’s trash…
Well, Hollywood, through its finest directors, has been delivering, inadvertently, that very message for decades. (What was the first vintage movie? Perhaps George Lucas’ American Graffiti or even Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. However, in the 70s this was not a trend, and most of the great films were nostalgia-free, contemporary stories. In the 1980s an obsession with the 50s started, but remained a comedy niche, and the 1990s were not prone to look back in all its optimism. With the new century the vintage trend slowly built up until this day and age, when vintage also means… corny.)
Of course, that kind of nostalgia is not the only ground for this Hollywood mania. There’s a general artistic incapability of American directors, and their audiences, to face the contemporary world and have something to say about it, that is, something that is not a liberal cliché. It’s safer as well: venturing into today’s intricate realities can bring a wave of polemics which are just not worth it for a career. Better play it safe and take some advantage from historical distance. There’s also, as always, the influence of money: once directors succeed in the trade, they get access to ever bigger budgets and become indulgent. Why can’t Mr. Scorsese do a small picture anymore, like, say, After Hours or Mean Streets? The same goes for Tarantino: why not go back to his beloved Los Angeles, only in the 2020s? ––– That’s how it is with nostalgic old men: they can’t get enough of old stories, the “back-in-the-day” attitude. American directors have become addicted to the indulgence of looking backwards. And thus turned films into a pretentious, and lucrative, business: vintage shops.
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Three honorable exceptions ought to be made: Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and David Lynch.
Woody Allen is an odd case. At the one hand, some of his films are perfect examples of vintage: Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and, more recently, Café Society and Wonder Wheel. However, he’s also the one director which tackled this nostalgic impulse directly: Midnight in Paris is precisely about this mania of looking back to a “golden age”. And he deliberately makes the decision to stay in the present. Blue Jasmine and Coup de chance are some of his recent films which dare to face our day and make it. Mr. Allen is not afraid of the 21st century.
Clint Eastwood, a conservative, knows better than to look back. He clearly dislikes what he sees today – and yet finds all the more reasons to keep looking at it. An old-timer like him, a living legend on and behind the screen, he’d find no difficulties in getting a budget to reconstruct, say, the good ol’ fifties. And yet he refrains from it and has an eye – quite a keen eye – on contemporary life and all its ups and downs. Though he did venture in vintage moviemaking (The Jersey Boys), he usually prefers this day and age (The Mule, Juror #2, Gran Torino): a fresh breath of air from an octogenarian–– the state of Hollywood…
Finally, the late great David Lynch. He had all the dramatic reasons to indulge in a trip down memory lane: his films, at least since Blue Velvet, were always concerned with, in the words of Pauline Kael, “an indefinite mythic present that feels like the past”. But Lynch knows better as well. He goes deeper into American nostalgia and its dark side: his films feel like the past, but are not, can never be–– he’s aware of its inexistence, of its phantasmagorical aspect. The past in his films is present and dream-like, and therefore nightmarish as well. In Twin Peaks: The Return, if someone expected a vintage season, a return to old Twin Peaks, with the same soapish structure, the same 90s network TV innocence, the golden hues and the diners––– boy, did he get it backwards… Lynch seems, in fact, to be purposefully attacking that nostalgic fashion: everything in the third season of Twin Peaks is disturbingly contemporary. The style, the photography, the digital techniques, the locations.
In the final scene, Lynch takes us back, alongside agent Cooper and an aged Laura Palmer, to the very same street, the same house, the Palmer residence, where most of the original series took place. Lynch shoots it in such austere manner, dark night with natural lighting, that it feels like a documentary of sorts: as if a tourist would go to that house today and make a video of it because he knows they shot Twin Peaks there. Cooper knocks on the door and is surprised to have a woman he’s never seen before answer it and tell him nobody in there ever heard of the Palmers. That woman, in fact, is not an actress, but the actual woman who lives in that house today. In trying to go back to the past, to the old Twin Peaks where everything happened, Cooper is astounded to find out he cannot do it. He’s like us now, the audience, he can’t access that Twin Peaks world anymore. “What year is this?” is his, and the show’s, final line. The answer is obvious: this is 2017 (the year that season was finished), this is our contemporary world, and you won’t find that beautiful early 90s Twin Peaks here. Soon afterwards, Laura Palmer screams in horror and the show ends abruptly in a nightmare. The past is a dream. If one goes back to it, like returning to Twin Peaks, one discovers it; and that is a nightmare.
Unfortunately for Hollywood, and cinema, most celebrated American filmmakers don’t seem able to keep their eyes open, like Lynch, while they fantasize over the past. In their blindness, they’ve turned American films into an extension of vintage consumption.
The brilliant finale of Twin Peaks: you can’t go back.
