Several moons ago, I watched Marvel’s Thor- Love and Thunder and I remember laughing so loudly in the cinema that I looked around to check if I was disturbing anyone. A few months after that, I watched Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and I absolutely hated every second of it.
Mostly because it reduces the attributes of most animals to being almost the same as humans, reducing Rocket’s story to be identical to perhaps Eleven in Stranger Things or Credence Barebone from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them or… the list is endless.
I also specifically did not enjoy the focus of the film on a storyline that felt simply too dark and sad to be thrown into the Guardians of the Galaxy universe, a series that generally produces more light-hearted stories. The context for me felt lacking and it felt like Rocket’s history was purposefully made sadder so that it could ‘tug at the audience’s heartstrings’ and create sympathy for the character that as far as I know, everyone already loves.
Yet, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has received a far better reception than Love and Thunder. I wonder if this is because of a shift towards gut-wrenching, sad tales in mainstream cinema. I talk of the extreme violence and gore that has inundated cinema and television shows in the 21st century, making it almost impossible to watch more than fifty minutes of any movie or TV show with at least one gruesome murder/ suicide or scene of torture.
In this world, where trauma and violence are almost indispensable from the camera’s lens, I argue that movies such as The Banshees of Inisherin and Asteroid City take the concept just one set further. They reduce this violence and trauma further by giving it the lens of the ‘every day’.
The two movies further treat it with an artistic lens, making it commonplace, and disrupting the audience’s ability to feel any form of catharsis after the end of the film. Even if I assume that the aim of the two movies is indeed to avoid catharsis and perhaps much like Brechtian or Chinese theatre and urge the audience on the necessity for action in real life, I think that the two movies might have gone too far.
They make these images of gore so commonplace that while I am initially agitated into action, by the end of the movie I am almost bored into complacency, a point where I could not even care to act on these central themes and issues that run from the movie into our everyday life.
For example, if we look at Asteroid City, the death of their mother (off camera) does not bring much of a reaction out of her two young girls. They simply stare, realise, and digest. They resist any temptation to emote or react and simply insist on the place where they would like to bury her ashes. The lack of emotions in this storyline makes the audience feel if I can say so… nothing.
The scene is so commonplace that even when Wes Anderson’s main character burns his hand on a hot grill ‘just to feel something’ the audience is unable to even begin to process the trauma. Anderson makes these scenes of despondency so every day and the silences so uncomfortable that the themes in this movie that may have resonated with the audience really just start to bore them.
Added to this, in both Asteroid City and The Banshees of Inisherin, the focus of the film is the cinematography and the visual image, almost as an attempt to get away with their lack of a plotline. The first attempt at this is the use of a beautiful and vast landscape. In Asteroid City, it is a motel in the middle of a desert, with West Anderson’s usual, beautiful, symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Not a hair is out of place in his world unless he wants it to be.
Similarly, the rural Irish landscape in Banshees of Inisherin is breathtaking and would almost make the audience feel a sense of serenity and peace if it wasn’t for the annoying plot that is forced into every marvellous frame.
The next attempt is the use of an outstanding cast. In Asteroid City, brilliant actors like Jason Schwartzman, Maya Hawke and Tom Hanks are told not to act. The list of strong actors in this movie is endless but their characters leave the audience with little to no impact, in fact apart from Scarlett Johansson’s overtly sexual character, I cannot even recall if the film gave them all individual identities. In Banshees of Inisherin, even when Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon, give their best performances, they can do little to make the lack of plot, redundancy of the images and the absurdity of the events resonate with the audience.
This leads me to my final point, which really is the only point I’ve tried to focus on in this article. It’s not bad acting or terrible direction or a lack of visually and aesthetically pleasing imagery in these movies that makes them so hard to watch. It is instead their insistence on reducing powerful stories of losing a friend, or a loved one, stories of assault and self-mutilation into devices that simply aim to force the audience into a reaction. They focus on the 21st-century camera lens’s love for gore, trauma and violence and exploit it to provoke a reaction from the audience without providing them with a justifiable reason to feel that emotion at that moment in time.
It is the senseless induction of sadness, despair and despondency within the audience that I believe is being overused by cinematographers. It is the reason why Archie comics, comics filled with bright, happy and light-hearted stories were converted into the serious, dark and mysterious Riverdale. It is the reason why we all watch The Office, Friends, Brooklyn-Nine-Nine and Parks and Recreation, over and over again. Because the truth is we used to be happy people and we continue to long for that age.
An age where art felt accessible, free and limitless and most of all, people knew how to have fun.
