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If you have teenagers, enjoy your freedom for a few hours while they flock to The Twilight Saga: New Moon. And if you’re concerned that your children should pursue more serious endeavors, then you aren’t visiting enough multiplexes. You see, nothing is more serious than contemporary blockbusters.
Indeed, Lady Gaga is not the only poker-faced entertainment in your teen’s lives. Popcorn is served with heaping doses of sincerity now. And it is not only palatable to the blockbuster-mentality crowd. Critics and, even Oscar are eating it up. So, if I may quote a decidedly non-comic supervillain named Joker, “Why so serious?”
Backing up we can perhaps trace the trend to comic books. I’m not well-versed in comics, but series like The Dark Knight and Watchmen, both now successfully (and morosely) adapted to the big screen, brought bleak storylines and no-nonsense (ok, there was tons of nonsense, but not the fun kind) storytelling. The face of the medium changed. “Dark” became critical codeword for “of greater value,” and film critics have followed suit. When reviews hailed Christopher Nolan’s film version of The Dark Knight as the darkest comic book adaptation ever made, it was assumed you understood that meant the best. How could corn like 1979’s Superman even compare?
Comic-inspired films seemed to kick off the trend in the movies, a medium that is rarely first out of the gate. While Tim Burton’s Batman hinted at what was to come with its conflicted hero and goth-black production design, there was still some fun to be had with a goofy Joker and Prince songs like “Party Man.” The first true trailblazers of the fun-sapped popcorn movies to me are the first two M. Night Shyamalan successes, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. The latter, especially. Steeped in comic book lore, Unbreakable is a somber-toned thriller with a loser super-hero introduced to us, not as a larger than life figure, but as a flawed man. To defend M. Night Shyamalan at this point is a little like defending George W. Bush in my circles, but I truly believe that these films literally set the tone.
As these films ushered in a new era, we bid adieu to the sea of irony that mass-market commercial art had been drowning in. Did anyone keep a running count of how many times one of Charlie’s Angels winked at us, literally, over the course of two features? And Joel Schumacher became irony’s fall guy for crossing the line between inserting-fun-into and poking-fun-at the beloved Batman series; die-hards are still livid.
In the wake of these works, Hobbits got Oscars, James Bond had to match Matthew Bourne’s grit, vampire teens got sullen and Judd Apatow even made lowbrow comedy serious. Most recently, Where The Wild Things Are emerged from a 30-page children’s book about rowdy monsters as a psychological study.
Got on the topic of Ben Stiller with a friend recently, and I thought about how Stiller’s ironic comedic style is out of sync with this recent development. I then actually craved some of that irony (such a component of Stiller’s work that its very definition is discussed in his first feature, Reality Bites) if only to lighten the atmosphere. It was then I thought about putting this post together and how I would complain about the seriousness of the current cinema. And while I have grown weary of the somber cinema and will never understand how the moviegoing public and critical wing can take some of these works seriously, I’m realizing now that I have been party to this movement as well and enjoyed a lot of the films that have kept our faces straight. So don’t be surprised if that’s me knocking over your teen on my mad dash to New Moon.
Louise Crawford
