"I've always been a geek," film critic and author A.D. Jameson writes in the introduction to his new book, "and what's more, I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't cool to be one." Suffice to say that's no longer the case; geek culture has taken over pop culture, and now superhero, fantasy and science fiction tales dominate the cultural discourse. Having strong opinions about dragonslayers is not only socially acceptable in 2018, it's practically expected.
But while geek culture has conquered the box office, not to mention online and cocktail party chatter, critical acclaim in film circles has been more elusive than its TV and even literary counterparts. The odd "Return of the King" Best Picture award and numerous technical accolades for genre films notwithstanding, serious movies, the kinds we think of as Oscar contenders, are still supposed to be rooted in the real, not alternate, world. To use a simplistic comparison, Alejandro Iñárritu's "Birdman," about an actor who became famous playing a superhero, nets him Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay and scores the Best Picture trophy, while Christopher Nolan strikes out three times with his actual "Batman" films.
This disconnect between acclaim and box office popularity is in part due to the films of the New Hollywood movement of the late '60s through the early '80s — a time characterized by critic Pauline Kael as "when the movies seemed to be about things that mattered" (think: "Easy Rider," "The Godfather," "Taxi Driver") — still influencing what's considered art versus lower entertainment on the big screen. The beginning of the end of that serious era, as the critical narrative goes, and the rise of the blockbuster series, began in 1975 with Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" and was cemented in 1977 by George Lucas and "Star Wars."
Jameson can't remember a time before "Star Wars." As a kid, they were his favorite movies, and he considers himself a lifelong fan. As he grew up and started watching films as a serious student of cinema, however, some of the ways that "Star Wars" was talked about, both by critics and by fans, didn't sit right with him. In his scholarly rigorous and yet wholly accessible new book “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: ‘Star Wars’ and the Triumph of Geek Culture" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 8) he declares that "Star Wars" actually embodies all of the characteristics that made its contemporaries, those "serious, sophisticated, adult films," so respected. Lucas applied gritty realism as an aesthetic — settings that looked dirty and immersive and real, characters that rang honest and true — to a fantasy tale set in space. "Star Wars" didn't kill American cinema, Jameson argues — it's New Hollywood's finest achievement.
I spoke with Jameson by phone this week about "Star Wars" and everything after. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think people get fundamentally wrong about “Star Wars”?
I think of my book in a lot of ways as a response to Peter Biskind’s book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” which is a book I tremendously admire on a lot of levels. I can’t remember exactly when it started, but gradually this notion arose that the ‘70s was the last classic decade for American cinema. Things were going great, and then we had this one-two punch of “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” and that just killed the American film industry. It killed it artistically and it killed it economically. And ever since then the movies have just been garbage: good movies don't get made anymore, it's nothing but nonstop, whiz-bang entertainment.
This narrative has been told so many times that everyone believes it these days. And you see it everywhere, whether it’s Richard Brody’s latest review of the new “Avengers” movie in the New Yorker to Robert Altman, before he passed away, his decrying of the state of the American box office. You get people like George Lucas himself who repeat these things. And even geeks repeat these things on some level.
I’m a big fan of movies, all kinds of movies. I’ve seen a lot of the ‘70s New Hollywood movies and movies before that and movies since. I’ve seen the big blockbuster movies, I like small movies, I have a background in experimental cinema and foreign cinema. And I just kept thinking, that’s not really true. Everybody says that but it’s not right. There’s something wrong with that narrative.
And don’t get me wrong — I believed it myself in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Somewhere along the line I probably said it to a bunch of people. In 2004, I probably said, “movies are garbage today.”
The other part of it was the way people tend to separate fantasy from realism — people often think of them as opposites from each other. So you have this idea that “all this fantasy stuff, somehow those artworks are further away from reality.” Then you have the real gritty stuff, whether that’s “Five Easy Pieces” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” stuff like that. And then in present day you have things like Alexander Payne’s films, like “Sideways” and “Nebraska.” They’re about real life and reality. They’re somehow closer to reality and the truth. And movies like “Star Wars” and “The Avengers” are just distractions from that; they’re escapist.
It’s a binary people make, and it makes total sense that people think that way. I get it. But the more that I thought about it, I thought, that’s not really right.
So the book came out of me trying to think my way out of those two binary narratives.
So your book claims that rather than being the destroyer of 1970s New Hollywood realist cinema, “Star Wars” was in fact one of its greatest achievements. How popular is this going to make you with film critics, do you think?
If people don’t agree with me, hopefully it makes me notorious. [Laughs.]
What about with the geeks? Is this a legitimacy argument that geek culture wants to embrace, or is it placing geek culture too much in the mainstream — even though at this point it's already totally mainstream?
I think the geeks will be happier to hear it than a lot of film critics. I mention this in the book — I think it’s in the “Children of Lucas and Spielberg” chapter. It struck me right away — a lot of these filmmakers and TV creators often talk about their works in terms of movies from the ‘70s. Whether they’re making “Daredevil” and they’re saying it’s going to be like “Dog Day Afternoon” or they’re making “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and it’s going to be “The Godfather: Part 2” of that series. Maybe that’s an aspiration they have. Maybe they’re saying it because those are great movies of the past that everyone agrees on, they’re classics, so they want to confer a certain amount of legitimacy [to their own work], and some of it is politics. But I thought, what if you take that seriously as an artistic ambition?
If you look at Lucas and "Star Wars," you really can’t imagine someone who was more a part of the New Hollywood than Lucas was. He was a central figure in it. When you look at [his earlier films] “American Graffiti” and “THX 1138” — you think of New Hollywood as a New Wave aesthetic. He met Jean-Luc Godard. He knows this stuff. He was watching Kurosawa films. If you watch a lot of the European art cinema of the ‘60s, the New Wave stuff, and you watch the New Hollywood stuff, you see them importing wholesale the techniques. And “Star Wars” totally does that.
And I think a lot of why “Star Wars” resonated with people — you talk about a classic French New Wave film like “Breathless,” and how it comes out in 1960 and it’s a breath of fresh air. Everyone sees it and they go, “that’s what I want my movies to look like.” It seems grittier, and there’s something more down to earth and appealing and everyday about it. “Star Wars” has the exact same effect on people. It comes out in ’77 and people go, “Yeah, that. That is the aesthetic, that’s what we want.” And they’ve been trying to do it every since.
And so I guess my argument, in a lot of ways, is “Breathless” and “Star Wars” are a lot closer to one another than people give them credit for being.
Over the years, many critics have been unable or unwilling to separate the subject of stories — fantasy — from their execution, maybe because the tension between what we considered to be "good" is hard to neatly reconcile. But I think it also points to, and you talk about this in the book, too, an anxiety we feel about the escapist nature of geek films and books and TV shows, that they’re just empty calories, that seeking to escape from the world around us is somehow a bad or juvenile way of approaching art?
One thing I wanted to get into in the book, and it never quite stuck, was I wanted to say something along the lines that these movies are escapist but they’re kind of not escapist enough, because they always end. You always wake up and go oh, wait a minute, I’m still working this job and I still have crushing debt and I’m never going to be able to afford a house. Etcetera. It would be nicer if they were more escapist.
I’m a big fan of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and every time I watch that show I’m like, wow, I would like to live there rather than where I live. It seems like a better world in a lot of ways. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
One thing I do in the book is trace [geek culture's] worldbuilding tradition back to philosophy and science. Humans are always imagining alternative worlds and realities. What if the world was like this instead? Whether it’s in terms of political rights, or if you’re a New Urbanist and you are trying to imagine how you can redesign the city structure and you want more transit options, we do this all the time.
I think about the conflict that we’ve imagined between art and entertainment, that one has a deeper value than the other, and maybe the ideal work is able to seamlessly blend the two together. When you think about what gets praise, it’s been a slow slog for fantasy and genre movies to get high-level recognition. Do you think “The Shape of Water” Oscar wins are a win for geek culture?
That’s an interesting question. I guess it depends on how people think of fantasy and science fiction, and the relationship between genre and quality. If someone thinks of genre art, whether that’s literature or movies or comic books, if it’s genre than it simply is barred from being “good.” In some ways that’s a very old argument. But just because something’s commercial or mainstream doesn’t mean it can’t be literary or good.
The Oscars are definitely changing, though. I’m not a member of the Academy and the finer details are lost on me but I know they’ve added a ton of new members and I think they’ve been looking at some of the criticisms made of them over the years and are trying to change that.
I think "The Shape of Water" is more of a fairy tale than anything, but certainly Guillermo del Toro is a geeky director. "The Shape of Water" is not his geekiest movie; if "Pacific Rim" had won, or "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," I’d be like, yeah, that’s a total game changer. But films like "Return of the King" can win Best Picture now, "The Shape of Water" can win Best Picture.
Geek is moving mainstream, and as it moves mainstream, certain stigmas that are attached to it will — I won’t say entirely fall away, but we live in a culture where behaviors that wouldn’t have been considered mainstream or even socially acceptable [for adults] 30 years ago, like reading comics in public or telling someone on a date that you like to collect action figures even though you’re an adult, going to cosplaying and conventions, these are all increasingly seen as normal adult behaviors. They’re not the kind of behavior that every adult is going to be into, but the stigma attached to them is lessening. And I think that does make it easier for fantasy and other genre pictures to win Best Picture.
I think that’s also true of all genre films. When you look back at a film like “The Godfather” winning Best Picture, it’s a crime film. And we kind of forget these days that there was a period when people didn’t think that crime films were good. They thought they were genre films. And you look at Westerns. It’s so easy for us to forget today, but some of the Westerns made in the '50s and '60s, they were basically the superhero movies of back then, where people thought, there sure are a lot of these and they're aimed at little kids and they’re not good. You look back now at “Shane” and “High Noon” and “The Searchers,” then later installments like “Unforgiven,” and we recognize there’s a literary quality to these — I use literary to mean a sophisticated artistic quality to them — and these can be taken seriously as art. I think in a lot of cases, like “The Searchers” and “Unforgiven,” a very high art. You can write papers about them, you can write books about them.
I think something similar will happen with geek culture and geek cinema, and a lot of that is already happening. A lot of comic books are pulpy and generic, but we look back now and say “Watchmen” is a classic of literature, Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight Returns” is a classic.
Can you talk a bit about how “Star Wars” and Lucas’ realism encouraged that J.R.R. Tolkien-style expanded worldbuilding and helped make it a staple of geek culture now?
In the book I trace worldbuilding back as a philosophy and a science and an intellectual practice that’s been around for 200 years at least. Tolkien does a lot to really push this idea that when you’re developing a secondary world, in order to make the fantasy more immersive and more convincing, you really have to flesh that world out and give it not only its own logic but its own cultures and its is own languages and its own philosophies.
Fantasy has always had rules attached to it, for example, you shoot a werewolf with a silver bullet it kills them. But Tolkien took that otherworldly logic and not only pushed it, but he really, in a way, secularizes fantasy. He makes his elves and dwarves and dragons and other imaginary creatures, their cultures look a lot like our cultures in that they have their own histories and their own logic and their own philosophies and their own languages — especially languages, because he really liked doing that. Fantasy throughout the decades becomes increasingly interested in those concepts.
Then you get to Lucas, and you know Lucas, when he made "Star Wars," what he really wanted to do was adapt “Flash Gordon” into a movie. And he couldn’t get the rights to it. So he thought, I’ll make my own. But his goal all along was he wanted to make a “Flash Gordon” that was better than the one he saw when he was a kid on TV in the ‘50s. One way is when people bump into the sets, the sets shouldn’t move like they’re made out of cardboard. Maybe the actors shouldn’t flub their lines. When you go back to the first "Star Wars" you can really see the "Flash Gordon" in it. There’s a purplishness to the prose. But also he said, let’s go out to real locations and shoot there. Let’s design the spaceships so that they look like, instead of props or sets made for a movie, they look like actual machines produced by a factory somewhere, like the Millennium Falcon is rolling off an assembly line somewhere out there in space the way cars rolled off assembly lines in Detroit. It looks like it really works.
Once you start that geeky commitment to realism, you do it on every level. You do it in terms of the characters and performances, in terms of how the makeup and costumes look, in terms of how the sets and props look, but you also do it in terms of how the aliens are like. The idea is that it’s not just produced for the artwork, it’s a product of the secondary world. So when you come across an alien like Greedo, there has to be a group of people, the Rodians, they’re a species out there, they have their own language. Once you start going down that path you can see how it’s really never-ending. You look at the Cantina scene and you see all of those aliens have to come from their own planets and cultures, they have their own languages, they have to have their own stories. So you start inventing that, and it’s kind of a never-ending work.
So I wonder if the current Hollywood fascination with reboots, revivals and sequels is related to that never-ending universe concept, too, not just to the marketing reality that selling a known property is easier than a new one? I’m watching “Cobra Kai” now, which depicts Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso from “The Karate Kid,” 30 years out from their big tournament showdown. We’re picking them back up in the Valley as if their story had never stopped.
Hollywood is always going to be happy to sell nostalgia to you. In the ‘80s, there were lots of 1950s scenes in popular media, whether it was a movie like “La Bamba” or “Back to the Future,” when we were kids we didn’t necessarily see it but our parents’ childhoods were being sold back to them. I have no doubt that if you went back to the 1950s, those kids’ parents' childhoods were being sold back to them in movies, too. It just gets harder for us to see it because you have to do some historical work.
Realism is just a mode of making art, but realism tends to have attached to it a lot of political and social values. Whether it’s fairly considered this way or not, realism comes with certain biases, that realism is a superior way of making art to other ways of making art. You usually don’t see the opposite argument being made. People are very pro-realism, whether it’s Peter Biskind making the argument in “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” or it’s a literary critic like James Wood.
One of the things you can do with pop culture genres to attach a certain kind of legitimacy to them is to make them realist. That’s part of what people like about “The Godfather,” it’s in some ways a more realist take on a crime genre film. Think about a James Cagney film from the ‘30s and ‘40s, “The Godfather” is doing a more realist version of it.
These genre movies that previously would have been seen as being for kids, like a martial arts movie like "The Karate Kid," you want to bring it back, but you want to do it in a more realist fashion, perhaps in order to give it some artistic legitimacy and to make it suit adult tastes. That’s part of what’s going on there, realism conferring a sort of legitimacy or quality to nostalgia.
There’s something else going on there, and it’s something the film critic Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have written about extensively, and I’m very influenced by their work. They’ve argued that if you look through the history of Hollywood and you divide it into different eras, Hollywood is always trying to minimize risk when they make products to protect their investments. How do you do that? Genre used to be a safe way to do that. People like crime movies, you make a bunch of crime movies. People like Westerns, you make a bunch of Westerns. Then you get into this period where the stars become the attraction. People think, I like Tom Cruise pictures so I’m going to go see the movies he’s in.
These days it’s what they call the Franchise Era. Hollywood’s figured out that the safest way to guarantee their investment is to invest in these franchises. Franchises always stay the same. If you’re a fan of Wolverine when you’re a kid, you’ll be a fan of Wolverine as an adult. Wolverine will always be there; actors can come and go. So there’s an increasing pressure to not just produce an artwork, but to produce a franchise.
As it happens, the geeky interest in realism and expanding those secondary worlds and playing them out and extending them in all directions in terms of time and space, it happens to line up really well with the financial model that Hollywood is increasingly using, this franchise model. That’s just kind of a historical accident.
The fact that Hollywood wants to use these franchises and the fact that geeks happen to want these immersive secondary worlds that go off in all directions both temporally and spatially, those two desires line up beautifully with each other.
In the book you chart the rise of geek culture to dominance, and then later explore the tension between genre films made for a mass audience and those made for geeks. To use the “Star Wars” universe as an example, you point out that a difference between “The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One” is one appeals more to a mass market and one more to geeks. When our critic pointed out that “The Force Awakens” was basically a retread of “Star Wars,” he got tremendous backlash. I assumed it was backlash from hardcore geek fans. Has there been a reassessment or even just a realignment of the geek-level response to that film?
If you think about the original “Star Wars” from 1977, part of what makes that film such a phenomenon is it’s three things simultaneously. It’s a pop culture sensation, right up there with disco. At the same time it’s also a very geeky film, on a scale that geeks weren’t accustomed to seeing on that scale with that realism, so it’s a seminal work of geek culture. But as I also argue in the book, “Star Wars” is a very aesthetically ambitious film. I think it’s a great work of art, and sometimes it’s hard to see what a great work of art it is, because we get caught up in the first two aspects of it, the pop culture smash hit and geeks loving it and replicating it.
When you look at the three new “Star Wars” movies they’ve made, they each kind of pick one aspect of the original and try to replicate it. J.J. Abrams’ “The Force Awakens” wants to be the pop culture sensation, the big popcorn movie that everyone has to go see that makes all the money in the world. But it wasn’t especially geeky. The same complaint [your critic] made at Salon, that it’s a retread of the original, I see a lot of geeks making the same criticisms. “Rogue One” tries to replicate the realist science fiction, grim and gritty New Hollywood, unhappy ending kind of movie. And then “The Last Jedi” tries to replicate the aesthetic mission of “Star Wars.”
They all have their own successes and own qualities, but I don’t think any of the three does what the original “Star Wars” does. It’s one of those once-in-a-generation movies, like "Citizen Kane," that comes along and warps the culture around it in a totally new way. Everyone reacts to it from that point on. I think it’s thought of in a business sense that George Lucas is a very successful filmmaker, but I would argue he deserves to be thought of as an Orson Welles or a Jean-Luc Godard.
“Rogue One” clearly makes the least money out of all three of those movies. The geekiest one makes the least amount of money. That’s why the geeks shouldn’t get their hopes up too much.
Everyone likes fantasy and science fiction unless you’re a jerk. But not everyone wants a super-realist movie, especially if it feels like you had to see 18 movies before it to understand what’s going on. This is a problem Marvel is encountering as it goes on [with the Marvel Cinematic Universe]. As well as “Avengers: Infinity War” did this past week, I’m sure there are people who think, “I haven’t seen the previous ones, I can’t go see this new one.” I call it “the homework problem,” which is geeks love that they’re enfranchised and they love it if there are 80 million previous films and to watch [the new one] you have to know the names of 100,000 characters and their histories and speak fluent Elvish and understand subtle differences in the Iron Man armor. That’s a lot of the pleasure they get out of it. All of that is lost on general audiences, and it’s actually off-putting to them. And “Rogue One” has a lot of that.
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