The State of the Culture Is...Not Bad, Actually

Reflections on a good year for the Oscars

Image via Variety.

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Hollywood seems to be undergoing a mini-renaissance. I can’t remember the last Oscars weekend with so many shortlisted films I’ve seen; films I made the effort to go and see at the cinema and didn’t walk out of before the end. And I’m not alone: part of the reason I went to so many is that I wanted to be part of the conversations people were having about them.

For a long time now we’ve been hearing, and no doubt will continue to hear, that the dominance of the blockbuster franchise has destroyed the kind of movies which traditionally win Oscars: grown-up films with artistic ambitions, telling emotionally nuanced stories without superheroes or the extensive use of CGI. Well, it hasn’t seemed like that from where I’ve been sitting.

From the Best Picture shortlist, I’ve seen Oppenheimer, American Fiction, The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Anatomy of a Fall, Maestro, Killers of the Flower Moon. As regular readers will know, I didn’t like all of these equally, but they all explore complex themes with intelligence and wit. They did pretty well with audiences, too, albeit not on the scale of blockbusters (Oppenheimer aside). Add the two shortlisted movies I haven’t seen, Past Lives and The Holdovers, plus films that just missed out on the shortlist, like All of Us Strangers, and you have a surprisingly long list of “movies they don’t make anymore”.

Don’t worry, I’m not getting carried away. The biggest grossing films of 2023 were mostly blockbuster franchises. Moviegoing overall has not yet recovered from the pandemic. But this year’s bounty of decent films has given me a little hope that the cultural entropy we seem to be experiencing is reversible, if only temporarily.

Fellow Substacker Ted Gioia recently argued, in a very popular post called ‘The State of the Culture, 2024’, that the whole of mainstream culture is in inexorable decline, as the “dopamine cartel” of tech companies feed us ever shorter and more meaningless hits of content, both creating and feeding our insatiable need for novelty. Art has been swallowed by Entertainment has been swallowed by Distraction has been swallowed by Addiction.

Since Ted makes his argument with such force (this is the culmination of arguments he’s been making for years) it’s easy to be seduced, if that’s the word, by his blistering pessimism. But just a little reflection reveals it to be premature.

For instance, book sales have been pretty robust (with a lot of sales driven by evil TikTok). TV drama is still more artistically interesting than it was in the twentieth century, and if anything shows have become too long and complex, rather than being reduced to thirty second dopamine triggers¹.

While we may not be in a golden age of popular music, there’s a vast amount of very good and interesting stuff out there, probably more than ever; Ted himself seems to find hundreds of albums to enjoy every year. In classical music, concert-going hasn’t recovered from 2020, but in terms of new recordings it’s in surprisingly good shape.

When it comes to film, I would agree that until this last year, excellence seemed thin on the ground. We’re obviously nowhere near the artistic peaks of the 1970s. But that doesn’t mean it’s been downhill all the way.

via the excellent Stat Significant

This chart shows films on Oscars shortlists that still show up in critics’ ‘Best Ever’ lists. It’s a proxy for the quality of films being made in each decade. Yes, one bar towers impressively over the rest. It wasn’t just that the decade of bell-bottoms and oil crises produced so many enduringly great films, it’s that the great films were commercially successful. In 1975, the top ten grossing films included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shampoo, and Dog Day Afternoon.

Jaws was number one that year. While undeniably a great movie, its huge success was also, at least if you’re an extreme movie snob, the beginning of the end for Hollywood film as an art form; that or Star Wars, from a couple of years later. These two films spawned the blockbuster.

But what’s most striking to me about this chart is that it shows how that decade - the 1970s - was an outlier. Note that this graph has no curve or slope on either side of its peak. There’s no linear trend. Take out that freakishly tall bar and you see that the number of enduringly great films per decade bobs around a mean.

The 1970s wholly deserves its ‘golden age’ status. It’s interesting to think about why a creative industry hits that kind of streak. The most eloquent explanation I’ve seen is from Adam Gopnik, who made it in an essay on the early days of Disney:

The larger story of the intersection of commerce and the popular arts, within which this history sits, is not a wholly negative one, but it does have a specific shape. High moments in popular art begin when no one has cracked the commercial code sufficiently to know what will work…and a proliferation of possibilities becomes available, including, above all, the possibility of open-ended, unkempt emotion. This proliferation of possibilities happened with pop music in the late sixties, with American film in the early seventies, with long-form television in the first decade of this century.² A receptive audience, a plurality of artists, and the basic commercial uncertainty about what works or what can be made to work, and, presto, you get “Sgt. Pepper” and “The Godfather”; then someone cracks the code of commerce, and you get “Frampton Comes Alive!” and “Smokey and the Bandit.” [My emphasis].

A little harsh on Frampton Comes Alive perhaps, but you get the idea. Golden ages for commercial art forms happen in windows of transition. Take a mature industry, find a bunch of hungry young creatives who are really into what they do - who see it as a vocation rather than just a job - add a sense of profound uncertainty about what works in the marketplace, and boom.

As Adam notes, this works well as a description of Hollywood in the 1970s. If you’ve read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, you’ll know that this golden age was born from desperation. Consumers were staying home to watch TV rather than going to the cinema, and the old studio system was crumbling. Ageing executives had no handle on a generation of kids who had grown up with rock music, mass protests, and drug culture.

So the suits threw the car keys to a cohort of headstrong young film geeks - Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Nicolson, De Niro - and let them drive. The result was a lot of thematically and formally adventurous movies, overflowing with unkempt emotion, some of which made a ton of money. The Godfather and its sequel were the most successful movies of their respective years (1972 and 1975). But these artists were erratic, and so was their work, and commerce thrives on consistency. It wasn’t until after Jaws and Star Wars showed the way that the code was cracked, and the artistic window began to close.

Of course, hits were still hard to predict and there remained a lot of quality and a lot of surprises in the movies that followed. It wasn’t until the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in this century that Hollywood really found a formula for consistent success, at which point the creative horizons of the industry shrank considerably. But now that even the MCU is in decline, a new period of profound instability beckons, made more perilous by the tech-driven trends Gioia identifies. Perhaps this year’s Oscar movies represent the first fruits of that uncertainty.

Look, I would not want to make a strong argument that any of our art forms are in rude health. I might even agree that we’re in some kind of broad, long-term creative decline driven by the algorithmic flattening of everything. But our culture is too variegated and perverse to be move in a straight line, in any direction. Even if the river is flowing down the mountain, there will be twists and eddies and changes of course - and from time to time, water might even flow uphill.

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After the jump:

• A young woman who’s trying to solve the problems of old age.

• A fascinating academic study on why elites misread public opinion.

• Thoughts on Biden post-SOTU

• My personal 2024 Oscar awards

• A beautiful song from 2023…and more.