I was grooving through Guy Rundle’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s recent film noir, The Good German, for a while. I thought the writer did a good job of explaining why the film is not the experimental triumph some critics have lauded it as, but rather a nice little mannerist exercise:
You could say it’s an interesting experiment, but the trouble is we already knew what it establishes. We’ve been theorising film noir for a half-century now, and no genre in cinema history has been more written about. In other words, The Good German is not an essay in experimentation, but in mannerism — the characteristic of mannerism in any art form being the exhaustive exploration of permutations for their own sake, beyond any usefulness they might once have possessed. Mannerism tends to break out when there has been a tremendous burst of artistic innovation and quality — as there was in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, and again in the Seventies — and a way to further revolutionise the form has not yet been fully conceived.
I thought he was making a good argument against overpraising movies such as Far From Heaven and Kill Bill; I enjoyed the latter, mainly for its affection for trashy movies. It wasn’t high art, and it had some dull moments, but it entertained me.
That said, Rundle lost me when he tried to compare the development of movies to the novel. He complains that cinema is stuck in “the existing framework of popular film – that of externalised third-person realism – has been utterly exhausted in the 70 years since the classic Hollywood style came together.”
What does it need to do? Go Joycean!
The next step — a popular cinema that incorporates the significant representation of internal psychological states, shifting points of view, discontinuous story as more than novelty elements within a traditional presentation — has not yet been substantially attempted.
And who’s going to lead the way? David Lynch! [insert sound of record-needle skipping off its groove here]
In that respect it’s no coincidence that the one director to come from outside the film world — David Lynch, a one-time surrealist painter — has been the only mainstream director to at least make the attempt at such a leap into the full incorporation of non-realist techniques into popular genres. But by now half the movies in the multiplex should be using the techniques that Lynch and others have developed in works such as Lost Highway and Inland Empire.
Wow. I don’t know where to begin. I can understand complaining that art films should be taking more chances, but to complain that big budget multiplex films should be incorporating techniques from Lost Highway is mind-blowing. I’ve seen my share of attempts at “portraying psychological reality” in moderate-budget movies (like In the Cut and Demonlover) and let me tell you: they make for awful, self-indulgent movies with storytelling that comes off as arbitrary and half-assed.
Moreover, the reason they’re not part of “popular cinema” is because the public avoids these flicks in droves. Which is to say, I can understand blasting the critical fawning over mannerist exercises, but I don’t see how that leads to the thesis that hundred-million-dollar movies (the aforementioned multiplex flicks) need to venture into the realm of “non-realism.”
In fact, you could argue that the implausibility and impossible action sequences are a filmic reaction against “realism,” but I’m just talking outta my butt.