There’s a problem with modern movies. Well, there are a lot of problems—terrible CGI, a general lack of trust in the audience, an unwillingness to take bold chances. There’s a lot that Hollywood needs to improve. There is, however, one problem that stands out above them all. One problem that makes older movies tower above the modern sensibility: Today’s directors have a fear of earnestness.
You can find this quality of smug, meta–obsessed, deeply not earnest work everywhere in Hollywood today. Basically any superhero movie has it, but especially the current output from Marvel. You can’t go three minutes without hearing a self–effacing joke, and you can sit through entire movies without seeing a single genuine emotional moment.
All this Ryan–Reynolds–inspired, sub–David Leitch work incorporates ironic cinema. I’m talking Bullet Train, Free Guy, every bad John Wick ripoff. They want you to know that they know that what they’re doing is stupid. There’s a certain brand of horror that is like this, too. Movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies, the worst of the Blumhouse output, any of the meta–horror slashers, they’re all guilty of this particular transgression. It’s even infected our prestige movies. Films like Everything Everywhere All at Once want you to know that they’re different from all other Oscar–bait movies. They replace the previous standard for genuine emotion with pompous jokes about genuine emotion.
I like to call this epidemic the rise of post–postmodernism in film. Most of the directors of the films that are mentioned above would tell you that they were inspired by a certain segment of postmodern directors popular in the late ’80s and ’90s: Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Wes Craven, The Wachowskis—the list goes on. This generation of postmodern directors all took inspiration from the films of their youth, generally genre films like gangster, horror, and sci–fi films, and they often comment on and interpolate these influences into something new. On the surface, this isn’t all that different from the epidemic I’m exploring today. The difference, however, is that these new post–postmodernists are another layer removed from the real.
The postmodernists were one degree removed from the original work. For example, Lynch took his love of 50s sitcoms and melodramas and used it to comment on the darkness beneath the American veneer in works like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. There’s one jump from the original to the new. The post–postmodernists, filmmakers like David Leitch and the Daniels, are taking their love of these postmodernist filmmakers and finding ways to further commentate and subvert. They take films that are already a degree removed from the original and go one step further. When you’re that far away from the earnest work, it’s hard for anything to feel real.
It’s impossible to watch the films of the postmodernists and not feel genuine, earnest emotion in their work. Whether it’s Jackie Brown or Mulholland Drive, The Matrix or Dead Man, it’s obvious that the postmodernists are able to retain the emotion and earnestness of the original work in their new interpolation. Earnestness can maybe survive that one degree of separation, but I don’t think you feel that same emotion in the work of Leitch, or Ryan Reynolds, or any of the other examples of the post-postmodernists. By subverting work that is already incredibly subversive, they lose any connection to the emotion that made the work great in the first place.
Despite how dour this situation may seem, there is still hope. The history of film tells us that this swing from earnestness to irony is cyclical. When one becomes the modus operandi for Hollywood, the other becomes cool and countercultural.
This holds up all the way back to the beginning of filmmaking. The first generation of filmmakers were actually earnest. Filmmakers like Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers made films meant to showcase the power cinema could hold, whether it be through spectacle or documentary. The next generation after them made films at the height of the silent film era of the late 1910s and early 20s. This generation included men like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who were subversive. They took the work of the original silent filmmakers, as well as tricks learned during their time doing Vaudeville, and made something new that both commented on what came before while still feeling fresh.
The advent of sound films gave way to a new generation of earnest filmmakers, those who made genre pictures so popular in the 30s and 40s. Filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, John Ford, and many others made countless movies adhering to specific genre conventions (westerns for Ford, melodramas for Capra, etc). These films are, by and large, incredibly earnest. Many of these films are still seen as the pinnacle of their genre, and it’s these films that later generations of subversives riffed on.
After a period of earnestness will inevitably come that subversion. Some of it is present in American films in the 50s—filmmakers like Nicholas Ray stand out in that regard—but you really see this subversion emerge in the French new wave filmmakers of the 60s. Filmmakers like Jean–Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and the rest of that cohort grew up watching the earnest films of the 30s and 40s discussed above. They held up filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and that entire generation of traditionalists as their heroes, and their films were interpolations of their work.
Then the cyclical nature of film history struck again, and after a generation of American subverts inspired by their French counterparts in the 60s (Scorsese, Altman, De Palma, etc.), American filmmaking returned to earnest traditionalism in the 80s. Movies like Romancing the Stone, all the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stalone action films, the height of rom–coms—all these movies wear their heart on their sleeve.
That brings us back to postmodernists, who rebelled against the traditionalism of 80s America. Filmmakers like Tarantino and Lynch dominated the 90s, and then the 2000s came around and with them, a new generation of traditionalists like Michael Bay and Peter Jackson. The 2010s gave us the rise of the post–postmodernists, and now here we are in the 2020s, awaiting a new generation of earnest filmmakers to continue the cycle.
So, there is some hope on the horizon. Filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan, Damien Chazelle, and Barry Jenkins feel closer to the postmodernists of the ’90s while still maintaining an earnestness reminiscent of many of the great historical filmmakers. It would be difficult to mistake any of their films for the overly ironic, emotionally cold films against which they have to compete. The pendulum will eventually swing back, as it always does. I just hope it does soon, because I don’t know how many more smug, annoyingly self–aware jokes I can take.
