“I’m so excited!”
—Nobody, upon the release of Severance season 2—
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There’s a fallacy currently running through “storytelling culture”—both in cinema and in literature, but here I’ll focus on cinema—that says simple stories can’t have depth because they’re simple. That is, in order for a story to be deep and profound and to have “permanency” in a media landscape constantly churning out new content, the plot has to be non-linear, it has to go in a lot of different directions/have a lot of subplots, it needs to be “subtle” in its philosophical verdicts, and/or have an anti-climactic or inconclusive ending. “This is storytelling for smart people, see,” begins the tone dripping with condescension, “And if you fail to appreciate it as such, well, you just don’t get it and maybe you should content yourself with watching mindless corporate franchise films with explosions and tits.”
This might sound like a strawman at first glance, until you go to online forums about entertainment media and see that this is what the discourse actually is like in our highly polarized time.
And the result, predictably, are an increasing amount of movies and shows being produced that are convoluted and intellectually pretentious; consumed by a small number of people actually enthusiastic about them and an even larger number of people pretending to be (for fear of being labeled simple-minded neanderthals if they don’t).
I’m reminded of that King Of The Hill episode where Bobby enrolls in his high school talent show and attempts “high brow comedy” (at the behest of his pompous theater teacher), only to need Hank to rescue him in the end from a booing crowd.
One takeaway from this recent trend of movies and shows being winding roads-to-nowhere, is that studios have a lot of money. Metric tons of it. Yankee Stadiums full of Benjamins, Empire State Buildings full of Jacksons, Titanics full of Hamiltons, icebergs full of Lincolns. Lots and lots and lots of reserve cheddar. How else could these types of films keep getting greenlit that a majority of the general public have no real taste for? How else could corporations centered around entertainment stay afloat after making flop after flop? Whole third world countries should sit at the feet of Hollywood executives for a masterclass on how to hoard vast resources in times of famine, because—according to Bloomberg and Film Take—studios are doing just fine after losing 60% of their net income over the past twelve years and watching ticket sales at theaters plummet 38% over the last decade; seemingly unable to consistently produce the type of original storytelling that frees audiences from franchise/sequel fatigue while also not being tedious, obscure, and “artsy”.
We can diagnose why this problem persists to death:
“It’s hard to craft stories that have clear moral or philosophical themes in a nihilistic age where everything is subjective and meaningless.”
“Movie quality is falling by the wayside due to streaming. Production can’t keep up with consumer demand, so the whole process gets rushed.”
“It’s too challenging to accurately gauge public interest in original stories that the public themselves have never seen before. So studios are forced to rely on screenwriters who are typically upperclass, college-educated, Los Angeles/New York leftwingers who have a fetish for all things academic.”
We can also recommend various fixes till the cows come home:
“Revive a culture of faith and meaning that produces art in a similar vein.”
“Streaming services could intentionally slow their output and reduce the volume of content on their platforms, so that subscribers savor fewer well thought-out stories longer and can actually anticipate new releases.”
“Competing movie concepts could be crowdfunded once the studios find a way to pitch them to the general public.”
But a simple place to start would be for studio executives, directors, and screenwriters to revisit the basic building blocks of a story. To have a story, you have to have a clear coherent plot. An A to B to C. Not just an A and no B, not just a B with no A and C, and not A to C to B then back to A before throwing Z in as a “quirky” twist, but a nice linear plot where one thing connects to another thing and eventually the connected things make a nice lovely whole. You don’t have that, you don’t have a story. You don’t have that, you have garbage. It’s not “intellectual”, it’s not “sophisticated”, it’s just a mess.
Moreover, what needs to be understood is that a common symptom of overly complex plots are simplistic and/or boring characters (e.g. Tenet, Black Swan, A Most Wanted Man). By contrast, simple plots give characters the space to evolve into just the right amount of complexity, because they’re not having to contend with the hurdles of pretentious and bloated story arcs (e.g. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Castaway, Mr. Brooks). Very few entertaining movies/shows are able to strike a balance of having both very complex plots and equally complex characters, though they do exist (e.g. The Prestige, Basic Instinct, The Americans series). I would also add that there are plenty of movies that have simple plots and simple characters that still turn out to be great and unforgettable (e.g. Hidalgo, Field Of Dreams, Secondhand Lions). And why wouldn’t that be true? Simple is not the enemy. It never was.
This leads me to a recently-invented genre description that’s not really a genre description, but an excuse disguised as a genre description: the “slow burn”. All “slow burn” means is that the story meanders. That’s all “slow burn” is a euphemism for. A story that has too much filler and is not boiled down to its essential elements. It revels in wasting the audience’s time and expects the audience to thank it for the privilege.
Slow burn has especially left its black mark on horror movies in the last eleven-ish years; though, wise to the fact that horror audiences like horror because of the expected shocks at the end of suspenseful scenes—i.e. the opposite of slow burn—creators of slow burn horror have learned to rebrand their productions with the more sexed-up monicker “cerebral”. But in their effort to spin, these rebranders have actually come closer to the truth of what “slow burn” has been about all along: cerebral—defined as “relating to the brain or the intellect”—says the not-so-quiet part even louder by overtly labeling its films FOR INTELLECTUALS (and thus, by extension, any movie or show that exists outside its pace and style is not worthy of being valued). The elitist attitude wafts like a fart through our screens: “Dumb hicks might startle at the Exorcist girl spinning her head all the way around, but we cerebral horror watchers require our ‘scares’ to be more subliminal. Cerebral horror is storytelling for smart people, see.”
Ironically, though the directors and screenwriters revel in the idea that their “cerebral” films are as insightful and revolutionary as they are annoyingly broody, cerebral horror is so bog standard that I can actually spoil the endings of every single one of them right now. You ready? Here’s the big Ooooh! Ahhhh! that the makers want viewers to absorb: “wHaT iF tHe DaRkNeSs IsN’t ‘OuT tHeRe’ BuT eXiStS In ThE rEcEsSeS oF oUr SuBcOnCiOuS?” There. You never have to watch one. I just saved you hours and hours of agony.
Meanwhile, horror films during this same eleven-year period that have remained true to the purpose of the horror genre by creating dread in the pits of our stomachs, scaring the breath out of us, or—if neither of those—at least supplying us with plenty of gore, have been mercilessly berated by the Cerebral Crowd as “trashy”, “unimaginative”, “idiotic and produced by idiotic culture”, “facile”, and “forgettable”. Swap one word from the King Of The Hill clip I pasted a few seconds ago, and you get exactly the same attitude as Bobby’s theater coach toward horror audiences: “Their fright is ill-informed! Ill-informed!”
In Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, the dazzling (and dangerous) Bennet sisters vie for the affection of dashing (and dangerous) English gentlemen, while undead rapscallions are slain by samurai swords and annoying children get eaten; whereas in The Babadook (a film about “how grief is the real monster”, kill me now) there is no such action or romantic tension, and not only do annoying children not get eaten, but one eats away at our patience throughout the entire story.
Black Phone tells the tale of a serial killer who kidnaps pubescent boys in 1970s Denver, while Men rivets us with the story of a vacationing woman who feels like she could be harmed by something—nightmares? ghosts? birds?—until at last the identity of the amorphous threat is revealed at the very end (spoiler: it’s MEN! So brave. So subversive. #MeToo) Granted, Black Phone didn’t shove “themes of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and dynamics of power” down our throats like a funnel in the mouth of a terrorist at Guantanamo, but the bad guy does get strangled in the end with a phone cord by the last boy he kidnaps, and isn’t that entertaining? I think that’s entertaining.
The Babysitter and The Babysitter 2 likewise didn’t “explore concepts of trauma, toxic relationships, and fear of ‘the other’” like Midsommar was praised for doing (the scariest thing in that movie being Florence Pugh’s lips); but unlike Midsommar, Babysitter and Babysitter 2 were fun to watch and didn’t make us want to jump off a cliff.
Last Voyage Of The Demeter, a Dracula adaptation, was bloodcurdling, animalistic, action-packed, and effortlessly transported audiences to the gothic era it was set in; it was everything The Witch (sponsored by Etsy) tried so desperately to be without committing the “cerebral sin” of being it. Sabotaged by its own self-seriousness, The Witch initially teases viewers with foreboding satanic imagery and ominous musical scores, only to retreat to the familiar slow burn pitfalls of overreliance on cinematography, symbolism, and alluding-over-showing to compensate for a disjointed story that moves at glacial pace.
The same slow burn affliction appears to have spread to historical drama over the same time frame as its spread to horror. Period pieces with all-star casts are released year-after-year that are about… that are about… nothing. Or at least nothing intelligible. Are they movies or are they just long-form advertisements for expensive cologne? These retro aesthetic cash grabs put all the attention on costumes, set design, and witty banter, trying too hard to be Baz Luhrmann while giving absolutely zero attention to stories a director like Baz Luhrmann would be interested in filming; the ethos seeming to be “Less substance, more ambiance.”
You can have films with great retro costume and set design that don’t skimp on plot (e.g. The Nice Guys, Murder On The Orient Express, The Terror season 1), but no. No no. For some inexplicable reason, that’s not storytelling for smart people.
At the risk of stretching speculation in this essay beyond its immediate subject, I gotta say that I suspect the small minority of genuine fans of these movies are people who, in their own lives, insist on having problems without solutions. I think we all know at least one of these. A person who neurotically clings to ambiguity and doesn’t like straightforwardness. It’s not that contentment is beyond their grasp, it’s that if they ever by accident took hold of contentment they would chuck it away like a hot potato. Their career aspirations are “complicated”. Their relationship status is “complicated”. Their friendships are “complicated”. So they like movies that are “complicated”. They live to be “complicated”, though ironically their “complexity” is never very deep. Rather the contrived “complexity” of their lives and tastes serves to mask an inner emptiness and perhaps—even—dimwittedness.
But regardless of whether I’m right or wrong in speculating this, it’s at least clear that the vast majority of the American public are hungry for stories that—yes—are original, but not for stories where “original” is the only thing going for them. They have to be exciting, they have to make sense, and it would be a good idea if they were stories that resonated with who rural and mid-city Americans are morally and philosophically (rather than antagonize or preach something contrary in order to appease the coastals). We can look at shows like Yellowstone, True Detective, Stranger Things, Westworld, Longmire, Yellowjackets, and The Old Man and see that really good storytellers 1) understand an audience’s need to “turn off” in order to become immersed in the perspective of the characters, rather than mentally strain to figure out what the hell is going on, and 2) understand the perversity and pointlessness of “defying genre” - be it a monsterless horror, a kissless romance, a deathless action, or a mystery without revelation.
No doubt it will take some time for studios, directors, and screenwriters to completely catch up to the public; and it’s important to remember that we’ve actually been through this type of period before. The 1960s and 70s were chock full of “messagy”, melancholic, pseudo-profound stink bombs before the 80s, 90s, and 2000s kicked that shit to the curb and delivered some of the best action, drama, comedy, and fantasy of all time. Ultimately I’m optimistic about the future of American cinema and television… even if waiting for it feels like a slow burn.
