I've had a busy day and am about to have a busy evening, doing something else. So instead of writing lots of stuff, let me do a shameless (the word always used when people are a bit ashamed) link back to one of my better (I think) Samizdata pieces on a cultural theme, called Art as aftermath, which I think may go some way to answering Patrick Crozier's kind comment on this piece here, about the grunge look in recent movies.
The gist of it is that art not only foresees the future, as Patrick notes; it also harks back to the past. It even does this when the past is miserable and the present is happy. Maybe the reason movies are drab now is that the recent past for lots of people has been drab, partly because of their imperfect housekeeping skills.
Re-acquainting myself with "Art as aftermath", it occurs to me that part of the grunge look may be a trickle down effect from high art. The masses don't get much about posh art, but they get that it is gloomier than popular art, and so, paradoxically, "popular" art has itself gloomier, because it now aspires to being posh art itself. The idea that movies are posh art has always been popular among movie makers. Now that idea has itself become popular. Ergo, movies got gloomier. Yes, I'm sure that's part of it.
Plus, I wonder if there's some artistic law that says: when a war ends you get grunge popular art. Film noire - after all, black not just in colour but in moral and pyschological mood – followed the end of World War II, and I'm sure had something to do with it. Perhaps the dislocation and uncertainty of no longer having a shared purpose? The rise of grunge in the cinema coincided with the end of the Cold War. Maybe that had something to do with it.
In that comment referred to above, Patrick Crozier mentions Bonnie and Clyde. I'd say that B&C is a fine example of a movie whose grim and amoral mood is not matched by the extreme beauty of the look of the movie. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that this contrast is what the movie itself is all about. In terms of everyday reality, both Bonnie and Clyde are squalid little failures. But they feel as if they've triumphed. So that would make it a key transitional movie, from straight happy-ending optimism to the later grimness. In a way, B&C does have a happy ending, in the form of Bonnie getting that poem published in a newspaper. Says Clyde: "You know what you've done? You've made me someone." And then they get gunned down. Maybe that movie encapsulates the ethic of the post sixties generation: artistic success please, and if that means a mere life that is nasty, brutish and short, so be it. We'll do whatever we have to do to "be someone".
I don't have time for all this, and I certainly don't have time for any more. Have a nice evening.
