One of the great pleasures of moviegoing is to see genre subversion in action: a western that re-examines familiar western tropes and puts them to other uses (Unforgiven), a war movie that turns predictable war stereotypes on their heads (The Hurt Locker), a romantic comedy that slides past expected rom-com beats to sneak up on poignancy and loss in lieu of a happy ending (Lost in Translation).
The strategy of a smart, subversive genre movie is a bit like Madonna's fashion culture-shifting choice to wear underwear as outer-wear: there's a special little thrill in seeing the same old things being put to provocatively new uses. Two recent releases that I happened to see in quick succession have a like-minded approach. Both Moneyball and Contagion go this route - being simultaneously true to their genres and mischievously not.
Moneyball doesn't feel like "a baseball movie" for most of its duration - we don't come upon The Big Game until we're nearly in Act 3 - and screenwriters Sorkin and Zaillian seem perversely bent on being more talk than action to its bittersweet end. Scott Z. Burns' Contagion, despite being baldly a "medical thriller," takes such a rigorously quirky approach to the unfolding of its cubist-like narrative that you forget we've been ostensibly focused on solving the origin mystery of a plague until its final scenes surprise us with that mystery's solution.
While neither film can claim to be a traditional mainstream entertainment (they're too heady and clever for that), they're both major studio releases, and while Moneyball is obviously much more of a feel-good experience, they both deliver the emotional goods - that is, to a point. What I find fascinating in both movies is that at times, on one level of traditional mainstream storytelling, they really are subversive: they consciously deny us the emotional pay-offs we expect.
Generally speaking, mainstream movies fulfill our emotional expectations of story: if a character we identify with is victimized by unearned suffering, we expect to see that wrong righted; injustice meets with justice, and we feel satisfied. Good is rewarded, evil is punished; the heroic pursuer gets his man, and a love-worthy girl gets her guy. Traditionally, this is one reason we go to movies - they're far more satisfying in this regard than say, life as we actually live it. Yet two small but telling set-ups and pay-offs in Moneyball and Contagion stubbornly resist this time-honored construct.
I'll risk minor SPOILER-age to explain. In Moneyball, the subversive team of Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill go up against Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as a team manager who doesn't believe in their newfangled approach to the game one whit. He does his best to oppose and thwart them at every turn, to the point that when Pitt and Hill's strategy starts to work, big-time, we're really eager to see Hoffman eat his hat.
You know, that scene where Hoffman has to grudgingly but gratefully agree that Pitt and Hill had got it right, after all, and maybe, in a lovably cantankerous way, offers something like an apology? Never happens. Instead, Pitt and Hill have to suffer the indignity of hearing the sports media fawn all over Hoffman, mistakenly thinking that their winning strategy was his. The two real, unsung heroes exchange a wordless glance that amounts to a shrug. And we move on.
In Contagion, Kate Winslett plays a CDC representative with a truly scary, thankless gig - she's the unlucky woman who has to inform a community that they have a full-scale epidemic on their hands. While running against the grim reaper's clock, Kate must quickly school the town's leaders in how to handle a major crisis, while she tries, against all odds, to figure out where it's started, and how to contain it.
One of the officials she has to deal with is - no other way to put it - a hostile bitch. Far from being cooperative with Kate, she seems to take this global life-threatening disaster as a personal affront, and by the time we've encountered her twice (she's even more an angrily obnoxious narcissicist the second time around), we're dying to see her get her comeuppance - hopefully delivered by put-upon, heroic Kate. But nuh-uh. Things go a different way, and this grievous wrong never is set right.
These are small beats in the larger scheme of things, and they're in tune with the greater genre-subverting approaches embodied in both films. But I was struck, days after seeing Moneyball and Contagion, by how these unfulfilled emotional experiences reminded me of something: my daily life.
How's it going for you guys, these days? Good triumphing over evil on a daily basis? Seeing little mundane villains get their just rewards, are ya? Experiencing that wonderful feeling of everything turning out as it's supposed to, in this best of all possible worlds?
Well, of course not. We're living in an age of frustration. These days, you not only can't always get what you want, you rarely get what you need, and it's no surprise that public discourse seems more and more like the venting of cumulative impotent rage (witness Occupation Wall Street).
I'm not going to go out on a shaky limb and make a case for Moneyball and Contagion as symbols of a sea-change in the mechanism of popular entertainment. There will always be, God help us, a Transformers 3. But I don't think it's entirely coincidental that both movies tap into what feels like a new realism: a gut understanding in the zeitgeist that the old-fashioned pay-offs in storytelling construction don't necessarily cut it - that it's more satisfying, in the Two-Thousand-Teens, to see our emotional experience of Things Not Fulfilling Expectations mirrored on the silver screen.
Small screens, too: Good people die, even heroes (witness Game of Thrones), good people go evil and get rich (hi there, Breaking Bad). But I find it especially intriguing to see evidence of this more realistic approach in the realm of mainstream movies, where wish fulfillment fantasy reigns supreme. Am I making too much of a moot matter (Mmmm?) Projecting a pointlessly myopic point of view? Or is this an actual trend that you may have noticed, too?
Let's hope it's the beginning of a trend. The Great Recession has shaken the American psyche out of its world-renowned consumerist bubble and perhaps enabled us to see life more as it is, and our entertainment is starting to reflect that.
Who knows what's next: honoring our elderly? Bringing death out of the closet that we might live life more fully today? An overall humility and respect for the human condition, in whatever creed or color in appears to us?
Wow, I didn't know I'd be writing those words today. Thanks for your thought-provoking post, Billy.
Posted by: Scott | October 13, 2011 at 06:17 AM
I hate to bring up reality TV, but do you think that is also having an impact on our taste? I don't know how many people have told me that they enjoy shows like Survivor and Top Chef because they seem more "real" than packaged entertainment, even though we know that this "reality" is packaged itself. But viewers are getting used to having the villain win the million dollars, or have the front-runner kicked off the show by the third week. Remember when it was so shocking to have the star of Psycho killed off so early in the movie? I have a feeling it would be less shocking today. While I agree with you about the realism growing in our media, I wonder if it is less a reflection on our emotional maturity in storytelling, but in our being jaded.
Posted by: Neil | October 13, 2011 at 07:38 AM
Yes, it's a trend but not one I like. I'm not enamored by this new trend to reality-tv-ify hollywood. I'm an escapist at heart and the more hollywood looks like my daily routine the less likely I am to pay it attention (let alone money) to go watch.
So if some hollywood executive thinks this is a sure-fire way to make money long into the future, I predict another thing coming.
Posted by: Daniel Smith | October 13, 2011 at 08:34 AM
Scott: I say an "if only!" to your "what's next?" But we can always hope, eh?
Neil! So good to hear from you, Citizen. I'm afraid (as in, "slowly we turn, step by step...") that you're right about the influence of reality TV - which isn't real in the first place (talk about the game being rigged)...
Daniel: I don't think the trend, if it is one, comes from "Hollywood executives [trying to] make money" (if anything, such attempts to be "real" would spook many studio execs I know). I belive it's coming from screenwriters and directors who are reflecting what they feel in the surrounding emo-sphere.
Posted by: mernitman | October 13, 2011 at 08:58 AM
I like this trend.
There will always be feel good films with completely non-realistic characters and plots, but the more we realize that life isn't always about instant gratification, the more conscious and thoughtful we're all going to be (ideally).
It's nice to see big studios allowing their imaginations to go a little farther than "hey, let's do that again because it worked 6894 times before..."
Posted by: JustMe | October 13, 2011 at 09:02 AM
mernitman: Would you say that there are any rom-com beats especially ripe for subversion?
Posted by: Rob in L.A. | October 13, 2011 at 09:24 AM
"We're living in the age of frustration ...". Ahhhhh, Billy, thank you.
As always, with perfection, you crystallize the human condition into words.
Re Moneyball and Contagion, I think they give us an "it's not just me" viewer recognition of own-experience, and provide us with screen buddies to share our burden, ie "if Pitt, Hill, Winslet can take it - so can I".
These characters may not overcome the bad guy, but they overcome the effect the bad guy has on them.
But I still think viewers get greater emotional catharsis and resolution from the metaphoric style of older movies, where instead of just observing onscreen characters deal with and overcome their personality issues, we overcome our own. And, instead of just BEING WITH the screen characters, we ARE BEING them.
You know me, it's all about BE.
So, yes, I'd like to see the trend continue, but with more character reality depth, and less so-called reality packaging.
Posted by: Joanna Farnsworth | October 14, 2011 at 05:10 AM
JustMe: Agreed, and again, I think it's the writers who are spearheading this (i.e. I can't imagine a development exec telling a writer, "Hey, don't give the audience the emotional pay-off they expect in this scene - frustrate them, they'll relate!").
Rob, that's a "don't get me started" proposition. You know how I feel about the Race to the Airport trope, in terms of specific beats. In the larger picture, I'd say that one of the most subversive notions a 2011 rom-com could espouse is: The protagonist doesn't want to get married, ever, and we're okay with that.
Joanna: I'd like to get "More character reality depth, less so-called reality packaging" printed on a t-shirt.
Posted by: mernitman | October 14, 2011 at 09:42 AM
"I'd like to get "More character reality depth, less so-called reality packaging" printed on a t-shirt."
As you well know by now that THAT can be arranged, BUT you can also find the answer to that in a place that's a closer than you think -- try the inside tag of a t-shirt that you recently got!! Sure is nice when you're the guy with the inside information for once. Hehehehe...
Posted by: E.C. Henry | October 14, 2011 at 11:26 AM
Hey Billy,
A very timely post. Though I haven't seen Moneyball or Contagion yet(they've yet to hit Aussie shores), I agree with the idea that they may be a reflection of the zeitgeist. For the last year I have worked for a charity that assists the families of seriously ill children. My biggest epiphany working there is that not everyone has an epiphany or wants one and many will do everything they can to avoid becoming conscious of their actions. So the Hoffman character and the official bitch in Contagion seem appropriate. I have had to deal with a father who has complained about not having enough money to feed his child who is facing the toughest health battle of her short life and a few days later he walks in with an ipod and a laptop,while the girl is left to eat dorritos and microwave snacks.Selfish prick! It's happened more than once.This has affected me so much that I've stopped the screenplay I was working on and have been writing a few short stories. I sent one to a friend because it was so different from anything I have ever written,I didn't really know what it was. She sent me back an email just saying wow,where did that come from? I want more. I'm usually a sucker for a good happy ending,but I haven't seen one for a while,so I guess it's bound to come out in my work.
I think as writers and creative people we are in tune to the subtle shifts in the zeitgeist and it's bound to reflect in our films and music and art and screenwriter's Sorkin & Zaillian & Scott Z Burns are doing just that.
:) Judith
Posted by: Judith Duncan | October 15, 2011 at 06:19 PM
hey Billy,
I just have to apologise for a word I used in my post when describing a situation were I work. I'm so sorry,I shouldn't have done it in a shared space,it came out of the moment and I hope I haven't offended you or anyone else.
Judith
Posted by: Judith Duncan | October 15, 2011 at 07:38 PM
EC: Glad to hear I can help provide the EC character depth factory with a fitting slogan...
Judith: Writers are indeed the zeitgeist monitors (and articulators). The good news in your otherwise bad news story is that you were impelled to write your way out of the disturbing feelings. Like I like to say, writing well is the best revenge.
And no offense taken, for language or thought. I'm glad you were able to vent and share.
Posted by: mernitman | October 17, 2011 at 03:48 AM
Maybe the next trend in romantic comedies will be the interspecies rom-com:
http://vimeo.com/18479035
Posted by: Rob in L.A. | March 03, 2012 at 07:22 AM