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December
27, 2002 12:00 p.m. By Thomas Hibbs |
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eonardo DiCaprio
as Alexander the Great? Brad Pitt as Achilles? Denzel Washington as Hannibal,
the elephant-riding Carthaginian general? In an attempt to repeat the
success of Gladiator,
Hollywood is digging up epic stories from antiquity, with a host of films
planned for release over the next few years. What are we to make of this?
In one sense, the trend indicates how impoverished and how slavish are
the creative impulses in Hollywood: "Hey, we made big bucks with
Russell Crowe in a toga. Let's put a bunch of other stars in togas and
see what happens."
In
another sense, it is a sign that Hollywood may be veering away from the
nihilistic bent that became so prominent in the late 80s and 90s. Concerning
the popularity of epics, screenwriter Erik Jendresen, who penned Band
of Brothers, observed in a recent interview with Entertainment
Weekly: "They're about men and women of unusual vision, individuals
who stand for something greater than themselves. Right now Hollywood might
have detected a need for stories like that." Yet, some critics think
this is precisely the problem. They see the surge of fantasy epics as
a bad sign for the post-9/11 culture, indicating, at best, a kind of American
escapism from the wider world and, at worst, a reversion to consoling,
childish stories of good and evil.
The biggest box-office successes of 2002 might seem to confirm the worries
of the critics. The top-five films of the past year (soon to be invaded
by Spider-Man,
Star
Wars II: Attack of the Clones, Signs,
Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and My
Big Fat Greek Wedding. Does the popularity of fantasy and myth
— in Spider, Clones, Chamber, LOTR's Towers,
and even in Signs with its apocalyptic attack of the aliens — confirm
the view that America is in an escapist mood, hungry for positive affirmation
of its goodness?
In post-9/11 America, films, always to some extent about escape, increased in popularity, providing safe, relatively inexpensive entertainment, close to home. Although there are no great films in the current top five, all are solid, entertaining films. If their popularity gives any indication of American taste post 9/11, the signs are mostly positive and healthy.
Here are three of the most prominent and most instructive themes in these films:
HOPEFUL
VISIONS OF ORDINARY LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
Greek Wedding and Signs are about the trials and tribulations
of ordinary, contemporary Americans. In Greek Wedding, which has
raked in over 200 million on a production budget of just five million,
gets great comic mileage out of a multigenerational, ethnic family. Signs,
which uses signs of alien life as a basis for reflecting on signs of God's
presence, also features the family, with Mel Gibson as a widowed pastor
who loses and then recovers his faith, both in God and in his role as
father of his family. Even Spider-Man is set in an ordinary American
family. (We should add to this list, the modest but still impressive success
of The
Rookie, the true story of an aging baseball coach and working-class
father who gets his chance to try out as a pitcher for the majors.)
Now, films about the American family are nothing new in Hollywood. Yet hopeful films about ordinary American adults have been surprisingly rare in recent years, where the archetype for the vision of the family seems to have been a film like American Beauty. Even where Hollywood depicted complex, noble, adult characters (as in Schindler's List, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan), it looked to another time and usually another place.
EVIL
AS PARASITIC ON THE GOOD
Instead of providing a crude and simplistic vision — a Manichean vision
— of good and evil as clear-cut, easily divisible realities, Spider,
Clones, Potter, and LOTR depict evil as parasitic
on the good, as arising from a twisted pursuit of goodness. For example,
numerous characters in LOTR must resist the temptation to use the
Ring for good ends. The best scenes in Clones concern the corruption
of Anakin by wrath, by an inordinate desire for justice. All these films
reject the naïve supposition that good intentions are sufficient
for virtue, even as they underscore virtue's costs. The youthful spider-man's
most difficult lesson is the one he learns at the very end of the film:
since anyone close to him is likely to become a target of his enemies,
he must sacrifice the affection of the women he loves.
The treatment of
evil is quite subtle. Not surprisingly, the nuanced depiction of evil
is accompanied by, indeed presupposes, a seriousness about complex, adult
models of goodness. The latter have been nearly non-existent in Hollywood
over the past 20 years, where the alternative to perverse, artistic villains
like Hannibal Lecter is the inveterate innocence and perpetual childhood
of Forrest
Gump.
WAR:
WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Although all these films, with the exception of Greek Wedding,
culminate in battles against evil forces, they are not war pictures. Instead,
they begin with ordinary lives, surprised by evil, and thus make clear
the various ways in which evil threatens goods we share in common. They
move from the personal outward to the political. By contrast, many recent
war films tend to dissipate the political into the personal. This is evident
to some extent in Saving Private Ryan, where the larger issues
of the war are largely irrelevant, and especially in Black
Hawk Down, where the answer to the question, "Why fight?"
is the film's incoherent refrain, "It's about the guy next to you."
Of course, that answer never explains why one should go to war in the
first place.
Will Hollywood learn these lessons and follow the paths blazed by the top moneymakers of 2002? All we know at the moment is that we will soon be inundated with Greek and Roman epics, some of which will undoubtedly make viewers wistful for the sort of classicism displayed in John Belushi's toga antics in Animal House.
— Thomas Hibbs, professor of philosophy at Boston College, is the author of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld.