With another needlessly controversial title, I want to talk today about why having 'great' filmmakers on a canonized list is a very, very bad deal.
Name a great director! I'm sure you can. Here's a list of names I commonly hear:
- Stanley Kubrick
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Stephen Spielberg
- Akira Kurosawa
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Quentin Tarantino
These are the kinds of names you hear from people all the time. We even have adjective forms to apply to movies like theirs: Kubrickian, Hitchcockian, Tarantinoesque. So these guys live on a list of people whose work is, at least in popular film discourse, untouchable. Far be it from the likes of you or me to claim that their work is not good.
Now most people won't claim this directly. Instead, you'll be in a conversation and confess that you haven't seen a big movie by one of these guys. Myself, I regularly have to warn people that I haven't seen The Godfather. (You may have no idea how much this angers people.) When this shameful fact is acknowledged, suddenly that person wants your blood- how dare you disrespect the canon, they will yell. What they're asserting is that a) I have no right to ignore this movie and b) I have no right to not like it.
I'm going to isolate myself here and say that I actually go out of my way to avoid watching The Godfather, primarily because of people like this. I have no issue with the existence of great films or even their constant praise: A Clockwork Orange is magnificent, Jaws is almost perfect, and I'm a massive fan of Jackie Brown (despite its inexplicable dismissal by many). My problem with this is that it establishes a list of legitimacy, therefore ignoring other films with their own worthiness. If a film is on the classic list, you have to see it, or your opinion is meaningless; therefore you should prioritise watching only classics until you have seen the 'true' works.
All of the stuff I've said so far is admittedly more a problem with how you treat films made by great filmmakers rather than with those films themselves. But this leads on to another, much bigger problem: once you're a 'great' filmmaker, you can get away with anything.
Take Quentin Tarantino. Now Tarantino is undoubtedly a very gifted filmmaker. In fact if anything his film talent is far too innate: he just is a product of film history up until that point, his particular brand of frenzied violence and pop culture natter simply the inevitable end point of a certain trend of American action cinema. But yes, definitely very good filmmaker. I never rated Pulp Fiction as legendary like everyone seems to, but Reservoir Dogs is a fantastic achievement, and the aforementioned Jackie Brown is a damned fine screenplay done justice by good directing and some excellent performances.
But we hit an issue getting past those movies. Because QT is so sure that everything he does is gold, and so is everyone else, that he can get away with making a movie like Inglourious Basterds.
I'm going to isolate myself here and say that I actually go out of my way to avoid watching The Godfather, primarily because of people like this. I have no issue with the existence of great films or even their constant praise: A Clockwork Orange is magnificent, Jaws is almost perfect, and I'm a massive fan of Jackie Brown (despite its inexplicable dismissal by many). My problem with this is that it establishes a list of legitimacy, therefore ignoring other films with their own worthiness. If a film is on the classic list, you have to see it, or your opinion is meaningless; therefore you should prioritise watching only classics until you have seen the 'true' works.
All of the stuff I've said so far is admittedly more a problem with how you treat films made by great filmmakers rather than with those films themselves. But this leads on to another, much bigger problem: once you're a 'great' filmmaker, you can get away with anything.
Take Quentin Tarantino. Now Tarantino is undoubtedly a very gifted filmmaker. In fact if anything his film talent is far too innate: he just is a product of film history up until that point, his particular brand of frenzied violence and pop culture natter simply the inevitable end point of a certain trend of American action cinema. But yes, definitely very good filmmaker. I never rated Pulp Fiction as legendary like everyone seems to, but Reservoir Dogs is a fantastic achievement, and the aforementioned Jackie Brown is a damned fine screenplay done justice by good directing and some excellent performances.
But we hit an issue getting past those movies. Because QT is so sure that everything he does is gold, and so is everyone else, that he can get away with making a movie like Inglourious Basterds.
So my main issue with Inglourious is that if anyone else had made it, it would be lambasted- but because it's QT, suddenly it's great. And the fact is that it isn't; it's half an hour too long, it feels like an hour too long, the plot repeats itself several times, and he can't decide whose story he wants to tell so tries to do both the Basterds and Shosanna and ultimately tells neither well. It's a few good ideas held together by his Hollywood acumen and the inability of other people to tell him what doesn't work. It's made especially painful because it almost runs counter to Tarantino's gifts. The master of the tight indie thriller makes a bloated, unwieldy mess; the king of character development through dialogue makes us sit through long, pointless dialogues. It's a shame, because sometimes the movie actually shows his old brilliance; unfortunately, it's just a counterpoint to how poor this particular work is.
I haven't seen Django Unchained yet, so I'm hoping it's better, but I'm terrified it'll be more of the same. Funny thing is, QT should know this phenomenon better than most; in a 1992 interview about David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, he said "After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him." (book)You may not agree with his appraisal of Lynch (I love TP:FWWM), but it's the perfect way to describe this sort of problem. That's a young Tarantino, riding high on the success of Reservoir Dogs; I think if that Tarantino could see Tarantino now, he would have to say exactly the same thing about his own work.
So what next? Well, three things.
Firstly, David Lynch got a proper kick up the arse from those terrible reviews, and gave us Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, two of his best (and riskiest) works. If Tarantino can get a proper kick up the arse also, maybe he'll stop making tripe.
Secondly, film critics and viewers need to stop treating talent as untouchable just because they made great films in the past. If we treat filmmakers with critical distance no matter what the weight of their previous work, then we will end up with a much fairer balance of interest in films. This isn't just an anti-filmmaker method: this will actually encourage filmmakers to make their best works.
Lastly, we can stop telling people there's a magic list of films and filmmakers that should be adhered to at all costs. The funny thing is, if you look at the work of those filmmakers, they are all revolutionaries in their own ways. Kubrick's films are radical and change constantly, almost directly attack the viewer; Spielberg is a quintessential populist, invented the blockbuster. These are filmmakers who would not agree with this bizarre idea of a canon. Sure, tell people what's good; don't tell them what they have to see, or devalue their opinion because of what they don't know yet.
Okay. /rant. Pray for QT. Enjoy niche films. Watch Night of the Hunter if you get the chance.
