« 013: The Daily Regime | Main | 015: The Reality of Character » November 28, 2002

014: The Quiet Bomb

"MGM? Yeah, this is Pierce Brosnan. I've just read the script for Die Another Day and I'd like to execute the clause in my contract where I phone in my performance. What? Everyone else is doing the same thing?" I can image everyone involved in the film having a number of conversations like this one. The actors, director, and crew all lining up for their paychecks, trying not to feel like complete whores as they took the money. Meanwhile the marketing machine rolls on, touting Die Another Day as the second coming of the action genre, the 20th outing of the world's most respected franchise wherein the producers point and exclaim, "Look! There's still life in this body!"

Which is the same statement Dr. Frankenstein made after running several million volts through an assembly of reconstructed tissue.

The pitch for Die Another Day went something like this: "Like License to Kill, only with DEADLY SCORPIONS and ENDLESS WATER TORTURE as motivation." "Like Dr. No, only in SLOW-MO WITH MORE TIT SHOTS." "Like Goldfinger, but WITH MORE LASERS." "She'll kick ass like Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies except with AN OSCAR IN HER HANDBAG." "We'll throw them out of a cargo plane just like The Living Daylights but in a FREE-FALLING HELICOPTER."

Opening weekend numbers were $47.1 million in the US alone, a number the producers will claim as a mandate to pump out more of the same recycled material for the next twenty years. Audiences will line up because we've shown a predisposition to be happy with the same thing over and over again. Hollywood is beginning to understand the maxim by which McDonald's and Starbucks have taken over the world: the audience doesn't want variety, they want the simplicity of perpetual regularity. But SUPER-SIZE it, make it a VENTE, because damnit! we want it LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER.

Einstein is laughing at us. Sooner or later we're going to bump up against a theory of his and even the insatiable human thirst for consumption isn't strong enough to overcome his theory of relativity. We'll try anyway and that may very well be the ultimate alien invader which breaks us. "Brought down by physics." That'll look good on our collective tombstone.

I was in the theater this weekend. Yes, I was voting for more of this crap with my dollar and if it makes you feel any better, you can blame me for the state of movies coming out of Hollywood in the next year. I was sitting in the theater, watching the pyrotechnics, the product placements, and the actors as they tried to squeeze some dignity out of their dialogue, and I was bored. I was thinking, "Did I leave the gas on? Are my socks all lined up in vertical rows in my drawer? Why does my cat lick his ass so constantly?"

I was also thinking: "Is the corpse worth saving?" Populist wisdom says there are only seven unique plots available to the writer and, with the action genre, that number is probably reduced to one or two. Even the most ardent fan is going to eventually realize that the spoon being shoved in their mouth has just come directly from their ass. Bond is being strangled by his own mythology. He teeters on the edge of self-parody, unable to escape the Saville Row mannequin into which he has been sewn. He poses, he preens, he blows things up: this is the extent of his character description. The characters in the film recognize their own stereotypical nature and comment on that nature as if the self-evaluation can be passed off on the audience as sharp psychological insight.

The inherent problem facing the Bond franchise is the same issue which Marvel and DC are trying to distract you from: boredom. James N. Frey in How to Write a Damn Good Novel talks about the concept of "maximum capacity." Characters must act at their maximum capacity in order for an audience to sustain a belief in them. They don't have to be paragons of their niche, but they have to operate at the peak of THEIR ability. Bond, like other superheroes, faces the problem that they are unmatched in their maximum capacity. Effective operation at that level would reduce film time to about ten minutes, leaving you with eighty minutes of commercials and naval gazing. The moment a character goes stupid on the audience is the instant where their attention wanders.

Quick! EXPLOSIONS. NAKED PEOPLE. RABID DOGS FEASTING ON INNOCENT CHILDREN. MORE EXPLOSIONS. SEX. SEX. SEX!

We're simple, really. It doesn't take much to distract us.

Writers need to do two things as well: operate at their own maximum capacity and know when to get off the stage. You don't have to outdo Shakespeare, but you've got to be able to look your audience in the eye and say, "Yeah, those are my words." And you need to know when to take the residual checks for foreign editions and call it a day. Take up gardening. Kill your genre character and start over, if that is what it takes.

"LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER" is intended to beat the audience into submission. One day we'll wake up from this S & M fantasy and the loudest, faster, hardest film will be playing to an empty theater. We'll have realized what is missing from the rollercoaster in which we have strapped ourselves: the sense of wonder.

It is an epiphany, the sensation of the sacred intruding itself into our mundane world. Cyclical religious structures (and aren't they all?) hold at their center the recreation of this primal moment when we first touched magic. The craze for nostalgia -- the continuing acceptance and queuing up for "more of the same" -- is just our attempt to circle back and find that initial moment again. Except we've built up so much scar tissue that we believe we need the recreation to happen -- you know it -- LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER.

We'll be saved by the quiet bomb. We need the mushroom cloud to be hand-held and personalized.

Posted by Teppo at November 28, 2002 12:47 PM

Comments