Why I rarely go to the movies anymore James Lileks Hits the nail right on the head, even through an influenza ridden household.
There’s another element to those crappy movies, as well - the notion that good people are really bad people. Goodness is a mask. Somehow this got expanded and given wider currency - if goodness is a mask for some, then goodness might be a mask for all. Goodness itself is suspicious. If you saw Buddy Ebsen smiling in a 1957 movie, you’d think: nice guy. If you see Buddy Ebsen grinning in a 1971 film called “Salem’s Bride” you vote him most likely to be wearing a black robe and chanting Latin backwards by the picture’s end.I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it has to do with the replacement of goodness with coolness. In the best old movies people were Good, or they were Bad, or an interesting combination of the two that resolved one way or the other by the movie’s end. (That’s one of the reasons Casablanca was so good - the Good-Good character, Victor Lazlo, was boring, and the Bad-Bad character, Herr General Fritz Uberbraten, or whatever he was called, was just there for hisses. Everyone else was mixed. Good-Bad Cap’t Renauld became good; we all know that Bad-Good Ugarte would have stayed bad. Ilsa had done a bad thing - she left Rick - but for a good reason! Etc.) But that’s been replaced by Coolness - a corrosive element that values smirky skepticism above certainty and belief.
It's the difference between John McClain and Mickey and Mallory Knox.
Posted by Rich at February 25, 2002 6:53 PM