DIVING INTO THE CULTURAL SHIFT AWAY FROM OPTIMISM IN FILM
By Felix Hughes
Take many of the best-picture nominee lineups from the 80s and 90s, and while it might not be immediately clear, there is often a common thread between each year's nominees: optimism.
Take 1990, not usually seen as a strong year for the Oscars, but embedded in each movie is a sense of hope and promise for its main characters. Field Of Dreams is a highly optimistic mediation on the American dream; both My Left Foot and Born on the Fourth of July address heavy subject matter but end on a hopeful note of triumph over adversity; the 1990 winner, Driving Miss Daisy, is the last PG-rated movie to win Best Picture and has even been criticized as being too earnest in portraying questions of racism.
Still from Field of Dreams.
Now, compare the nominees from 2024. Oppenheimer, the winning movie, ends by suggesting humanity is destined to wipe itself out – hardly hopeful. Some may suggest The Holdovers was the feel-good comedy of the bunch, but its tone is more cynical and dry than overtly uplifting.
This shift from optimistic to cynicism is partly a result of wider boundaries filmmakers can push today. While the 70s were a decade that pioneered the scope of indie filmmaking, the 80s saw a shift as studios were no longer willing to invest in such risky projects. For example, United Artists was a studio similar to A24, providing young filmmakers with carte blanche to make what they pleased with little oversight. But after significant box office failures – most notably Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate — United Artists could no longer afford to be an independent studio and was sucked into the Hollywood machine, taking Hollywood's finest with it. This shift saw a reduction in director's power over their film and move towards 'high concept' features.
80s filmmaking focused on commercial appeal first and artistic appeal second. Pushing the boundaries was fine so long as one could still sell it as a toy, and the entire family could see it. Grittier movies still had their time, with Platoon or The Killing Fields getting recognition, but these were few and far between.
Instead, films like Chariots of Fire, Out of Africa and Rain Man won best picture, each of which many now decry as 'Oscar bait' that prefers a happy, simplistic portrayal of subject matter over a realistic one.
But, by the 90s, things had shifted back to directorial power. Directors like Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and David Fincher brought new styles and directions that pushed out the idea that only family-friendly movies were marketable to a broader audience. The fan bases of these directors grew and often so did their box office receipts and Studios couldn't resist. Thus, award-winning movies became more nihilistic than ever before. This shift has stuck to the point where films aiming to win awards that are more in line with the tone of 80s movies are dismissed as soapy, simplistic, or dreaded 'Oscar bait.'
Some attention must also be paid to the influence of international cinema. Since the turn of the century, international cinema has received more recognition in the cultural zeitgeist than ever, culminating in Parasite becoming the first foreign language movie to win Best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards. This brings a cultural shift in that, somewhat like the Tarantinos and Fincher’s of the 90s indie wave, foreign films that have broken through to the English-speaking world are often dark in their subject matter.
Still from Parasite.
Up to this point, Hollywood audiences preferred simpler, lighter movies, and suddenly, they were introduced to foreign movies that revelled in a darker tone. One of the biggest breakout hits from the early 2000s was Park Chan-Wooks Oldboy, which portrayed a bleak world. Once again, this showed that the limits could be pushed, and studios sought to cash in on this by trying to copy this style. Thus, the optimistic arthouse movie lost once more.
While some films have shifted to a darker tone to push the limits, the intellectual shortcoming of major blockbusters creates a feeling of pessimism in movies. Terminator II: Judgment Day, despite its apocalyptic subject matter, is a very humorous movie, and its ending offers hope for the audience in proclaiming that one's future is not written and is what one makes it.
Yet, by the time we get to its legacy sequel, Dark Fate, we see a movie that scarcely stands on its own two feet, retreading the same plot lines. Audiences know precisely where the film will end, so any well-earned triumph is non-existent. Retreading the same movie dampens the impact of earlier movies in the series that are now declared unimportant, so "conflict is only ever over until there is a sequel." Any optimism a moviegoer might've had watching Judgment Day is lost when watching Dark Fate. With legacy sequels a mainstay in blockbuster filmmaking, it becomes hard to watch many of these movies and not feel cold and cynical about them.
The decline of optimism and film can be divided into two camps. On the one hand, we have seen a decline in award-winning and indie filmmaking that came about not necessarily because optimism was bad but because directors had newfound opportunities to make a movie as they pleased, without restricting their vision to cater to a family audience.
In the other camp, we see this decline in how the modern blockbuster has become recycled and stale, offering us few original stories and, thus, no new endings that leave us feeling better about the world. Even with this crisis in originality, that does not mean to say optimism in film is dead. People want to go to the cinema to feel inspired, to turn away from a fractured world for a moment, and to be reminded of the good in the world rather than a lack of hope. If audiences want a change, they will have to demand it however they can.
Image Credit: Field of Dreams Movie Site; Shot.Cafe; and Purple Clover.