Fight! Fight! Fight!
A ringside manifesto for the rebirth of Hollywood
Everyone has a take on two men fighting at the Oscars. I don’t have a take. I did not watch the Academy Awards this year. I do, however, have a plan to improve on them.
My major point of contention with contemporary Hollywood is that filmgoing is no longer a sensuous and deeply textured experience. It is high-budget but bereft of awe. The sort of aesthetic experience taken for granted in early 21st century cinema - dark night, blue day, dark grey room, loud music, mumbly voice - is not a pleasurable one.
Hollywood’s old investment machines - the feminine A-movies of roughly the late thirties to early sixties - were tactile, fanciful, and intense. With their choir soundtracks, chiaroscuro lighting, emotive close-ups and crystalline textures - women in anguish and despair, wearing fur and satin, holding up irrepressibly shiny glasses and forks and knives - the major studios conspired in the sensuous enlightenment of housewife audiences. This has now gone awry. Middle-aged women have no films to go to and no violent, drunken, glamorous celebrity landscape to lose themselves in. An entire industry rests on its ability to entertain us - and it is currently failing.
Hollywood used to be a proxy for the visceral order of pagan religion, lining our heads with the miracle births of ancient myth and the bureaucratic, globing skies of Catholicism. It is currently no Dionysian experience, and no Apollonian one either. We cannot live out a magical fetish, because focus-grouping and academic theory has all-but annihilated the burdened eye of the single director. We have no pantheon of gods to worship, because most actors working today are devoid of interest or sexual quality.
Lining the red carpet are men and women who appear wholly contrived and invented, but in ways starkly different from their forerunners. Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford were the creations of skilled storytellers, and their lifespans formed complicated soap operas, studded with gun violence and villainy and imagined sex. Sunday’s Best Actors and Best Actresses are pulled together by independent PR agencies, seemingly under the pretence of truth and in the face of disaster. They are merely foil blankets, small and insufficient for the Lawrencian traveller - the moviegoer stranded in an icy, sexless and snowy wilderness. The moviegoer looks for heat and for something to kill.
Hollywood actors and actresses could come alive again by hitting, punching, shooting each other - a shadowy industry like cockfighting, or a widely-paraded staple of the festival season. Take the latest blockbuster heroes and make them wrestle in a paddling pool full of mud. Line up the Best Actress nominees and hand them bows and gilded arrows until we find a new, supreme Artemis. In this framework of violence, seppuku (cut of knife, shine of innards) serves as substitute for the most grating, self-involved skits and speeches. The most invested of us will sit ringside, periodically splashed with blood.
The affair does not have to stop with actors - those depressed by the tyrannies of current special effects departments may rejoice in seeing computers, rigs and mannequins rise like Transformers in acts of mutual destruction. The industry will finally reach its furthest frontiers of viewership: not genteel journalists or merch-buying teenagers, but ordinary men and women like you and I, who now live on the margins of film, alienated by politics or style or the death of the melodrama.
We need story, rumour, myth - traumas to feel in ourselves like shadows, passion, aggression, generations passing like flights of stairs, broken bones, secret children, bodily fluids. Without this superstructure, we look to pornography, which lacks narrative in its fragmentation and interchangeable stars. The desire of the porn addict is not a desire for sex - it is a need to be overwhelmed by, and ensconced in, a larger human story, one whose lining is sewn with innumerable secrets.
Vive le Studio Hollywood! Vive le violence!