Apocalypse? Now?
Emma Stone and Joe Alwyn do really bad things, in Kinds of Kindness.
There were some stops and starts after Anthony Soprano maybe did or didn’t meet with his demise at a diner in New Jersey. The golden age of American television, more than one person ventured, was all about bad men doing bad things — but in such a fashion, or with tolerable frequency, that it seemed reasonable for us to make serial apologies for them.
Jack Bauer negotiated with terrorists by blowing off their kneecaps, circa George W. Bush making the case to roll back various day-to-day freedoms; more for some folks than for others. Dexter Morgan, a forensic investigator, satiated an appetite for murder by moonlighting as a serial killer with a vigilante M.O. not too dissimilar to Batman’s. Then came those two scions, Don Draper and Walter White, to help underline the idea that protagonists of questionable moral fibre, who were visibly deteriorating emotionally, were necessary centerpieces in the mission to conceive of cinematic art.
I say ‘cinematic’, because for a hot moment television was where serious individuals flocked to shoot and deliver stories that unfurled without bounds. The limited miniseries was by its nature designed to accommodate experiment with the risk of greatness: you could shoot eight hours of story with (no doubt) grandiose artillery, and you could cast one big name actor and surround them with (say) theatre stalwarts; and thereby assure your network (and in time, streamer) of choice that if it all went to shit at least it’d only be a one-time investment.
Powered by the foggiest memory in town, I will make another hunch that The Knick — which starred Clive Owen, was directed by Steven Soderbergh, looked absolutely glorious, and was a stupendous and unjust awards-season failure — nestles right at the cusp of this moment in pop culture history. When passion projects like this no longer needed to kneel at the mercy of traditional networks and their ratings projections; when, gradually, ultimately, there began to emerge diversifying tech brands that might pay large sums of money to populate (then) embryonic libraries.
The movies, meanwhile, were faced with a different but not divergent watershed moment. To me Zero Dark Thirty represented a violent pivot, or at least a decision point for one. It starred a forceful female lead, directed masterfully by a powerful female director, and (most crucially, because this world suffers chronic social amnesia) was distributed by an upstart studio founded by a woman. Remember when Annapurna Pictures, founded by Megan Ellison, daughter of Larry, founder of Oracle, had its logo on just as many trailers as A24 did? I welcome you to fact-check my recollections … but the culture shift was very much underway. Forceful, teeth-baring female leads — there was another, in Claire Danes’ brutal turn as Carrie Mathison in Homeland — seemed to afford moral license to the liberties of television’s bad men, who soon found themselves screaming and breaking and inhaling things on the big screen. Because the numbers and the reviews on the small screen were too compelling for Hollywood to look away.
The world of popular entertainment has subsisted in the belief that audiences need their heroes (and every now and then heroines) to do increasingly questionable things in their journeys towards self-discovery. Because, hitherto, we had seen everything except watch serious men abandon their children, undercover spies have good sex with “the asset,” and Emma Stone chop her thumb off for dinner. But it’s been almost 20 years now, since Tony Soprano – the touchstone for the trendiness of this all – found his diner Waterloo appropriated for a campaign ad by the Clinton family. (Please do as you wish with that cheeky little juxtaposition.)
It occurred to me, discussing The Brutalist with one spectator in particular, that it’s high time we tried something else.
The most frustrating moment in Brady Corbet’s showcase occurs when yet another dastardly tycoon rapes yet another misunderstood genius, to illustrate to us (the same patient audience) that capitalism is awesome until it fucks you. This movie’s primary failures are the sheer number of modern cinematic stereotypes it’s happy to peddle without doing much groundwork for why its characters satisfy certain cliches. The businessman with (it turns out) zero moral complexity. The entitled heir apparent who (it also turns out) knows exactly how the sausage is made and submits all agency to said sausage. The swaggering and then staggering genius, who is on drugs, who a strong woman must pull up just before he cedes entirely to his own depths, at the expense of a life or story of her own. There is an oldie but goldie in using a lone act of gay penetration, in a movie full of straight characters, to undo our understanding of the cast’s dynamic.
But that was not the a-ha moment for me, per se; when I decided perhaps enough is enough with bad men!, and not just because we now fully exist in an era lorded over by bad (not to mention pathetic) men. My colleague in cinema said The Brutalist’s heir apparent character, played by the otherwise photogenic Joe Alwyn, made her want to punch Joe Alwyn. Which got me thinking about what Mr. Alwyn’s agent tells him about what street cred the industry has legitimised in and around bad men – because in Kinds of Kindness, an hour after Emma Stone makes a chicken thigh of her thumb, Alwyn too indulges in nonconsensual evil. I held this up against Colin Farrell’s prosthetic makeover to play The Penguin, in HBO’s TV series, and how all of this media is supposed to be worth something because we’re all supposed to be riveted at seeing just how far bad men will go. Each episode pushes the physical and emotional limits as far as it possibly can, each time glancing over its shoulder to see how perturbed we are by the carnage; and if this is the sport of it, to be honest, I conclusively am no longer moved.
Give me the dangerous naiveté and inevitable disappointment that comes from letting Kendall Roy rizz me with takeover talk over BLTs. Give me the euphoria, dismay, and then clawing jealousy of Sebastian Stan in A Different Man, when Edward realises a new face may save him from public ridicule but not from life’s acute, intangible humiliations. Give me the endless talkability of White Lotus season 2, full of people who keep trying but failing to transcend themselves. Give me movie stars again, and characters and stories, who could quite conceivably share my flawed and terrified and frenzied response to a world that is rapidly losing its shit.
I think we’ve just about earned the old normal.
