A meandering comment that I chose not to post on another blog today. To be clear, this is not some final-word manifesto. This is me exploring:
It’s not so much that Hollywood doesn’t “get” emotional cores but, rather, that Hollywood must get the movie out whether they’ve found the emotional core or not. If emotional cores sold tickets appreciably more than spectacle, you can bet that Hollywood would make finding emotional cores an essential part of production. Movies, right now, don’t make money based on your satisfaction but on your curiosity.
Hollywood has certainly demonstrated that you do not need a humming emotional core powering a picture to make a movie a movie. It’s not necessary for every picture to live beyond its meager money-making life-cycle of theatrical and home release, after all. Not every movie needs to be timeless. Sometimes a movie is just a movie, and that’s not a crime.
We aspire to something grander and more timeless, and there is great power and adoration to be had in that story that taps into its emotional core (or its character’s emotional core) and connects to its audience through it, but some stories are just strings of exciting events. That can be pleasing, too.
Movies can move us, but sometimes they’re just about laser blasts and explosions and a well timed kiss. Not everything can be the pinnacle of its form, after all, and we must appreciate that not every instance of a product is going to be a marvel or an exemplar of the form.
When I hear that Hollywood doesn’t get it, I always wonder who Hollywood is. Which executive or which producer or which director are you talking about? I read on Facebook that Hollywood finally figured out how to do remakes, as evidenced by the new A-Team picture, as though director Joe Carnahan (Narc, Smokin’ Aces) had tried this trick before and gotten it wrong. As though all the previous remakes were made by the same cadre of filmmakers, all deviating from the same simple guidelines of “finding the emotional core” and exploiting it.
It sounds like I’m apologizing for Hollywood here, and maybe I am, but my intent is to make manifest my acceptance that 90% of anything is, as they say, shit. And that it’s not a big deal. Storytelling involves a lot of important structures and guidelines and goals, but it isn’t as though movies only fail to achieve the pinnacle of their form because they are just too lazy to give a damn about emotional cores or characterization or whatever storytelling element is the topic du jour.
Storytelling is relatively easy, but great storytelling is hard.
Great movies aren’t the baseline, despite what an Academy or YouTube montage might imply. Great movies are champions of the form, and great stories are rare. Mediocre stories have a place—some as background noise, some as example lessons, some as mere entertainment—but let’s not mistake great storytelling as the average against which other movies don’t measure up.
We demand stories at an astonishing rate. We don’t want the next great feature film to be here when it’s done, we want it now.
As long as we demand stories to be fed to us constantly—and I can’t think of a finer thing to get fat on than stories—we have to accept that some of them will arrive on time at the expense of excellence. In exchange, what we get is the occasional dose of excellence, amid the chaff.
If we are to write off every creator, every institution, every storyteller, every studio that produces a misfire as not “getting it,” we are minimizing just how hard it is to tell a great story and we are confusing storytelling with show business.
Sometimes they overlap, and praise be for that, but let’s not generalize about what Hollywood does or does not get based on the fact that it has produced chaff alongside the wheat. Hollywood is a lot of people, and that kind of empty kvetch (and its counterpart praise) doesn’t help us understand the craft.
Learn who it is that’s making your entertainment and understand how it can go wrong.
