Whatever

Nihilism is nothing new, but it’s hard to recall another moment in movie history — outside, maybe, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia — in which we’ve been subjected to so many films stripped bare of rational moral judgment and politics both. How did we get here is the question, not just because they tell us about how we live now, but because Very Bad Things is not the last of these very bad movies. You could blame other filmmakers. But Scorsese’s virtuosic sadism, no matter how sporadically abhorrent (as with Casino), remains inseparable from his deep sense of good and evil, while Tarantino, for all his giggly sadism, did structure Reservoir Dogs around how long it takes for a sympathetic cop to bleed to death. And, anyway, is Michael Madson slicing off a guy’s ear in Reservoir Dogs, and jolting us into a state of shock, honestly more offensive, more immoral than, say, Bruce Willis chipping golf balls at a Greenpeace boat in Armageddon, a scene played for laughs?

Not to let Armageddon’s creators off the hook, but trying to place original blame for the moral and political vacuum at the core of so many of our movies seems, finally, a zero-sum game. If nothing else, it’s terrifying to imagine this vacuum being filled with still more of the pseudo-spiritual pap of which Hollywood has recently become so fond. Writing about Buñuel, Bazin argued that the cruelty of the director’s films was not his own, that "he restricts himself to revealing it in the world." This was not a cinema of pessimism but, rather, a cinema of love: "Because it evades nothing, concedes nothing, and dares to dissect reality with surgical obscenity, it can rediscover man in all his greatness and force us, by a sort of Pascalian dialectic, into love and admiration." It doesn’t seem too sensational to suggest that right now in this country we are being inundated with a cinema of hate, a cinema that encourages our sadism, our scorn and, worst of all, our total disinterest — toward the world, other human beings, and just maybe ourselves.