Buried several grafs down in Sharon Waxman's Times think piece on "[v]anquishing evil, battling for freedom and dying for honor" in this summer's slate of movies, she talks to an expert. No, not the bit where she talks with Jerry Bruckheimer or Stacey Snider--they only make movies, those lowly craftspeople. She talks to a UCLA film professor. This bloviating academic reminded the cinetrix yet again why, aside from an allergy to abject poverty, she never went after a PhD.
Some film and social historians read these types of movies as thinly veiled wish-fulfillment fantasies in a complicated world, or even as a coping mechanism after a societywide trauma."It is our way of dealing with a very complex thing for most of us," said Linda Voorhees, a screenwriter and visiting assistant professor at the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. "This is our way of dealing with 9/11 and how we feel about those foreigners, and those terrorists, whom we are trying very hard to define.
"In our nondefinition, we have a need to vilify, and these big pictures help the audience identify a villain," she said. "The morality of these types of movies tend to be very black and white, very good good guy, very bad bad guy. That serves our purpose of `we are good and they are bad.' These movies are very much that way."
Ms. Voorhees and others observed that societies needed time to assimilate trauma and to express it through popular culture. Movies take longer than most media, because of the time it takes to write scripts and produce and release the films, she noted.
Ahem, "nondefinition?" The sad thing is Ms. "Don't call me Jason" Vorhees thinks she's always already speaking English, instead of a half-assed combination of theory appropriated from other, more established disciplines and southern California therapy-speak.
To be fair, the cinetrix did hear a fascinating paper by a UCLA film grad student this weekend about how AMPAS used newsreels and later television to establish itself, Hollywood filmmaking, and the Oscars as "high culture." So I guess film studies' attempts at cloaking itself with borrowed and fabricated legitmacy makes sense, given the medium's own aspirational tendencies. But I don't have to like it.
