The 21st Century Is Hard (For Movies)
How do you ridicule something so ridiculous?
I think a lot about Veep. I mean, for one, it’s a perfect show. It has some of the more fucked-up insults you could ever hear, Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing the cruelest narcissist one could ever imagine and a supporting cast of characters that rivals the 1992 Dream Team.
During its final run, there had to be massive script rewrites as what was currently happening in the White House (Trump…) was more insane and unbelievable than a team of some of the best comedy writers in the world could even dream of.
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Making a movie seems pretty tough. Making a movie about the modern-day à la Veep seems nigh impossible. By the time the script is written, the actors are cast, the film is shot and the editing is completed, you’re years past the initial idea. Building something that reflects the current day is going to seem passe at best and tedious at worst.
There’s a reason that our most notable filmmakers stay away from making something super recent. Phones ruin a lot: Having a split screen with two characters talking back and forth does not make for an entertaining watch. It’s almost better to jump into the past to better explain the present.
Even more modern movies like Get Out are misconstrued when they’re released. The Jordan Peele debut dropped in 2017 making it a “statement on the Trump White House” even though it was an Obama-era idea. The genius of the concept and cultural significance made it stick, but it got lumped in with a certain type of content purely because of its release date.
This brings me to a few things I’ve watched recently: The Killer, May December and American Fiction, all new releases that try to say something about the 21st century to mixed results.
American Fiction is the most obvious. A cultural satire about an author who decides to write a “Black” book so as to win over white critics and woke readers, the Cord Jefferson script has a lot of fun poking holes, especially when it comes to the entertainment world. It’s pretty funny at times but also feels like a bit of a chore and a master’s thesis screed instead of a full movie.
How many times can you show various characters on Zoom or group calls? We don’t even want to be on them in real life, let alone in our fiction. A knowing send-up of the literary space eventually becomes the melodrama that it’s trying to avoid. It’s almost too 2023 as it’s chockful of ideas without anything to really say about them. Quite a few of the jokes feel out of a first draft and like something on mediocre SNL skits. It’s tough to satirize something in a broad way years in advance. You might as well watch TikTok which may not have the big-time backing but is as current as it can get.
May December and The Killer, on the other hand, are more specific works that don’t comment in an outright way like American Fiction. The Killer, the David Fincher hitman movie for Netflix, is an easy analog for our gig/freelance economy. The unnamed assassin uses his Apple Watch, Amazon and Equinox-esque free trials, and yet he’s still a fucking idiot screwing up time and time again. Shocking. His boss’s boss has no clue what’s happening and the main idea of the movie is essentially, we’re all kind of screwed so we might as well lay on the beach. The opening involves a WeWork screw-up; this isn’t rocket science.
Yes, Amazon Delivery makes things a little easier, but we’re all still wandering through the world without a clue of where to go. The messiness and bothersome tech make this feel like a real movie of the 2020s despite it never saying anything outright. There’s a reason the killer goes to McDonald’s other than getting some cheap protein.
Bringing a killer into our modern-day world is a hell of an idea backed up by a script that understands how bleak everything is and a Michael Fassbender murderer who is as undependable as your least favorite coworker. Just a bit deadlier.
Like American Fiction, May December has a similarly jaded view of the film industry. Centered on a fictional actor played by Natalie Portman researching for an upcoming role, this film shows the trappings and bizarreness of celebrity. The phone calls are a bother for its protagonist, who is rarely fully listening and oftentimes doing something else simultaneously. Now, that’s relatable.
One of May December’s main characters even uses Facebook to connect with others but not on a real level. The moment face-to-face interactions are suggested, things fall off the rails. It’s these types of small details, without ever bringing so much attention to what’s happening, that give the story life.
These big ideas are less noticeable and hidden in an ingenious script that wants to tell a story first and satirize the world it’s in second. Watch Don’t Look Up if you want to see how not to do something like this.
I remember seeing a tweet a while back (great start to a sentence) that chided directors for putting Dakota Johnson in period pieces, essentially saying that Johnson has a face that has seen a cell phone. There’s no way around it. You can put her in a corset and fix up her hair, but at the end of the day, you can’t change her enough so that she doesn’t look like she knows how to use the Safari app.
You can make a 21st-century movie, but you have to know what you’re in for and you have to be willing to push things further because of how dumb things can get. It’s a delicate balance and at its best when it’s a bit more obscured instead of directly in your face.
If you’re going to text, have a reason. I may not follow this rule in real life, but it seems like a good idea to live by.