Our Movies’ Broken Moral Compass

Here’s what film-culture cognoscenti will never admit: They think that cynicism is smart and skepticism is smart — and that they’re smarter than you. Being nihilistic is considered a virtue among film authorities, and so it is applauded in the work of high-minded artistes such as the American Paul Thomas Anderson and Romania’s Radu Jude, whose new movie Scarred Hearts may be the most cynical, skeptical, nihilistic movie this year so far.

The title “Scarred Hearts” is taken from the writings of Max Blecher, a Jewish-Romanian intellectual who suffered from spinal tuberculosis and was confined to a sanitorium, where he wrote prose that emphasized the pointlessness of life, until his death in 1938. Jude’s semi-comic narrative (which includes quotes from another Blecher tome, Adventures in Immediate Irreality) uses a bedridden Blecher figure named Emanuel (Lucian Teodor Rus) to exemplify what some still think of as the modern human condition. Emanuel’s pain, lust, and existential frustration reflect Europe’s social collapse after WWI, anticipating the horrors of the next great war.

Emanuel, always expounding his morbid perceptions to gregarious Dr. Ceafalan (Serban Pavlu) and other patients, represents the intellectual standard of contemporary film culture. His emaciated figure evokes cultural landmarks from Kafka’s beetle-on-his-back Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory to Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and the loftiest ambitions of Woody (“life is meaningless”) Allen. It is these profound-to-silly artists, not the little-known Blecher, who have set the orientation of contemporary intellectuals, and Jude follows their portentous examples to make a high-art film that is refined yet depressing.

When all that nihilism becomes the art-movie standard — established in Blecher/Emanuel’s first quote, “I get the feeling of the transience of life and the unimportance of what we call human existence” — film culture gets thrown off its moral compass. The needle of Jude’s artfulness swings from elegant to inescapably morose. The stylish credit montage, using actual Blecher photographs, manuscripts, and expressionist drawings, gives way to meticulous stationary images: shots of Emanuel and his father in an open-air carriage on their way to the sanitorium, Emanuel being fitted for a plaster back cast, Emanuel in the foreground of assorted absurdist compositions.

This dispirited tendency is what makes some of the most aesthetically accomplished contemporary films abhorrent.

Scarred Hearts features an antique square frame — a 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Is it just coincidence that this resembles the 1.85:1 aspect ratio of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ultra-arty Phantom Thread? Jude’s images, like P. T. Anderson’s, look like a stereopticon rather than regular movie scenes. With their aestheticized methods, these filmmakers boastfully manipulate viewer perception, throw the moral compass of their stories off-kilter, and congratulate audiences for having a depressed, rather than elated, response. Note how Emanuel seduces a hospital paramour: “Worrying about bourgeois morals is disgusting,” he informs her. “Christianism has destroyed us all.”

I lauded the balance of humor and bitterness in Jude’s Aferim! (2015), but with Scarred Hearts, he has moved past Kubrickian irony to something darker: Jude the artiste, citing Percy Bysshe Shelley: “I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.” Readers should realize that this dispirited tendency is what makes some of the most aesthetically accomplished contemporary films abhorrent. The title “Scarred Hearts” not only describes the hopelessness Emanuel has resigned himself to, but also the punishing fate that Jude accepts in the same vein of pretend intellectual sophistication in Phantom Thread.

At two and a quarter hours, Scarred Hearts recalls the miserable overlong 2005 Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Since then, film culture has given in to low spiritual expectations, which might explain the cynicism that now pervades American cultural life. It sees the U.S. as in the same dread moral state as Ceaucescu’s Romania — a condition our cultural arbiters have happily claimed. They feel smart, which puts them in the same supercilious position as Blecher’s Emanuel, a flat-on-his-back cynic who quotes Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and radio ads yet can still get it up, even though the comical act of love (Jude boasts two acrobatic sex scenes) is painful.

Given that cinema’s moral compass is distorted, if not broken, art-film intellects are no different from Marvel Comics yahoos who enjoy the suggestion that the modern world — just like Romania prior to WWII — is doomed.

***

Meryl Streep is certainly overrated but more important, her industry reputation masks the fact that she’s a film actress who lacks charm. When she smiles on screen, you see the mimetic work involved and are not made happy by it. And after recent disingenuous public statements, she can no longer be trusted. So her participation in the ABBA movie musicals Mamma Mia and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is unappealing. She puts ABBA’s wondrous songs and the sublimity of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s musical arrangements to the test. These films are minor, yet, like Scarred Hearts, they also derange the moral compass of our culture. The plots that herald female sexual freedom (this time interchanging the late-Seventies generation and the present) seem like PC gimmickry. The delightful songs are used for patronizing purposes.

Streep’s self-defeating haughtiness deserves a later, in-depth essay on Hollywood hypocrisy, but right now it’s worth noting that in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, Streep’s distaste for the masses casts a shadow over the old-crone substitute for Streep, Cher, who appears like a dowager in drag performing ABBA’s lovely ballad “Fernando,” a better song than any Cher has recorded in her entire unexceptional singing career. But the most alarming example of a movie unbalancing pop culture’s moral compass is the music-video clip of the number “When I Kissed the Teacher,” originally an innocent, disarming mash-note from a student to a teacher (sweeter than Van Halen’s horny-teen “Hot for Teacher”). It suggested classic Sixties rock by the Ronettes or the Crystals given Mozartean thrill, but now its subtlety is turned into a preening, over-obvious sexual-identity anthem.

ABBA’s original version was already transgressive enough, confessing hidden (universal) romantic impulses and celebrating passion that was chaste and exhilarating. But in this clip, Lily James (playing the young Streep) distorts the song to teach us a lesson about accepting same-sex effrontery whether we care about it or not. Now the little-known ABBA masterpiece is no better than that politically calculated affront by maniacal Hillary Clinton supporter Katy Perry, “I Kissed a Girl (and I Liked It).” The clowning, overly cheery insincerity of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again diminishes one of the peaks of Western pop culture.