The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

>but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field

sure, but it was self-funded and it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible. Which it wasn't in the grand scheme of things.

I can't remember whose blog it was on but someone recently compared audience and critic ratings in the 70s/80s and today, and in the past there was a lot of overlap. Today completely divorced. And it's honestly because the audience, not the critics, just can't take anything unconventional. Creators that had mainstream appeal, Kubrick, Tarkovsky were out there by today's standard. You could not put the opening scene of 2001 in front of a modern audience without half of the people playing subway surfers on their phones. Or take Lynch, he wasn't just niche, people made an effort to understand that stuff.

I noticed this in other media too. I saw reviews for Kojima's Death Stranding 2 and every five seconds someone went it's so weird as if that's almost an offense, from the guy who made the Metal Gear universe. You make something like Evangelion today, the biggest mainstream anime franchise at the time, you'd probably have people on social media cancelling it for some of the more Freudian stuff in it, and complain because there's not enough plot in it.

I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a movie might be good in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. There's no curiosity that it might be more than what they saw it to be. And when everyone sees art as beneath them (or at least, certainly not above them), it loses that transcendent quality.

Many of Kubrick's movies were panned at release and only received merits upon reexamination. Even 2001 was initially met with a mixed reception.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywoo...

I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.

Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.

There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.

>it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible.

The biggest issue with the movie is that it's boring. I personally think the weirdness wasn't used to it's full potential.

A very similar (and highly underrated) movie is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales which in my opinion is far superior and vastly more entertaining to watch. Which I guess does prove there is some merit to your point, since this movie was also panned by critics and audiences for being "way too weird".

The art house vs blockbuster dichotomy has existed for a while, but I do think the internet as a medium makes it hard to have truly individual opinions. The whole point of reviews is to surrender a bit of your judgment, but this is more dangerous when the reviewer is an aggregate group. Lots of dogpiling, etc.

2001 is one of those movies that get better with every rewatch. The only part that doesn’t get much better is the stat gate sequence, which starts to get a bit long after a couple watches. Otherwise, every minute detail is masterfully crafted into the finished movie.

Couple of points in defense of the stargate sequence:

a) It’s meant to be seen and heard on what even today would be a pretty insane cinematic setup. Even moreso than the rest of the film, it loses a lot in the translation to the home theater, or even a typical multiplex. Maybe this is heretical, but I’d love to see a carefully upscaled, remixed 2001 in IMAX.

b) The stargate is perhaps the singular element of the film that was the easiest to imitate, vs. say the incredibly thoughtful and detailed production design. So it was replicated to the point of psychedelic cliché.

Genuinely curious if contemporary audiences found it overlong or just perplexing.

There are parts of it in false color that are perhaps a bit more obvious and less "magical" now.

I would love to see what Stanley Kubrick (and Douglas Trumbull) could achieve with current technology for the same sequence. I'm not sure audiences would survive the warping of their senses though. Some would come out irreversibly transformed.

I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a cloud might look like a shape in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. Poor rubes, I'm just more insighftul in the field of nimbohermenutics. The internet has revealed to us normals that an awful lot of "trust me, I'm upper class, this really is superior" was the idle rich patting each other on the back, empty posturing, tax dodges, a game of words as a passtime and social in-group signalling. Twitter and ubiquitous videos of daily life have broken the illusion.

Am I willing to hold the idea that a movie might be good in a way that goes over my head? Yes - take books, I'm never going to read James Joyce, I won't study the historic texts it references, I won't learn the Dublin colloquialisms, I won't understand his wordplay, and I accept that the people who do will get a lot more satisfaction from reading it than I would get from the few scraps I might make sense of.

But if you tell me the painting of a blue rectangle is worth millions, and I just don't understand because I'm a simple pleb and you're a true art connoisseur, and that the art house movie just has more sophisticated culture that a low-brow wouldn't understand, I go back to saying that if you stare longer at the clouds you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you are sharper and more imaginative you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you enjoy finding patterns in clouds you will find more of them. That doesn't mean some clouds have more meaning in them.

And if it's you telling me I can join your club of exclusive film afficionados if I pay the member's fee and spend hours watching the film, or that I can read your educated critical thoughts on 2025's Cloud Patterns in your review column in Cinema Monthly magazine, well that's sounding more like a racket.

Two different people recommended Severence to me [it's a streaming series about people who have their brains severed so when they are at work they cannot remember the outside, and outside they cannot remember their workday]; I find it boring. Is that because I'm a simpleton who can't appreciate social commentary and can't follow unusual storylines, or is it because I've read a lot more SciFi and spiritual self-help mumbo-jumbo than either of those people have, so the ideas are less novel and exciting to me? Sure there are objective things like "this lighting and camera technique was pioneered in $FILM" which I can't see and you might get enjoyment and satisfaction from noticing, but is that really different to me commenting that they have CRT/desktop computers harking back to the IBM XT instead of going with a Star Trek LCARS style flat UX, or that the Data Reduction team shouldn't be able to work with encrypted data because good encryption would not give any information about the plaintext content, or that using the computers to show numbers-as-text is really broken because computers are a tool for turning numbers into human-friendly graphs, sounds, pictures, and by showing the computers as dull numbers machines the writers are revealing society's lack of deep computer understanding and we've all missed the point of Jobs' "computer as bicycle for the mind"?

And there are more subjective things to say about media e.g. "this is Plato's Cave" but is it really, or are you seeing Plato's Cave in the clouds because you were hunting for Classic Memes or because you have spent more time studying the Classics so the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon kicks in and you notice more of the things you know about?

Sure, sure, "all art is the same, nobody is any better" says the intellectually sterile internet commentor. Sure, sure, you're just a higher calibre of person and it's not that everything in life is a status game and you're positioning yourself as higher status by self-declaring that the things you spent more time on are the better things. Yes, people are smarter than me, people know more than me, people see more connections in films than me - but the medium through which I learn those things, the way that message gets to me, is very suspect; why am I reading a newspaper column where you take a broadcast position and get paid to tell me that you see more meaning in a film than me? Why are you, the sublime intellect, spending your life watching films and commenting about them on the grubby pig-mud internet while claiming deep meaning, instead of fixing the world or sitting ZaZen on a mountain top? Why am I hearing about this from a Film Professor whose income depends on people believing that film is deeply meaningful, or from a Film Studies graduate whose self-image is partly supported by the idea that their expensive degree is about more than just simple entertainment? The medium is the message, and the mediums are not truth-finding, they are marketing and entertainment.

It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".

And isn't nature wonderful, but is this art?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVmw3ZhdzEs - Steamed Hams, in the style of the banned Soviet film Glass Harmonica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynyv3oHDRg0 - Steamed Hams, but it's French New Wave cinema.

There's no curiosity that Steamed Hams might be more than what you saw it to be. Sad times.

https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...

> It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".

Everything you said was baked into my post already, so it's funny to me that your conclusion ends up being the exact phenomenon I was talking about. I don't feel like going point by point but nothing you said was something I haven't considered.

Yes! Sometimes there are experts in higher-up places that do simply just understand something deep and insightful that you don't, and they may not have a peer-reviewed scientific study justifying this. You are allowed to not accept this - it may even be true, although I don't think so - but how are you going to keep thinking about what you might not know yet if you're already convinced you know about as much as the author does?

Like... are you going to keep thinking about the ideals in Star Trek if you think you know more than Gene Roddenbury? Are you going to keep thinking about what Lord of the Rings means if you're absolutely certain no author could really be THAT insightful? I've already come to a conclusion here: no.

> "Like... are you going to keep thinking about the ideals in Star Trek if you think you know more than Gene Roddenbury?"

This doesn't follow as a piece of logic at all; I often find some computer related comment on the internet by a beginner where I definitely do know more, and the comment is a trigger for me to keep thinking about the details long after the comment is over.

We could list some ideals in Star Trek, e.g. the multicultural bridge crew, and then think "I know more about that than Roddenberry so let's imagine about where Roddenberry could have done better". (I'm not claiming to know more, just spinning a thought experiment). Or you could say "look I've studied a lot of multicultural ideals and I knoww more about it than you, and you could learn something of it by watching more Star Trek and focusing on that point". The important part is that you can list specific ideals in the work, and then we can talk about those ideals.

We could imagine a movie about the killing fields of Cambodia. I don't want to watch it. You are saying "you don't think there is anything in there to understand!". But I am not saying that. This is not "the exact phenomenon" you were talking about because here I am accepting that there are things I don't understand, as I did with my example of James Joyce's writing.

However, what I do reject is the idea that there are films which you claim contain deep meaning that you understand - but you can't say what that meaning is, you can't demonstrate its presence, you can't demonstrate that you have the understanding which you claim to have, or demonstrate that I do not have it, but you are convinced that you understand it more deeply than I do and that elevates you to a higher status than me. That is the realm of every mystic, street corner preacher, megachurch pastor, cult leader, every psychoactive drug taker, every dreamer and philosopher, many artists, con-artists and scammers, and should be rejected under Hitchen's Razor ("What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence").

Am I going to think about what Lord of the Rings means? Probably not. I have read enough songs (one song is enough) about Bilbo Baggins hating it when people are careless while washing up plates. That's not because I claim to know more than Tolkien. But if you say "Tolkien made some deep commentary about the choice to suffer to protect those you love" that's different claim than "Tolkien made some deep commentary and it was like, whoa dude, you just had to be there, it was like - well, it was so profound words can't do it justice - but I understand it and if you don't agree then you must be a base simpleton philistine" and you say it in a magazine with a posh register. Yeah well the clouds were very deep and meaningful too and I saw Man's Inhumanity to Man in them, you'll just have to trust me. Why not spend a few hours contemplating it?

I recently did a rewatch where I replaced the audio in 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' with Pink Floyd's 'Echoes'. It really changed the experience for me. Going into 20+ minutes of psychedelic rock after over 100 minutes of classical music really made it feel like a transformative experience.