Anyone who ventures near a movie multiplex this holiday season will encounter abundant evidence of Hollywood’s infection by an epidemic of epics. This proliferation of lavish, distant adventures corresponds to the de-emphasis on topical movies about immediate issues in the real world.
Getting Away From It All
The entertainment industry invites the public to escape from stress and confusion into a remote universe of definitive conflict and moral certainty, rather than challenging moviegoers with references to the war on Islamist terror and other great battles of our time.
This observation implies no disrespect or ingratitude for recent products of Hollywood's energetic, imaginative escapism. In addition to the gargantuan conclusion to the most ambitious trilogy in movie history, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, moviegoers will marvel this winter at such lavish spectacles as Cold Mountain and The Last Samurai. Recent weeks also witnessed Master and Commander and The Matrix Revolutions, the third installment in the ambitious (and pretentious) religio-sci-fi phenomenon, and Kill Bill Vol. 1, the first piece of a similarly showy martial-arts/revenge extravaganza. Even one of the season's top romantic comedies, Love Actually, appealed to the public with its grand aspirations and simultaneous unfolding of nearly a dozen different love stories.
On the most obvious level, the scale of these cinematic endeavors connects with the painfully inflated price of movie tickets. With the cost of admission near $10, patrons rightly expect some stirring, eye-popping experience in exchange for their investment. New technology also makes it easier for filmmakers to live up to those expectations, with Lord of the Rings making especially expert and effective use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to lend additional splendor to battle scenes and exotic locations. In an epic of a different sort, Looney Tunes: Back in Action deploys computer graphics to bring several classic cartoon characters (including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam and Marvin the Martian) to three-dimensional life, inserting them alongside such human stars as Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman and Steve Martin.
Another technological development, the digital video disc, has contributed in its own way to the current emphasis on epics. With their regular offering of director's cuts, deleted scenes, interviews with filmmakers and behind-the-scenes documentaries, DVDs inflate the artistic importance and historic significance of even the most ordinary releases. For instance, the nifty genre film Alien, along with its three decidedly uneven sequels, now appears as part of an outrageously elaborate (and expensive) set of nine DVDs. The prospect of future releases in this format encourages filmmakers to stress the most ambitious, resonant aspects of their projects.
Not That Dour 70's Fare
All five of last year's Academy Awards nominees for best picture (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gangs of New York, The Pianist, The Hours and the ultimate winner, Chicago) could qualify as epics, with elaborate period costumes and sets that created images far removed from our contemporary world. This year, historical melodramas and classic fantasies once again seem poised to predominate as front-runners for major awards. These big-budget spectaculars seem so conspicuously well positioned for Oscar consideration that it seems startling to recall that as recently as 1999 an intimate, cinematic indictment of suburban life (American Beauty) won best picture and swept to victory in other major categories.
In fact, the 1970s — a decade much like our own, with foreign-policy crises, economic stress, racial friction and political scandal — featured top Oscar winners that emphasized contemporary issues rather than historical spectacle, with best picture going to such titles as Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People and two Godfather films. Despite insecurity produced by the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Arab oil embargo, not to mention rising divorce and crime rates, neither critics nor the public showed a discernable preference for escapist fare.
Middle Earth vs. Middle East
Today, however, Hollywood confines its grandest ambitions to climactic struggles in Middle Earth rather than in the Middle East, altogether ignoring all relevant battles against terrorism or anti-American extremism. Perhaps 9/11 made the threats too immediate and too intimate to allow any plausibly entertaining means to dramatize real-world conflicts. Even those few recent films with terrorists in their plots (misfires such as The Sum of All Fears, Bad Company or The In-Laws) avoided all references to the Islamic militants who threaten our daily lives, instead focusing on wholly imaginary Euro-trash bad guys.
The big studios obviously operate on the general assumption that moviegoers prefer to escape into glorious, larger-than-life combat in which the distinction between good and evil remains clear and uncontested. There are no shades of gray to confuse the sentiments in the current crop of battlefield blockbusters: The French privateer in Master and Commander, the imperial mercenaries in The Last Samurai and the Orcs in Return of the King are entirely and unapologetically evil. Escapism also allows Hollywood to deploy heroes who display uncorrupted heroism — at a time when nervous executives might worry that many viewers around the world see America and its allies in the war against terror in far more ambiguous terms. As messy battles continue to grab alarming headlines, the long-ago/far-away big-budget extravaganzas offer the sort of conclusive resolution that seems to elude us in present-day clashes.
In the midst of a war on terror that even optimists suggest will take many years to win, the longing for this sort of closure becomes especially intense, and helps fuel Hollywood's raging epic-demic.
(Film critic and USA TODAY contributing board member Michael Medved hosts a daily, nationally syndicated radio show focusing on the intersection of politics and pop culture. You can visit his website by clicking here.)
