Why Movies Suck

It's the Spirit of the Age

Well, the Oscars have come and gone, and I really can’t say how much I enjoyed not watching them. Not watching the Oscars has become one of the high points of my entertainment year. Conversely, one of my entertainment low points is listening to conservatives whine about what some lefty said when he accepted the statuette for his lousy leftist movie. I mean, really. It’s like going to a Communist cell meeting and complaining that everyone there is some kind of Communist.

I did, however, have an Oscar-adjacent experience that was actually kind of revelatory.

You know how movies suck now? You know how you used to say to your significant other: “Hey, let’s go to a movie,” then look at the listings and pick one out, and how you can’t do that anymore because all the films are garbage? This season of cultural sterility has actually effected most of the American arts for the last five years or so. I have assumed the reason had to do with the left’s monopoly on our cultural outlets. It’s the same reason late night shows are so utterly unfunny, and the latest novel by Shemali NBongo about growing up black and lesbian turns out to be a bore despite the glowing reviews.

But the other day, I cut a video in which I rated Oscar-winning movies. I had done one before about movies from the Golden Age, and found most of the winners deserving. But this one was about films made from 1981 to the present day. The way these videos work: my producer Tom selects the movies and I don’t know what they’ll be until the camera rolls. I have to rate and react to them in real time.

As we began, I found the Oscar winners from the eighties generally good, though not really great. But as we reached the nineties, something odd happened. I started to see films that were exceptionally well-made, some even delightful to watch, but which had at their core an essential element of dishonesty.

Dances with Wolves, which, like Pocahontas and Avatar, partakes of the Rousseauian fallacy that there is something innocent and benevolent about the lives of primitives. Schindler’s List, which presents itself as the authoritative movie about the Holocaust, and yet centers on acts of decency that were so rare an exception as to be nearly non-existent. The English Patient, a dishonorable and subtly antisemitic picture, in which the primary act of love involves giving traitorous aid to the Nazis because who wins the war doesn’t matter so much as getting the girl. (The opposite theme of Casablanca, a far, far better film.) And American Beauty, a picture that pretends to be about a straight man but isn’t, and hasn’t got a single honest frame in it from start to finish.

Let me repeat: these aren’t necessarily bad films. They’re certainly talented films. Most of them are watchable, even good. Schindler’s List would be a great film if you removed its overblown sense of itself, and its childish Spielbergian-Freudian theorizing about the Nazis’ motives. They are simply films with a cancer of dishonesty eating away at their hearts.

What is the source of this falsehood? I suppose I could give a neat and satisfying political answer. Hollywood is leftist and leftism is a dishonest philosophy that requires dishonesty from its followers. True enough. But the dishonesty in the movies wasn’t political. It went deeper than that. It reflected a crooked sense of values. The dishonesty was, I think, the cause of the leftism rather than the other way around. And it was a type of distortion I had seen before.

I have written and spoken often about the eerie clairvoyance of the mad scene in Hamlet. I read the play as a commentary on the Reformation, in which Shakespeare predicts the consequences of the weakening of that Roman Catholic religion that was the source and identity of the European ethos. Hamlet, tasked with avenging his father’s murder, is paralyzed by doubts. He plays mad while he investigates his father’s death. And in his make-believe madness, he expresses most of the false philosophies that will eventually arise from materialist atheism.

There is moral relativism (“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”); there is a rejection of the reality of human experience (“What a piece of work is a man,”); and there is the concomitant separation of language from meaning (“Words, words, words.”). But what is most remarkable about the scene is that Hamlet is only pretending to believe in these things, and yet his pretense of madness becomes a kind of madness in itself. The make-believe expresses the reality of his inner state, the helpless visceral doubt that makes moral action impossible.

I don’t know the religious beliefs of the directors who made the dishonest Oscar films. But like Hamlet, like all of us, their souls are imbued with the spirit of the age. Increasingly, that spirit has been a spirit of unbelief — and worse, a spirit of unbelief in a God who is actually there. No matter our faith, we draw the lie into ourselves with every breath and breathe it out again in the art we create.

Most of the movies I watch these days are full of talent and style. But again and again, I find they go awry because they do not know what a human being is, and therefore have nothing to say about the human condition: its violence in primitivism, its evil in civilization, the necessity of its sacrifices or the dangers of its sexuality.

Such ignorance is the sum effect of Hamlet’s madness. It is a sorrowful madness and a tragic one. It has brought down whole empires and civilizations. It is a condition worth confronting before we not only lose our ability to create great art, but find ourselves, as it were, weeping beside the rivers of Babylon.