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nihilistic suburban daredevils / the death of action movies
There's been a small flurry of recent writing about nihilistic suburban daredevils lately, mostly commentary on Jackass : The Movie.
Eric Zorn, of the Chicago Tribune, writes:
"...this movie is a series of experiments based on the question ... [w]hat if?
What if someone attached bottle rockets to his roller skates or tried to shoot them out his rear end? What if a quartet in panda costumes ran amok through a nightlife district? What if a tattoo artist tried to ink a smiley face onto a customer's biceps in the back seat of an all-terrain vehicle speeding down a bumpy road?
What would happen? How would it feel? What would we learn? How would others react?"
I think Zorn may be onto something (although I'm nonplussed by his assertion that these questions "[seem] to intrigue men far more than women"). For a long time I've been putting forth a hypothesis that action movies, in general, were driven by a similar spirit of inquiry. I feel like the genre, as we understand it, is inextricably linked to the rise of technology that cannot safely be pushed to its limits. People have a clear sense of the destructive potential of the technology that surrounds them, but in everyday life they don't get an opportunity to explore that potential. The result is an appetite for answers. What would happen if you drove a bus off a bridge? Or crashed a helicopter into a skyscraper? Or fired a rocket launcher at a taxicab? The best action movies answer these questions, and help us to understand our world that much more clearly.
Consequently, I believe that the rise of believable digital effects will kill off the traditional action movie. The "answers" that action movies provide no longer satisfy us if we can't be certain that the crashes or explosions we're seeing are real. We suffer from the possibility that we're seeing a false answer, an animator's idea of what an exploding jet might look like. (I see the relevant paradigm shift happening right around 1992, Schwarzenegger's year off between the morph-heavy Terminator 2 and the career-killing Last Action Hero.)
The result? A craving for "more reality." Jackie Chan, "reality programming," Jackass, and a thousand suburban kids who want to do it themselves. I don't know whether to fret for the future of our world or beam with a perverse sort of pride. |
Monday, November 04, 2002
3:16 PM
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