As Prospect's multiplex moocher, I would like to report a trend in mainstream cinema: it has darkened, both thematically and psychologically. The trailer for Spider-Man 3 shows that in the next instalment, arachno-man merges with a black creature from another world. The film's tagline is "the battle within." In 2005, Star Wars: Episode III depicted Anakin Skywalker's own battle within. The same year, Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins saw his parents slain and had a traumatic experience in a dark cave, setting him on his, and the film's, tenebrous course. Also in 2005, The War of the Worlds was so visually dark that cinemas put up signs explaining that the projection wasn't at fault. The Passion of the Christ (2004) was one of the most downbeat mainstream films ever made. Currently showing in the multiplexes are The Prestige, which is stygian in the extreme, and Casino Royale, which treats us to 007's battle within.
It was a surprise to discover that the movie Bond even had a within, but there's no doubt that the tone of mainstream cinema has darkened: nearly all its franchise characters—those heroes who blow in the direction of cinematic and social prevailing winds—have undergone traumas of late. Sunny disposition is out. Black is the new lack. It has happened before. In the 1940s and 1950s, European emigres and filmmakers who saw combat made more than 300 shadowy films about venality and lust that became known as the film noir cycle. In the 1970s, a more pessimistic view of human nature emerged blinking from the Californian sunshine, lasting for about a decade. And for 30 years now, tinseltown's legend-maker-in-chief, Steven Spielberg, has seemed profoundly undecided about trauma and darkness.
What is behind this new spate of mainstream movie noir? The obvious answer is 9/11, but other issues should be considered first—like demographics. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of US movie tickets sold to fiftysomethings doubled from 5 per cent to 10 per cent. Over the same period, 16-20 year olds, Hollywood's core audience since the mid-1970s, dropped from 20 per cent to 17 per cent. In the current decade, movie attendance by 55-64 year olds is projected to increase by 14.6 per cent. Add the fact that once in the cinema, older audiences buy more cappuccinos, bottled waters and glasses of chardonnay, and the massive impact of these changes on Hollywood's income projections becomes clear.
The consequence for storytelling is obvious. If you've taken a few knocks in life, films where the characters do the same are more believable; characters who have survived bleak times are more likely to move you. The success of films like The Road to Perdition and A Beautiful Mind (both of which I disliked) is widely attributed to older audiences.
The second factor is the influence of new Asian cinema. With notable exceptions, such as The Blair Witch Project, the Hollywood horror movie had for years been suffering from sequelitis and too much postmodern joking. Hollywood seemed to have forgotten that sobriety lies at the root of terror. Then along came a spate of Japanese horror pictures: Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) and Dark Water (2002), and Takashi Miike's Audition (1999). These were resolutely gruesome, and their success made Hollywood horror look lightweight. So Hollywood did what it always does—steal and copy, remaking Asian films and aping their anguish.
Some of us have argued that one of the reasons Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese and Korean filmmakers do seriousness so well is that their nations have sustained a series of traumatic shocks. The US has its own wounds, but some of them—like the humiliation and slaughter of Native Americans—did not look like wounds to the pioneering filmmakers. Others, like slavery, did, but they were borne by people who neither ran studios nor, until recently, called action and cut very often. Vietnam is a wound that certainly haunts American film, but it wasn't in itself cinematic, and had to be reinterpreted by mythmakers and legend-smelters like Francis Ford Coppola. The same was true of other national shocks, such as the deaths of JFK, Janis Joplin and Robert Kennedy.
You can see where this is going. No national event has been more cinematic, and more suited to cinematic representation, than the planes flying into the World Trade Centre. They dream about 9/11, those studio executives who meet their writers in Sunset Boulevard restaurants, eat seared tuna and talk about how Anakin Skywalker, Bruce Wayne, James Bond need to go through something darker this time. 9/11 hit those execs in their solar plexus. Apart from Aids—which was slower and stigmatised—this was the first time Hollywood saw its own kind really suffer, and the pain wouldn't go away.
So the darkness in the multiplexes these days has been caused by three changes: baby boomers in their fifties going to movies have created the audience (and market) for seriousness; Asian cinema lent an aesthetic that could incorporate psychological darkness; and 9/11 injected fear into the lives and dreams of filmmakers. Social, aesthetic and psychic factors have caused this shift to the "battle within."
