For Low-Budget Cinema
We so easily forget that most of the films regarded as “classic movies” were, by today’s standards, very cheap to make. Certainly they did not boast the bevy of special effects that is now regarded as essential if a film is to have mass appeal.
Speaking personally, I find it much more admirable if a director manages to make a great film with a small budget than when he achieves the same with a huge budget. Surely the former is more impressive, more laudable? Is it not a greater display of human ingenuity, talent and skill? Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) is objectively a superior film to its predecessor, but I think The Terminator (1984) is more impressive as a creation, if not as a film, because it was created with such meagre resources.
A more useful comparison, for my purposes here, is Robocop (1987) and its 1990 sequel. The original was made for $14m and is a masterpiece and a classic. The sequel had double the budget and is completely forgettable, being a narrative and tonal mess peopled by bland characters. At a technical level, it is very well-made, with far more spectacular effects than the first film and everything is at a bigger scale… but so what? The result is still rubbish, because budget is no substitute for talent.
You might say, of course, that the ideal is budget and talent. I would disagree.
I just read an article in Variety about the film industry. Here is the nightmarish conclusion:
Warner Bros. has a packed upcoming slate. To round out the second quarter, Shazam! Fury of the Gods will arrive in a matter of weeks. Kicking off the summer is Ezra Miller’s The Flash, followed by the hotly anticipated Barbie, from director Greta Gerwig and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. In August, Jason Statham will face a prehistoric shark yet again in Meg 2: The Trench, and New Line will roll out DC’s Blue Beetle.
The end of the year will bring a big hit of Timothee Chalamet, first in Dune: Part Two, then in the candyman origin story Wonka. The musical The Color Purple will close out the year, as will Jason Momoa in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
Not a syllable there is of any interest to me.
The post-2000 evolution of film production (this being that films should be of a very, very high production standard) means that films inevitably get worse. To have high production values, it must have a big budget. If it has a big budget, to recoup that money, it must appeal to many people. To do that, it must be lightweight, thoughtless garbage. Almost unavoidably, then, if we keep demanding high production standards, we can be assured of low artistic and intellectual standards.
The result is the hellish 2023 calendar of Warner Bros. Here are the films with their budgets:
Shazam! Fury of the Gods ($125m)
The Flash ($200m)
Barbie ($100m)
Meg 2: The Trench (at least $130m)
Blue Beetle ($90m)
Dune: Part Two (approx. $165m)
Wonka ($125m)
The Color Purple (unknown)
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom ($205m)
average: $142m
Which of those films will be good for the public? Which of them will be remembered 50, 20 or even 5 years hence?
This gets even worse when you take into account the international market. To appeal to many different cultures, the film should ideally be as generic as possible. (In truth, it needn’t be like this. Chinese and Japanese etc. audiences love to see examples of specific Western cultures. But our modern values, forged by being the hosts of multicultural societies, compel us to mute our own character rather than impose it on others, even when they want it.) Making a film “as generic as possible” means shearing it of cultural and racial specificity, which means shearing it of truth (or, in the modern parlance, authenticity). The result is something that cannot speak to anyone’s actual life, but more perversely still, presents a fictitious generic existence that people then aspire to and expect to find around them in the real world - a culture of pure, hollow, deracinated consumerism. In this way, the goals of neoliberalism coincide: the market wants deracinated consumers, so it produces products that will make consumers want to be deracinated. But this long-term goal is facilitated by the short-term necessity to make profit; as illustrated, if the film is big-budget, it “needs” to be generic.
Clearly, this is deeply wrong and unhealthy.
A responsible government would implement a budget cap of, say, $40m per film. With today’s technologies making it much cheaper to do almost everything, even $40m would be luxury, largely spent on the fees for actors and directors.
What we should be doing is fostering a culture in which people are acclimatised to less pizzazz, less flash and bang, less hollow spectacle, and more depth and quality. But this would be the direct opposite of what today’s public expect. Today’s public would be confused and bored by a film that didn’t have explosions, car chases and CGI. They would not know what to make of it, except to mock it and turn their attentions elsewhere, to something that did have explosions, car chases and CGI.
Cinema has become too big and expensive for its own good, and in order to survive has transformed into a vehicle of pure cultural decline. This is what happens when you rely on being big and glitzy - it is, like endless growth, the ideology of the cancer cell, and similarly destructive.
Withnail & I cost £1.5m in 1987, which apparently is about £3m today. Avatar cost $237m in 2009, which apparently is about £285m today. For the price of one Avatar, you could make 95 Withnail & Is. I, and probably you, would much prefer the latter. I think it would be more interesting, more fulfilling, and better for society and for people individually.
The problem is that the general public would disagree. We can moan about capitalism and the vandals of culture, but the ultimate problem is that the general public are stupid, or at least are prepared to behave as if they are stupid. Without a culture that compels them towards the high, they default to marinading in the low.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If those at the top were to decide on it, we could have a culture that worked to better its people, that believed in their potential, that didn’t allow them to settle for trash ideas, trash habits and trash media. And we could do it so rapidly, for a tiny fraction of what it costs to make one ludicrous, mind-numbing blockbuster today.
This change would require a psychological transition away from being enthralled by scale, spectacle and bombast, to being comforted by the intimate, straightforward and simple. While that sounds rather feminine, it echoes the transition that occurs in a lot of men as they attain maturity: their taste in cinema will evolve from high-octane mindless blood and gore at 18, to more cerebral and dignified material as the testosterone calms down. This process is seen as maturation in an individual, and I believe that, at a societal scale, it would be the same thing. We look on the cultural tastes of the stereotypical 18 year-old boy with disdain, and rightly. We should consider the tenor of mainstream cinema today with similar, but stronger, contempt.
What we need is simplicity, and a love of it. There is virtue in simplicity and in the frugality that requires it and fosters it. In drama production, technical and narrative simplicity allows the subtext to breathe. It allows the drama to actually be “about” something. This is how we can have dramas that are meaningful, that explore what it is to be human.
The first challenge would be persuading today’s public to be interested in such things.
But it could be done.
This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, as the entire entertainment industry is populated by people whose sole interest is not simply money.
It's demoralization.
Remember that TV and film always were, and always have been, propaganda. There may be a few gems that aren't, but they are few and far between.
They don't HAVE to be, of course, but the American and British film industry is as much propaganda as Goebbels's films ever were.
Beautiful article, MW. So true. The bigger the budget the bigger the lie and also, concomitantly, the more cultural sensibility will be vulgarised by flashy cinematic mendacity until it can no longer discern real art at all (and thus feels no need for it). - How long before we see '9/11 - the musical' (probably already been done)!?
You mention 'frugality' and 'simplicity' - what strange revolutionary words they sound like in today's crudely self-referential age, full as it is of gender pseudo-complexity. How would a tediously self-conscious degenerate like Sam Smith thrive on an artistic diet of metaphorical and actual frugality, one wonders? Conversely, real art requires terrifying discipline. You yourself will know just how rigorous are the terms one accepts when one contracts with one's conscience to put pen to paper! But I much appreciate your optimism too when you suggest we could pull this around. Indeed, we could, but it will only be by a kind of secessional movement, artistically speaking. Real artists and real people, i.e., the brave minority of us not fatally afflicted by 'the message', will just have to go our own way and hope eventually to draw an audience by the sheer quality and appeal of our vision. The problem remains, of course, being allowed to do so. Can you imagine Hamlet getting past some 'spotty Herbert' leftist reader in a modern script department? The writer would probably get a knock on the door at midnight. Nietzsche talked about 'endurance' as a test of real character: well, no doubt we must endure this vile cultural descent into madness in order eventually to come out the other side. Lord knows when and where that will be! But the luminous clarity and deep sympathy of voices such as yours will be largely responsible for the survival of all - or at least some - of what we brilliant Europeans hold most dear!