Reading Literary Classics, Again

Time and again I have been struck by the difference between people how are supposed to read literary classics, and the far less inspiring way they actually experience them--a combination of unthinking respect for their Authority, and equally unthinking boredom with the actual stuff of them.

As it happens, this is not a new situation at all.

Oscar Wilde summed up the situation almost one and a quarter centuries ago in similar terms, when he remarked that:

In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them.

Certainly where Shakespeare is concerned, it seemed to him "quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays."

Moreover, he took the view that this tendency "does a great deal of harm," the public "mak[ing] use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities."

Some decades after, H.G. Wells observed in The Outline of History that it was "a pity that the ridiculous extravagances of scholastic admirers . . . speak of [Homer's Iliad and Odyssey] as supreme and unapproachable and so forth," for these attitudes had left the general reader's response to these worthwhile works an "awe-stricken neglect."

And so it went with every other writer enjoying a company of "scholastic admirers" prone to "ridiculous extravagances" of this sort, who insured that that part of the public which did read fiction gave their attention to figures like E. Phillips Oppenheim instead. So it still goes, long after Oppenheim himself became obscure, while his heirs advertise their novels on television.

Incidentally, I expect to have more to say on Wells' Outline in upcoming posts.

Selling Theater Tickets in a Post-Netflix Era

The entertainment press is, like the rest of the press, not famous for encouraging a long-term perspective. Slight ups and downs in the mark get trumpeted as indications of endless boom times to come, or the End of Everything, when in the United States, at least, the numbers have remained fairly constant: 4-5 tickets sold per capita, per year, for the past several decades.

Still, that does not rule out the possibility of deeper and more worrying changes for the business, like the apparently decreasing tendency of the younger age cohorts to go to the theater. To go by the statistics routinely offered up on BoxOfficeGuru, for the young moviegoing (rather than mere movie-watching) is less and less a casual activity during a weekend outing, and more and more a deliberate decision--which seems understandable given that they are as a rule more cash-strapped, less mobile and more accustomed to alternatives for accessing content than older cohorts, even as all demographic categories seem to be affected by these trends.1

The result is that while it has always been the case that most movies lose money, leaving the industry dependent on a comparatively small number of big moneymakers, a "regular" movie has even less chance than before. A film simply has to offer something on the big screen that will make buying a ticket rather than waiting and seeing it on the small screen worthwhile. The most obvious way is sheer visual impact--hence, the accent on blockbuster-style spectacle, supplemented with the punch of IMAX and 3-D.

The other is making a film's release feel like an event, something the viewer wants to experience not in two months, but right NOW along with "everyone" else. Of course, there is hype, but it only goes so far when everyone does it, and those charged with generating the hype need something to work with--the very reason for the pressure on would-be filmmakers to produce "high-concept" work. Basing a film on a property which already has a large and interested following is the most obvious strategy--hence the endless sequels, spin-offs and remakes, as well as the tendency for new work to come from adaptations of already popular properties rather than original scripts. (The phenomenon is not limited to tentpoles: Twilight was not an action-packed CGI-fest, but its release was certainly received as an event by fans of the book.2)

Still, there are limits to the "event" strategy. If every movie is an event, then no movie is an event, especially if all the movies out there look alike anyway--a gripe that has become fairly routine, though it may be increasingly plausible. And particular franchises can be worked to diminishing returns in this as in other ways. The Spiderman reboot failed to stir up real excitement back in 2012, and the sequel suffered accordingly this summer, setting the tone for a season full of movies that large parts of the audience felt they could afford to miss.

Nonetheless, for all the disappointments of the past few months, Hollywood, buoyed by all the surcharges and foreign receipts, looks a long way from the kind of crisis that would require it to seriously alter its way of doing business.

1. Their decreased propensity to drive has often been noted; and it should be remembered that this is not a reflection of improved public transport, the reverse likely being the case given post-2008 cuts to public services.
2. It seems, too, that movie running times reflect similar pressures. The 90 minute film seems largely a thing of the past, just about everything seeming to be a two-and-a-half hour epic, intended to make the viewer feel they got something they wouldn't just watching a TV show at home. And of course, when the movie's main offering is spectacle, the longer running time lets it serve up more of this.

The Decline of the R-Rated Action Movie

The dominance of the effects-powered science fiction and fantasy spectacle, and with it, the "summer tentpole," is typically traced back to the mid-1970s, and films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and Richard Donner's Superman (1978), since which time films of the type have typically topped the box office.

Yet, their dominance of the marketplace has never been so complete as it is now. Going back over the lists of releases as recently as the 1980s, one struggled to find a handful of such films in any given year. Now in a typical summer, most weeks see a new release of the type (or even two), while a good many other such films are sprinkled around the rest of the calendar, giving the impression that it's summer all year long.

In the process they have crowded out other types of films, among them other styles of action film which had managed to flourish even in the post-Star Wars age, like the paramilitary action movie, and with it, the R-rated action movie in general (in contrast with the typically PG/PG-13-rated Spielberg-Lucas-superhero spectacles).1 During the '80s, and even much of the '90s, various Schwarzenegger and Stallone vehicles (like 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1993's Cliffhanger, and 1994's True Lies), the first three films of both the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises (1987-1995), and assorted Die Hard imitators (1994's Speed, 1996's The Rock, 1997's Air Force One), as well as a slew of science fiction films made in similar style (like 1986's Aliens, 1990's Total Recall and 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day), were all among their year's top ten hits.2

The annual top twenty during these years also included such hits as 1982's First Blood, 1986's Cobra, 1987's Predator and Robocop, 1988's Rambo III, 1989's Tango & Cash, 1992's Under Siege and Patriot Games, 1993's Demolition Man, 1994's The Specialist, 1996's Broken Arrow and Eraser, 1997's Con Air and 1998's Lethal Weapon 4. Two other Schwarzenegger films widely seen as prime examples of the '80s action movie, 1984's Terminator and 1985's Commando, also came very close (making the twenty-first and twenty-fifth spots in their years, respectively).

The preponderance of these kinds of films would seem even more overwhelming if one also counted in related films like Eddie Murphy's '80s-era action-comedies (1982's 48 Hrs., and the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies in 1984 and 1987, all of which were top ten hits, with the original BHC the top earner of '84), or the period cop film The Untouchables (the sixth highest grosser of 1987).2

In fact, it could be argued that where the action genre was concerned, they were predominant, big-screen action almost synonymous with the words "People under 17 years may only be admitted if accompanied by a parent or guardian." Still, even before the end of the '80s the relationship shifted into reverse, as the shoot 'em ups characteristic of the decade became creatively exhausted and decreasingly relevant, while improving CGI and the superhero boom boosted the science fiction and fantasy epics. In succeeding years the blazing machine guns gave way to wire work and computer-based superheroic feats, and the mayhem became at once larger in scale and edited in quicker-cutting fashion, leaving less opportunity or reason to linger on gory details, while the subject matter (so often drawn from the pages of DC and Marvel) made a lighter tone appear more appropriate. The result was action that was at once more spectacular and nearly antiseptic.3 Meanwhile, film in general, the action movie included, became prone to downplay that other major reason to exclude the under-17 crowd, sexuality (such that one writer recently remarked the sexless lives of superheroes). Under such circumstances, the shift away from the "rougher stuff" was natural enough, and encouraged by the risk attendant on swelling budgets.

In hindsight, The Matrix (1999) seems particularly representative of the transition, in its blend of withering machine gun fire and superheroics (Neo even flies), and its launch of the last R-rated action franchise to meet with really massive commercial success. After its debut fifteen years ago, new R-rated action movies tended simply to continue older franchises (like Bad Boys and Terminator in 2003, Rambo in 2008), often sold on nostalgia even when that was not the case (like 2010's The Expendables), and tended to be comparatively marginal within the marketplace.4 The highest-grossing such film last year, Olympus Has Fallen, fell short of the $100 million mark to wind up only the thirty-sixth highest-earning film of its year--a long way down from the prominence of comparable movies a quarter of a century ago. Unsurprisingly, even traditionally R-rated franchises have tended to sanitize their content in pursuit of a more lucrative PG-13 rating (as Alien, Die Hard and Terminator did in the 2000s, as has been the case with the Total Recall and Robocop remakes, and now even the third installment of The Expendables).5

In short, like the sex and nudity once a regular feature of such movies, bloody violence, when not presented as part of Serious Drama (like the based-on-a-true-story terrorism-themed films in which Navy SEALs are now apt to make appearances), tends to be left to lower-budgeted fare, and one supposes, to premium cable drama like Game of Thrones, which along with the rest of the post-'90s explosion of means for accessing entertainment, saves fans a trip to the theater.

1. One might include under the heading of Spielberg-space-superheroes such things as the Star Trek franchise (first-class hits through the fourth film) and the succession of Indiana Jones imitations seen during the decade (the biggest success among which was 1984's Romancing the Stone).
2. Indeed, four of the top twenty movies of 1987 were police-centered action movies (The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon) or action-comedies (Beverly Hills Cop II, Stakeout)--even without including the science fiction film Robocop, which also made the year's top twenty.
3. Excepting the Blade franchise (1998, 2002, 2004), launched in a time when comic book movies were often lower-budgeted and less commercially ambitious, R-rated superhero movies have tended to perform modestly at best. The most successful of these, 2008's Wanted, is only #34 on BoxOfficeMojo's list of superhero films.
4. One area that has been something of an exception is the battle-heavy historical epic, the R-rated Gladiator (the #4 hit of 2000), Troy (#13 in 2004) and 300 (#10 in 2007) all doing good business, but this remains a small and fickle part of the market, especially in the United States. Another, more modest area of success is action-horror, the Resident Evil (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012) and Underworld (2003, 2006, 2009, 2012) films getting by on smaller budgets and lower grosses.