It is completely logical, through any sort of dialectical process, to come away with the opinion that both good and bad things can become annoying. 

Some of this is a question of saturation. That’s more or less what happened to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the absolute earliest days, with Edgar Wright still attached to Ant-Man and Shane Black and James Gunn just having done Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy respectively, it was understandable to talk yourself into the possibility of films with vision coming from the studio. What was Joss Whedon if not a person with a distinct vision (never mind The Avengers is blocked like a CBS spy show)? Of course, we all know how that went. Does anybody care about Ant-Man? With the exception of Ryan Coogler, it was just as easy to hand it to that pair of company men the Russos so Kevin Feige can continue making money and wearing ugly baseball caps. Since then, the number of Marvel properties went up, quality control slipped, and Feige lost the mandate of heaven. 

Somewhere in there, Martin Scorsese did an interview and more or less said the MCU movies were theme park rides. It was certainly possible to read this interview and just view it as a private opinion made public, as directors are wont to do, but it would be easy to see online branching off into two distinct opposing camps. The first being a complete rejection of the idea that Marvel movies were primarily entertainment and that they could stand toe to toe with any movie. The second was an embrace of Martin Scorsese’s position, mostly taken by online movie fans. The result was that nobody who liked the movies before was going to be swayed by Martin Scorsese’s opinion and everybody who hated them instead gained a patron saint.

This leads us to the Absolute Cinema meme, a picture of Martin Scorsese with his hands up, almost in a prayerful motion. He looks like a priest looking to his flock. There is the strong, classic Impact font screaming “Absolute Cinema”. Where the sort of ironic detachment begins and ends is a different matter, because now, Marvel’s latest offering in trailer form declares Thunderbolts, a film directed by an A24 alum, as “absolute cinema”.

Filmness has become a quality, how much a film resembles a film instead of operating on its own logic. If you achieve filmness, anything becomes absolute cinema. Watching the Thunderbolts trailer gives you an idea of what filmness might be: a dour, badly colored video whose lack of color denotes seriousness. The film even includes A24 actors, like Florence Pugh from Midsommar. It’s no secret the Marvel Cinema brass has not been exactly happy about Scorsese making his feelings on their offerings known. Maybe “absolute cinema” is a dig at the man and the idea of filmness. But what’s more likely is that filmness is about marketing to another sector of the film world, one that is concerned with that quality being present. 

It’s no accident the creatives from A24 are part of that tactic. It’s silly to slander A24, but some of its offerings tell us a lot about this quality. Filmness is, in a lot of ways, really about how identifiably formalist a film is, about how much it uses the language of film to make a point. The Filmist director leaves no synchronicity out of their film. They are impressive in the way J. Cole is. They lack something like a voodoo or a geist. They could stand to get a little stink on them. They are capable of interesting tableaus, decisions made, pushing actors and actresses to the ends of the earth, but they are a synthetic pearl, coming from imitation instead of grit. It’s not so much about using formal film language as it is existing to please the whims of Youtubers who can spend the entire film looking for easter eggs. In many ways, it’s an equivalent logic to the bathtub action figure campaigns that constitute the MCU. 

Franchises mostly exist to pump out a product with lightning efficiency that has the same quality everywhere. Under the logic of McDonalds, you should be able to go to any McDonalds in America and get the same meal, more or less. A24 is capable of putting out films that I like quite a bit. It’s probably no accident most of them involve the Safdie Brothers, whose ability to imbue a Cassavettes realness to the postmodern New York has produced two films I love and in The Curse, a television show I genuinely think is only bested by a couple of obvious names that’d be boring to list. The film I’m most taking aim at here is the aforementioned Midsommar. Poor Florence Pugh, batted around franchises aping each other like a ping pong match with Mao and Nixon in attendance. A24’s ability to put out singular work absolves it from pure franchise ability, but there is something like a ghost franchise created by the psychic brain power of David Lowery and Ari Aster at his worst. And it’s that “franchise” these A24 creatives are modeling the Thunderbolts after.

I remain ambivalent about The Green Knight for reasons that apply to my criticisms of a movie I also happen to enjoy. After her family dies from carbon monoxide poisoning, an event that sends Dani down her herrenvolk trad wife arc, the film begins hammering in the deep schism between her and her boyfriend Christian through symmetrical blocking and shot composition. In his Letterboxd review, Jake Cole called Ari Aster the “One Perfect Shot” director, referencing a Twitter account that operates under supreme Filmist logic. Nothing is left under-directed or left hanging, no happy accidents. You might find this seductive. It reminds me of Brazzers.

 The anal direction gives us a deep distance from Dani’s journey into a fascist May Queen. In this way, I think the movie is subtlest and most effective in its depiction of race relations on the commune, as the Hargas hands the black anthropologist’s project to Dani’s white boyfriend. It’s the simple drama of good actors delivering good material. Ari Aster’s tweezing of his cult drama into a perfectly groomed piece may have actually had the inadvertent effect, convincing the “good for her” types who think Caliban and the Witch is a book with solid accounting to don the flower crown instead of seeing a person getting guided into a Nazi cult. I know he means well, but just as you can put medicine in cheese some dogs will remain stupid. I know he can do it, because the claustrophobic sense of composure benefitted Hereditary. The problem is Sweden doesn’t exist inside of a dollhouse. 

It’s in the prim and picked over filmist language that constitutes absolute cinema, a fetish for long shots and washed out coloring, black and white versions of films. As Letterboxd creates an army of filmfluencers who write shit like “So, is there a Mrs. Dr. Phibes” and describe Titan AE as “bodies in space and motion. A post-capitalist vision”, perpetual portfolio clips bound together so they can go write for a show that reboots Jabberjaw as a Soundcloud rapper, something like cliche is created out of what should inherently avoid it. While I think Everything Everywhere All At Once is mostly maudlin, I will give it credit for avoiding cliched film language even if I think the writing and story leave a lot to be desired (the minute I saw that everything bagel I was out for good). It’s in the spaces of those cliche you get something like franchise mentality, becoming allergic to chance and random accidents. What was kinetic becomes staid. Both Marvel and A24 can become victim to this phenomenon if the logic of “house style” is followed too closely. Marvel did the minute they sent Edgar Wright off Ant-Man, a decision that deflated the films after the natural arc of The Avengers was followed to conclusion. Searching for answers, Marvel goes for another house’s style, hoping to compete in that market. It’s not likely there will be some thousand year reign of absolute cinema, a totalizing impulse followed to its extreme. If anything, in its very solidification of the trope, the idea has died. The swords wielded by Letterboxders and Marvel fans are no better than ploughshares now. They’re dull. 

 

 

When necessary, after the overall article, I will self-promote. I don’t like it either, but also, I just wrote an entire essay and you read it. 

My essay “Rumble in the Belly of the Brain-Rotted Beast: Tyson V. Paul Live at the Terrordome” is now open for public access at Typebar. It’s what it sounds like. I decided I’d be watching the event the minute I heard about it, and then I only remembered it was happening because I went to ESPN to check some NBA news. I pitched it that evening and it was accepted. 

Boxing has a deep nostalgic value for me. It was probably the first sport I enjoyed. Me and my granddad would pretend box in the yard when I was a kid and would tape Friday Night Fights to watch through the week. Watching it decrease in status as I get older feels like watching the tide recede on the last day of existence. Paradoxically: watching this circus reminded me I do enjoy the circus, and I missed the last Gervonta Davis match.

I had also wanted to write about my odd relationship with Tyson for awhile, because I find him to be fairly haunting. Allow me a pretentious excursion: in Grant Morrison’s chaos magick pamphlet, he refers to the idea that “anything” can be a God. There is a similar relationship to me and Mike Tyson, but Mike has rather been how I’ve understood my own self-loathing and anger, often aimed at myself. Probably too heavy of an admission for advertisement, but this is to say that I’ve wanted to write about Tyson for quite some time, and this was the perfect opportunity. I’m loathe to quote Nick Cave anymore after his late career turn into writing advice columns but he referred to the Las Vegas Elvis as like watching the crucifixion, and, well, there you go. 

See you guys again in April.