Free Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television by Chuck Klosterman

have been the least watchable movie of the 1990s, because it was so obviously designed for audiences who don’t really like movies (in fact, that was the key to its success). At this point, winning an Oscar is almost like winning a Grammy.
    I realize citing the first two
Godfather
films is something of a cheap argument, since those two pictures are the pinnacle of the cinematic art form. But even if we discount Francis Ford Coppola’s entire body of work, it’s impossible to deny that the chances of seeing an
über
-fantastic film in a conventional movie house are growing maddeningly rare, which wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t long ago that movies like
Cool Hand Luke
or
The Last Picture Show
or
Nashville
would show up everywhere, and everyone would see them collectively, and everybody would have their consciousness shaken at the same time and in the same way. That never happens anymore (
Pulp Fiction
was arguably the last instance). This is mostly due to the structure of the Hollywood system; especially in the early 1970s, everybody was consumed with the auteur concept, which gave directors the ability to completely (and autonomously) construct a movie’s vision; for roughly a decade, film was a director’s medium. Today, film is a producer’s medium (the only director with complete control over his product is George Lucas, and he elects to make kids’ movies). Producers want to develop movies they can refer to as “high concept,” which—somewhat ironically—is industry slang for “no concept”: It describes a movie where the human element is secondary to an episodic collection of action sequences. It’s “conceptual” because there is no emphasis on details. Capitalistically, those projects work very well; they can be constructed as “vehicles” for particular celebrities, which is the only thing most audiences care about, anyway. In a weird way, film studios are almost
requiring
movies to be bad, because they tend to be more efficient.
    However, there’s also a second reason we see fewer important adult films in the twenty-first century, and this one is nobody’s fault. Culturally, there’s an important cinematic difference between 1973 and 2003—and it has to do with the purpose movies serve. In the past, film validated social evolution. Look at Jack Nicholson: From 1969 to 1975, Nicholson portrayed an amazing array of characters—this was the stretch where he made
Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail,
The King of Marvin Gardens, Chinatown,
and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. It might be the strongest half decade any actor ever had (or at least the strongest five-year jag since the fall of the studio system). And what’s most compelling is that all the people he played during that run were vaguely unified by a singular quality. For a long time, I could never put my finger on what that was. I finally figured it out when I came across a late-eighties profile on Nicholson in
The New York Times Magazine
: “I like to play people who haven’t existed yet,” Jack said. “A future something.”
    Nicholson was particularly adroit at embodying those future somethings, but he was not alone. This was what good movies did during that period—they were visions of a present tense that was just around the corner. When people talk about the seventies as a Golden Era, they tend to talk about cinematic techniques and artistic risks. What they should be discussing is sociology. The filmmaking process is slow and expensive, so movies are always the last idiom to respond to social evolution; the finest films from the seventies were really just the manifestation of how art and life had changed in the sixties. After a generation of being entertained by an illusion of simplicity and the clarity of good vs. evil, a film like
Five Easy Pieces
offered the kind of psychological complexity people were suddenly relating to in a very personal way. What people like Nicholson were doing