Nothing Happens: Mumblecore and the (possible) Reason Violent Films Are Popular
I remember, many years ago, watching the beginning of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. The opening credits rolled on forever. A black luxury…
Nothing Happens: Mumblecore and the (possible) Reason Violent Films Are Popular
I remember, many years ago, watching the beginning of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. The opening credits rolled on forever. A black luxury sedan is quickly driving in long circles, its sound growing and declining as the car gets closer and further from the camera – the camera itself slowly panning out, showing the car still circling in the middle of a desolate desert valley. By the time the opening credits ended, I wanted to turn the movie off, but, being optimistic and hopeful for the director of Lost In Translation, I kept watching. But it didn’t last long. After seeing a sad, rich celebrity have sad and shallow sex with a hollowed-out caricature of a female body – a tool in the functioning of this masculine-centered narrative – I had to turn it off. I was done. It was too boring.
When I think of this now, however, I realize that I love movies like Somewhere that seem to be about nothing. Slacker is a personal favorite along with La Dolce Vita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Roma. But I still haven’t seen Somewhere.
When we watch a boring movie (by this I mean a movie that is quiet and usually not full of any dramatic storylines, or definitive plots), we seem to find them as such because they do not satisfy a cultural need for something outside of our daily lives. We might say, if we don’t like a movie, that “Nothing happens.” But I wonder if these boring movies are only boring because they are close to reality, our reality, or someone’s reality, or tell us something about the current world to which we live we live, and in a less glamorous way. They are unagradized depictions of life, more emotive than dramatic. So, in that sense, nothing does happen in these types of movies often associated with the Mumblecore genre. They are boring because they are reflection of life. And a contemporary life is ultimately boring. Perhaps a general audience is uninterested in these films because they don’t satisfy the viewers leaving their personal reality, but instead push them further towards it.
We want films like The Bourne Series, or The Hangover, or Bridesmaids, or Fatal Attraction, simply because they are far beyond our normal state of being. They satisfy some desire in us for suspense and a heightened life, one that we feel we don’t currently lead or could not possibly lead, like a Marvel character. But why is that satisfying? None of us want those stories to come true for ourselves. No. We want our lives mostly unchanged. But we want to experience something more – more intense and somehow more authentic and raw, or at least more visceral than contemporary life.
Let’s take one example, The Bourne Series. To sum up the plot, it is about a man who slowly is rediscovering his past as an assassin while trying to escape his high-stress life in order to find peace in some state of normalcy, something like the life we lead currently (I am painting broadly here). But the CIA is always trying to kill him for fear that he might give up valuable government secrets which, secrets he never intends to share until they step on his fragile life, which leads him to search for them, and take them out. And it’s Hollywood, so he wins.
But through these films, he is at constant odds with the state. He becomes the ideal contemporary outlaw. He fights the very thing that made him a pawn to their gains, and we love the justice he brings, like Robin Hood to a dying village, gold in hand. This is one way Bourne satiates our desire to dream.
Then there are the long fight scenes in the films. He is always provoked, and so he is just in his killing. But these fights also have a strange satisfaction. Like Paleolithic people fighting a great predator, he brings us close to our primal anxiety of being attacked, or being eaten. In the same way as his physical pursuers, the state is also the predator that he must defeat it in order to feel safe in the world. He must kill the predator. This is what humans did successfully thousands of years ago, ultimately killing most of our largest predators. And because we don’t live in constant fear of our lives at the hands of greater predators, we need these visceral, intense, and grotesque forms of entertainment in order to soothe our primal anxiety over the predator. Because of these films, we get to leave our mundane reality and enter a life teaming with endorphine-riddled authenticity.
(It should be noted that this is all hypothetical. I have not found any science-based research to back my thoughts on how watching these kinds of films affect or stimulate our brain. So, as with any good meal, add plenty of salt.)
Today, being sick, I applied to a couple of jobs, wrote and edited some work, paid some bills, added air to my bike tires, bought a burrito and watched some movies. I did nothing, and none of it is really worthy of a narrative for a greater audience than myself.
But, the first movie I watched today was Funny Ha Ha, directed by Andrew Bujalski, a film about a twenty-three year-old who gets fired from her job and is seeking love and trying to figure her shit out. It’s a fairly normal story of life (albeit a white and cis life, but we’re not talking about that now). It is also a story for anyone seeking meaning in life, which is most of us.
I can understand why people may not like the film. It is definitely boring, and very realistic. Dialogue is stitched over each other with little flow, there are coincidences and silent moments that are awkward, and nothing too special happens. But like other boring movies, that’s why it’s a good film. It looks at life as is (such a boring sentence I probably shouldn’t have written it. Oh well). It is able to effortlessly go through Marnie’s life (the main character), showing the strange difficulty of living in this contemporary world. And it makes life seem less lonely, because clearly other people are living like this too.
And yes, it doesn’t satisfy my primal dreams, but it gratifies me in knowing that my life is not so special, that we’re all somehow seeking satisfaction. Even if it can only be found in small moments, like watching a squirrel skaling a telephone line or learning a new song on guitar, or just talking with a close friend, it tells more about our current world and how people regard it than me meticulously dissecting modern Blockbuster (or should I now say Netflix?) films.
So, maybe I should rewatch Somewhere. Maybe it will tell me more about our perception of celebrity life, and in a way, bring me to a better understanding of the world I live in today. But, I might also just be bored.