Like all film school dropouts, I have spent most of my adult life actively avoiding engagement with facets of mainstream and modern cinema that I perceived as devoid of… let’s say taste. I woefully indulged my loved ones by seeing certain Marvel releases, Star Wars sequels, and live action Disney movies all while holding an air of superiority, insisting that no matter how good they might be that I had not really enjoyed them. And although most of the time, I had genuinely found them quite deplorable, I think these reactions reflected an inherit pessimism towards movies that didn’t actually reflect any sort of critical engagement. That pessimism in turn spread to how I viewed movies in general and I began to lose taste for the very thing that made me interested in film in the first place: the spectacle.
The Society of the Spectacle is a philosophical work turned film by Guy Debord which in broad criticizes society’s growing relationship with mass media as it reduces our social relations to something mediated through images. Much like the idea present in Simulation and Simulacra, the problem for DeBord is the reproduction of feeling rather than feeling something for oneself. His film, famous for putting me to sleep, takes an explicitly Marxist stance and urges the mass populace to ignore distractions and get organizing. Although my disdain for main stream media didn’t stem from my desire for revolution, I found and still do to a certain extent that the base of his critique remained true: spectacle cannot replace feeling. Additionally, I find the timing of his critique (the late 1960s) to be rather relevant, as now that time is still viewed as one of relative artistic freedom especially in filmmaking spaces. This demonstrates that the critique of contemporary media is rather endless, take for instance the Martin Scorsese vs Marvel incident, and that discontent with the spectacle persists regardless of how deep in the trenches of the slop we may seem to be. And for many years, I felt as though we were deep in the trenches… that is until I saw the Minions movie.
The Minions, for many years, was a piece of media I would have never considered worth watching or critical thought and was sort of a peak example in my mind of media produced explicitly to satisfy profit motives. And perhaps it is… but it’s also a lot of fun. I could go on all day about the genius of the minions, the way it fits into a sorta Charlie Chaplin mold of comedy and classic serialized silent comedies but I’ll hold off on that for another time. Because ultimately, it is one of many examples of contemporary cinema that is both undeniably a product of a capital driven studio trying to extort audiences for maximum profit that is also fun and finds itself homaging and referencing great films of the past while still inventing its own mythos. The tension that exists between film as art and film as business has always existed and will likely continue to persist unless current circumstances dramatically change, but that tension has still managed to produce all ranges of cinema throughout history. In fact, I would argue that with the increase of ease around access to filmmaking equipment and accessibility to platform and share art, that it has become easier to produce and share countercultural pieces of media. But that’s beside today’s point. The point is that there is an incredibly long list of grievances that one could make about the modern state of the film industry and there are always countless stinkers that get released by evil people trying to line their pockets, BUT there is no reason why we can’t enjoy the now while hoping for something better. It’s okay to enjoy what you can from our current offerings while also showing support to the art you want to see more of, and I don’t think it diminishes revolutionary intent (if that’s what you’re after anyways) by having that perspective. The slop has always existed, and in many ways our endless access to it has made it feel heightened in many ways, but there are glimmers of humanity there despite that.
There is joy to be shared and emotions to be felt through it all. So get out there, and live it up, Minions style.