This one time in the early 2000s, I conned my way into an interview with Jeanette Winterson. If you were to have asked me then, I would have said she was my favorite living novelist (today she shares the title with Ali Smith and Helen DeWitt). One of the things that attracted me to her work was the feeling of freedom and play in her texts, specifically the emphasis on language over plot, the so-called “unconventional” nature of her best work.
When I interviewed Winterson (which you can read here), we got on the subject of the so-called unconventional novel. Something she said has stuck with me all these years (and I’m paraphrasing): The novel, in the 20th century and beyond, was liberated by movies. Movies could handle traditional narratives with rising action and believable characters and recognizable tropes. Thanks to cinema, the classic Victorian novel structure need not always be repeated. We could move on. The camera had liberated painters from always having to do portraiture; the movie camera did the same for the novel. Yay! Here comes Modernism!
Here’s a phrase Winterson used in that interview that struck me then as funny: “Printed television.” Buy this, she meant books that were doing what TV does, which is to say not challenging the audience, giving them what they want, being fun but disposable once finished, a thing you turn on and off for distraction rather than edification or, dare I say, spiritual fulfillment. Today, this phrase is off the mark, but who’d have guessed that TV would have gotten this damn good?
And it has. There are certainly shows that are not nearly as good as they are popular (The Queen’s Gambit, Lovecraft Country), shows that I find lousy (The Chair) and shows that miss the mark the longer they go on but are rather satisfying (Breaking Bad, Mad Men). And then there’s The Walking Dead, which should have been killed off years ago. There are, as we know, a lot of damn shows. Maybe too many? No, I’ll leave that rant for someone else.
The best of the so-called Golden Era we’re (I think) still living in, in my opinion, is The Wire. The best currently running is Succession. If I had to articulate why I hold those highest, I’d likely resort to a lot of the things people say about art when they struggle to communicate their appreciation: compelling characters and situations, well written, not dumbed down, engaging, high stakes, humor, tragedy, pathos. . . but I dunno. All that, sure, but I just like those particular shows. One thing I can point to is their length. At an hour a pop, 10 episodes a season, Succession is, in comparison to a movie, looooooong. But in that length, there’s more than enough room to do all the nasty, compelling things that show does. How do you cram all that into a 90-minute package?
This may be why I love Succession but never understood Wall Street. Two hours is too quick for me to buy Gordon Gekko.
What really concerns me is the way these shows, and so many more I’ve not gotten around to (Hi, Ozark) have adopted what the best movies used to do. They’ve stopped using the old TV templates. We have quirkier meta comedies like Community and absurd ensembles like Brooklyn 99 and those before-mentioned dramas that are leaps and bounds better than Dallas or Melrose Place. I know everyone loves The Office, but if it did anything of note it was to present a sitcom that avoided the easy feel-good gags of Friends. TV started taking more chances, streaming became a thing, Netflix green lit some oddities that wouldn’t have stood a chance in the 90s, and now we are where we are. If we are indeed living in a Golden Era of TV where it’s possible that the shows today are doing what indie movies in the 90s were doing, that may explain why so many of the movies seem to be action based CGI violence celebrations. The movies have been reverse-liberated (hobbled?) by good TV and can focus on giving people digestible content that goes down smoothly, maximizing profits in the process.
But I don’t have to like it.
I know great movies are still being made. But damn if it doesn’t feel like 90% of new releases feature grown-ups in superhero costumes. I loved my Underoos when I was a kid, but there’s a time to grow up.
Okay, there are plenty of lovely, intelligent people in my life who will balk at my suggestion that perhaps better stories are out there than the ones dreamed up by Marvel (and definitely DC), and they are as right as I am in the sense that this is all very subjective. But smarter people than me (by which I mean, actual film critics) have argued that the dominance of superheroes, dragons, and John Wick action films has an effect on what gets green lit in a landscape where fewer films outside those genres receive attention. The result may be the sort of monoculture that has long depressed me, that we see already in publishing (a topic for a different day). When we’re fed multiple 3-hour Avengers extravaganzas, we come to view anything outside as small. The summer blockbuster used to be a thing reserved for, well, summer. Now it feels de rigueur, the thing one should always expect from a theater-going experience. The quaint little movie with the smaller budget, lack of what were once called special effects (which are now too common to be special), and lesser known faces. . . that’s for at-home streaming, maybe. I mean, am I really going to leave the couch and drive to the dirty little art house cinema for a movie that may be different than what I’m expecting? And what’s with these subtitles?
I’m fond of a lot of stuff. Highbrow, lowbrow. . . You know where I’m going with this. We’re at the part of the essay where I list my various tastes and proudly proclaim how much I love Miles Davis and Schubert and Pig Destroyer and the Butthole Surfers. I’ll throw the names of canonized classic films like The Third Man and some oddball cult favs like Repo Man at you. (These are my two favorite “Man” movies.) I’ll try to sway you by representing my openness to what one former professor called “Intellectual prime rib and intellectual White Castles.” I’ll make the very true claim that there is a place for both, for all of it, for everything. And I’ll restate my “eclectic” taste in art as a means of establishing my credibility. I like some weird stuff, so I’m no snob.
But how convincing can I be? I’ve already lost a segment of theoretically existing readers by talking shit about Marvel movies (and by refusing to use the phrase “The Marvel Cinematic Universe”). The Marvel defenders I envision would read my words and sharpen their critical knives, for they have practiced their retorts often: The themes in the MCU are universal, the filmmakers are using heroic archetypes to tell real-world stories. I know these arguments, and I believe them. I agree. I’m more than convinced. Buuuuuut. . . that doesn’t mean we only ever have to use those heroic archetypes, right? We can tell those stories a number of ways. They need not always be wrapped in spandex and capes.
The arguments from the fanboy crowd tend to feel strained. I know comic book enthusiasts and writers. I know that they fight for acceptance in a literary culture that devalues them. I know that even calling their books “graphic novels” is not enough to convince the tweed and leather-elbow crowd that the X-Men may provide tragedies on par with the canonized tomes. So I don’t want to come off as the university-bred asshole who doesn’t have time for funnybooks. But in working so hard to make the culture accept what was once derided as “nerd shit,” I wonder if we’re not tipping the scale too much for the superheroes. Has nerd culture become just plain culture?
Maybe, and that’s fine and dandy. But again, there are implications to that normalization.
Another issue I have with the more labored arguments for Marvel, et al. being accepted as part of high culture: The most vocal arguers remind me of the people who try so hard to convince me that guns are necessary and that the 2nd Amendment is unquestionably good. All the massaged statistics and forced logic mask one clear truth: people like shooting things. That’s all. Whatever goofy justifications they weave can’t cover up the one argument I can’t defeat: Guns are cool, so don’t take mine. I don’t agree, but I’d respect the honesty if the 2nd Amendment crowd would summarize their position that way.
When the comic movie defenders tie themselves in knots trying to get me to validate their superhero stories and admit that Iron Man is as good as The Hurt Locker, well, let’s just say that I can see the real argument under all the bullshit: I like when Iron Man blows things up. Don’t take that away!
Okay, I suspect you’ve got this comeback at the ready: Hey, Vince—The Hurt Locker won Best Picture while Marvel movies barely get an Oscar nod, and never for the top categories. So your so-called “good movies” are still nudging out my beloved superheroes. And you’d be right, but. . . really? First, it’s only a matter of time before Oscar and the Motion Picture Academy—never the most progressive institution—catches up to where the viewers are. Second, don’t you love that your favorite movies are not Oscar winners? Don’t you get the same thrill complaining about this that I got when Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas? Man, the Oscars suck. Fucking idiots. I’m more punk rock than you!
Not to mention that art is not always synonymous with mainstream recognition, right? If anything, the box office returns are the real marker of where the culture is, not the award ceremonies that have rarely if ever gotten things right (Driving Miss Daisey beat Do the Right Thing, after all). And the box offices swell whenever a beautiful person dons a superhero costume.
I’ve spent enough time shitting on the movies under the Disney umbrella (which includes Marvel and Star Wars and DC, to name just a few popular content producers). Suffice it to state that my (I grant you, only partially informed) perception is that the Winterson point about a new technology liberating an older one does not seem to be the case when we think of 21st century TV and film. Things seem to have flipped. I don’t pronounce this good or bad, just curious. My real question is: what can we predict about these forms of art? Will movies become heavier on action and lighter on nuanced storytelling? Will TV continue to do what indie films used to and get quirkier and better at representing traditionally marginalized voices? Let’s hope. Because I’m on board for more shows like Fleabag, Reservation Dogs, and Succession. But I can’t summon the energy to go to the multiplex and drop $20 on a few hours of ScarJo in spandex fighting aliens while somewhere in the background a guy in a tin suit flies to space and does something with a hole in the sky or whatever. My couch is a helluva lot comfier, and my kitchen is better than any I’ve found in a movie theater. Fuck it—let the nerds have the cinema. 12 months of action, explosions, tacked on love stories, B acting in front of a green screen, a talking raccoon because, why not? If people enjoy watching a video game they’re not playing, good for them. I think I’m cool with this cultural shift.