A Brave New Digital World?

You’re sitting there watching the last few minutes of Spider-Man, the biggest blockbuster to hit Manila cinemas in about four months (only to be replaced by Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones). Anyway, as you watch Tobey Maguire’s character (Peter Parker) walk away from the eager-to-mate Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane) in favor of a career wearing blue-and-red tights, you begin to feel a little cheated. Like you’ve been had. Like you’ve been set up for another three or four sequels, before the end credits even start to roll.

Is it too much to ask that today’s movies simply end? Can’t we have a little closure in our lives (or at least in our moviegoing) after sitting still for two hours? Do we have to be subjected to the fastest-growing virus of the summer months, sequelibrius majorus?

Yes, summer’s here again, and the time is right for slick, sweeping digitized movie epics with merchandising tie-ins and sequel potential. Granted, with Spider-Man, the hype preceding the movie made it impossible to ignore all the products, gimmicks and attendant spin-offs that accompanied the comic book hero. Watching the movie, you could already guess, as soon as James Franco’s character (the Green Goblin’s son) vowed vengeance for his dad’s death, that we were heading straight for Franchiseville.

And maybe that’s what’s wrong with movies these days. So much money goes into manufacturing "blockbusters" – from actors’ salaries, cutting-edge special effects, merchandising and promotional budgets, and the sly practice of opening in as many movie theaters worldwide as possible to guarantee huge box office – that human-scale concerns, like acting and plausible stories, get blown out of the water.

What replaces these things is a slick, brazen attempt to rope the filmgoer in one more time – either for the sequel, the prequel (in the case of Star Wars), the spin-off (in the case of The Scorpion King, which picks up on a minor character from The Mummy), or the product experience (in every possible manifestation known to man). Spider-Man is but the most successful example yet of Hollywood’s commitment to recycling: to taking tried-and-true formulas, whether derived from comic books or TV shows, and making them into bigger and bigger earners.

A more recent example is the new Stars Wars epic, Attack of the Clones. Somewhere amid the layers and layers of CGI-created worlds and jam-packed digital frames concocted by director George Lucas, there is a story going on. Star Wars fans know the basic thread of that story (having followed the original trilogy), so they’re not too concerned about the fact that this sequel delivers its information with all the delicacy of Jar Jar Binks running a potato-sack race. But critics have had little mercy on this movie, particularly the wooden acting and clunky script. (How wooden is the acting of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman? It’s woodier than Woody Woodpecker’s shit.) It’s simply a matter of comparing the spunk, camaraderie and crackling wit displayed by Princess Leia, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back to see how completely hollow and leaden is the pacing of Attack of the Clones. (To be fair, I actually liked Attack of the Clones, but only as it figured into the preceding and following storyline. Which is partly my point.)

Most of the blame for this state of affairs falls on George Lucas, a man who had more to do with the Digital Age of Movies we are now experiencing than anybody else. Next to Steven Spielberg, that is.

It started, of course, with the original Star Wars (1977). Here was a movie that had built-in merchandising potential, the promise of repeat viewing, even the blueprint for a future generation of video games. (None of this was obvious to Lucas at the time, of course.) Lucas went on to steer two sequels into production, and amass a huge fortune in merchandising which was parlayed into creating new companies: Pixar, Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound. He focused more and more on the technical aspects of enjoying film – better sound in theaters, which led to the THX Sound System of today, and Industrial Light and Magic, whose seamless digital effects became a staple of films by the early ‘90s.

Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten some of the basic elements that make films enjoyable in the first place: human-scale emotions, acting, clear storytelling. There’s a hands-off, computer-processed vibe to both Star Wars prequels that’s often hard to connect with. It’s easy to see why the acting appears so airless and vapid: when you watch a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Attack of the Clones, it’s clear that each actor is instructed to twirl his or her light saber in a special-effects vacuum; there’s nothing to play off of, except blue screens and directorial cues. Multiply this phenomenon by at least a light year, and you can see why acting takes such a back seat in special-effects-driven movies.

But critics claim the two Star Wars prequels hardly even qualify as movies anymore. More accurately, they’re events, something to be experienced along with bludgeoning sound, million-details-per-second digital layering and editing, and the whole "gestalt" of the Star Wars culture.

Again, I wonder: Why can’t a movie just have its way with you, then leave you alone? Why must it live a life larger than the screen, invading your cell-phone and fast-food ads with promos and tie-ins? Why must it relentlessly seek to suck more money from you?

The answer’s pretty obvious: movies are about money. In his generally excellent American film study, A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker points to the buy-out of major film studios by corporations starting in the ‘80s: thus, Rupert Murdoch acquired 20th Century Fox; Disney Inc. controlled Miramax and other studios; Viacom purchased Paramount; and Warner Brothers merged with Time, Inc. (which has since merged with America Online). All these changes have resulted in an environment in which movies have to make more and more money, just to justify the studios’ existence. Foreign box-office is a bigger and bigger factor for an American movie’s success – the reason why, for instance, Spider-Man or Attack of the Clones occupy five movie theaters at a time in your local mall.

Our lack of discernment about this is truly appalling. We take whatever Hollywood spoon-feeds us, in bigger and louder doses, convincing ourselves that all we want is more. There’s a certain conservatism about this, Kolker claims, which ties in to our postmodern viewpoint:

"The postmodern urge to deny seriousness, meaning, and point of view hooks into that conservatism, translating it into a larger cultural cynicism, a belief that individual agency has been lost, worldviews are pointless, history is finished, and that the pleasures of the moment are all that can provide solace or excitement."

So what does this have to do with enjoying Spider-Man, Attack of the Clones, or any other mindless summer flick, for that matter? Not much. Except that we have been led to believe that only BIGGER and BIGGER special effects will do; that only new thrills will keep us glued to our seats; that a lot of talk and closeups of people emoting is not very interesting. After all, moviegoers pay more and more for tickets; they expect to be entertained.

It also pays to recognize the cycle, the trend of movies, and where it’s heading. In a sense, Lucas and Spielberg have created an empire, and while I would hesitate to call it evil, it is clearly all-encompassing. The digital world promises to make movie images more than real. Advance promotion described the digital film texture of Attack of the Clones and Spider-Man as "hyperreal." I’ve got another word for hyperreal, though: how about "fake"? The problem with such minute attention to digital layering and rendering is that it tends to draw attention to itself, thus drawing the viewer out of the moviegoing experience. (My own conspiracy theory is that Lucas settles for wooden acting from his "stars" in order not to upstage his precious special effects tableaux.)

Which reminds me of a comment by film critic Roger Ebert, who, after viewing Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for the first time, asked what kind of CGI and special effects were needed to allow Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi to hover so beautifully over the green bamboo. "How did you get it to look so real?" Ebert innocently asked. "Because it is real," Lee responded, noting that CGI was used only to brush away the wires suspending the actors during their stunts. The rest is real. And that makes all the difference in the world.