Ouroboros Culture Wars #1 - "You’re living in the past, man!”

“Has Hollywood Run Out of Ideas?” 

That's the only entertainment headline more clichéd than “Saturday Night Dead” or “Celebrity Junkie Found Dead.” But these days, it seems truer than ever. Forget the blockbuster borefests, the recycled rehashes of sequel-prequel-requel garbage shoveled into summer multiplexes for the lobotomized teens. Let’s just focus on ‘good’ movies (and I use that term very loosely).

Aren’t there good present-day stories to tell? Have we really run out of new ideas? Some would say that there haven’t been new story ideas since Shakespeare. And those people are English professors…and retarded. Sure, they’re all basic variations on ‘stranger comes to town’ or ‘family goes on vacation’ or ‘strange teen with amazing abilities’ or ‘two people so much in love but the whole world is against them’ but…there’s always a new or extra twist you can put on it. If you care enough to try.

The movies are an escape. Into a new world we’ve never seen before…or a world which no longer exists. The alternate future or the forgotten past. Choose your destiny.

Out of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture, only Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is set entirely in the present day. The Artist (1927-1932), Moneyball (2002-2003), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2001-2003), The Help (early 1960s), Hugo (1931 with flashbacks to early 20^th century), Tree of Life (present day with flashbacks set in the 1950s), War Horse (1914, 1918, set during WWI), and Midnight in Paris (present day with flashbacks set in the 1920s and 1890s), either have sequences or are entirely based in the past.

Even Superhero movies like Captain America and X-Men: First Class were all period films. Cowboys & Aliens had an Old West setting, Transformers 3 threw in a moon landing opening bit, and both POTC: On Stranger Tides and The Three Musketeers both rode on the coattails of that one good pirate movie all those years ago. Was it just the fun of rewriting history to make American audiences just a little bit dumber…or was it part of this ‘everything-old-is-new-again’ kick? What is it with this nostalgic kick that everyone seems to be on? A Mad Men hangover? That would explain the Pan Am and Playboy Club fiascos…but not this. Do audiences really want to escape into the past? Do they care? I mean, for the filmmakers and performers, I get it. It's enjoyable for the actors to play dress-up with wigs and costumes and accents...and I’m sure it’s plenty of fun for the hair and makeup and props people and set decorators and set designers and directors to lovingly and meticulously recreate a time period but…c’mon.

There are plenty of great modern-day-set stories out there. To quote Christopher Walken in Joe Dirt, “The past is past, the future’s now!” Words to live by.

Normally, I'd blame the meticulous tediousness of the big-budget biopics but they're merely a symptom, not the disease itself. In 2011, we also had The Iron Lady and A Dangerous Method. J. Edgar was a period piece too (although you’d barely know it, since Clint Eastwood shot everything in murky shadows so the whole movie looks like the print was accidentally dropped in octopus ink – seriously, it makes Gordon Willis cinematography look like Disney sitcom lighting). They were well-researched and competently-made but mostly uninvolving and kinda boring. But hey, that's what the Academy loves, right? Slow and historical wins the Oscar race...

Which is why for 2012, we get more hairdo-costume-accent-gasms with the release of The Master (P.T. Anderson's thinly-veiled L. Ron Hubbard biopic), Hysteria (the Brits love their Victorian-era-set films, especially if they're Jane Austen adaptations), Lincoln (Spielberg's long-gestating project about the second-most-famous assassinated US president), Django Unchained (Tarantino's escape-slave-revenge-love-story that uses the word 'nigger' more than all his other films combined), and the adaptation of my most hated of all forced-reading books, The Great Gatsby (it can't be any worse than the last adaptation starring Robert Redford with a botched Coppola script), and On the Road (a belated adaptation of a beatnik 'trapped-in-amber classic' that Coppola's been trying to get made for over 30+ years). And of course, the 'Why even bother?' trifecta of yet another whack at the scratching post for Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, and Great Expectations.

Oy.

Ouroboros, for those of you who don't know, is a serpent or a dragon which eats its own tail, satisfied in perpetuity by the consumption of itself. It's synonymous with the symbol for infinity (∞) and that's the problem here; it feels like we're stagnating. Woody Allen pulls out an idea he had in the 1970's, does a quick rewrite, 'good enough,' shoots it. Martin Scorcese makes a movie where the most interesting parts are the old footage of films shot 100 years ago. Whether it's segregation or baseball economics or the invention of Facebook or the stuttering saga of King Louis VI or 9/11 (over and over and over), it usually has all the impact of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week...only released in theaters and nominated for awards.

"Hey! Remember that? That shit that just happened! Remember? Well here it is again! Enjoy!"

We're an ouroboros culture. We just want to feast on what's familiar, cannibalizing the past for our own entertainment (we're never surprised by how good we taste because we expected as much). We want to eat something when we're young, have children, and then see that same thing again regurgitated into our children's open waiting mouths (like a robin redbreast caught in a time warp - only with bad movies posing as comfort food). We want to hear others mocking the same shit we just consumed (literally, if the success of Human Centipede series is to be believed). But mostly...we just want more of the same old same.