On a recent viewing of David Lynch’s 1987 neo-noir mystery, Blue Velvet, a question formed in my mind: when was the last time Hollywood produced a film as strange and unique as Blue Velvet? With its soundtrack, plot, production, and overall tone, I can’t remember the last time I saw a mainstream movie made after 2010 that had that same mood and quality. Now, this notion could very well be passed off as Lynchian peculiarity getting the better of me, but it left me thinking about cinema culture as a whole in contemporary Western society, with a specific and direct lens on Hollywood, big-budget films.
Two main reasons can be accredited to the cause of the cinematic zeitgeist feeling stunted and repetitive: audience appeasement and money. All movies nowadays feel the same, because without audiences wanting to pay to physically see a movie in the cinema, production companies cannot make a profit, and so the movie flops. Hence, mainstream movies today are using the same techniques, the same plots, and the same structure, because previous success will sell again. At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business.
Film structure, plot progression, and storyline development are potentially the most important elements of a film. No matter how good the plot is, if the story isn’t being followed, the audience won't like it; thus, a linear storyline is the blueprint to most contemporary films. Tarantino's 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs brought the non-linear storyline to the mainstream. This led to ripoffs and dupes of his structures, and made the format arguably overrun, and now we're back to square one: set up, conflict, resolution.
In the spirit of audience appeasement once more, Hollywood films are ruining the tone of movies nowadays by trying to be too trendy. Social media users on all platforms, whether it be Letterboxd or Reddit, Instagram or X, have caught up with this point, noting the cringiness of contemporary movies using what some have dubbed ‘TikTok language’. With the trend cycle moving at rapid speeds, films that use trendy language, outfits, and hobbies at the time of production end up looking too on the nose and aim to be so in tune with pop culture that it just leaves the film feeling dated from the minute you buy a ticket on release day.
I’ll leave you with one more point: Hollywood is scared to take cinematic risks in an effort to preserve sensitive audiences and keep their money up. Gangster movies are too violent, the lead man in a romance is high-key misogynistic, horror movies are over-sexualised. So Hollywood changed this! Gangsters get taken down, the lead man learns about emotions, and now everyone is killed in the horror flicks – not just the teenager who had sex! The contemporary film scene has become lazy and repetitive in an age in which critical thinking, nuanced characters and intricate plots that don’t have definitive yes and no answers to moral or social quandaries are lost.
Now, this isn’t to discredit and say that the real issues and concerning, glamorised ideology that was in film is good by any means, but at the same time having morally corrupt characters and themes is representative of the evils of the real world, and is thus important to have represented in film. In an era where the line between originality and rip-offs is basically non-existent, audiences have the opportunity to embrace the comfort of familiar films while still appreciating and supporting filmmakers who take creative risks and go against the conventions of contemporary cinema.
Go to small, local cinemas, watch independent films, and critique what you see!