Years ago, Forrest Wickman published a piece in Slate titled “Against Subtlety.” As the headline suggests, the essay argues that subtlety is an overvalued trait in art, assumed rather than proven to be of paramount importance, and that critics praise it too highly. Art that’s blunt is usually better and longer-lasting, Wickman claimed, and we should stop giving it short shrift. I thought it was a pretty weird piece. On the one hand, absolutely, yes - there are other virtues than subtlety, many artists create great things when they’re freed from restraint, and we should want artistic variety in all things. I’ve written before that
I was talking to my mum the other day and she made a rather sad admission. She says if she's watching a foreign-language film or TV show on Netflix, she tends to find it more relaxing and immersive than watching an English-language film or TV show on the same platform.
Why, you ask? Because if she's watching something with subtitles, she's forced to give it her undivided attention or she won't be able to follow the story. Whereas if it's in English, she can half-watch it while looking at her phone.
I despair. How hard is it to just watch a movie without looking at your phone?
That explains why I have so much trouble finding anything I want to watch. If it doesn't grip my full attention, why bother. I hate watching the same thing over and over. I hate it when I can predict exactly what fluff is going to come out of the characters mouths.
However, I think a lot of people like that. My parents spent much of their later lives in front of the screen. Hours and hours. As my mother's brain deteriorated she'd watch the same thing over and over. I think it was comforting.
Alternative take: we know what Freddie thinks of Hamas/Israel, he’s written about the issues several times. It’s good to remember there are other things in life than tragedy. Restraint is sometimes admirable in these matters. Like in art?
He's been keyboard warrioring on his notes page. I'll say that the number of comments over there that offer what I call a pragmatic eliminationist view - "Israel is responsible for what has become of the Palestinians, and for that reason they will never be prepared for coexistence" - is disturbing.
Hey guess what's not gonna happen here - we're not going to backdoor an a Israel/Palestine conversation. If I choose to write about it here, I will do so.
I'm not sure I should have been disappointed by Glass Onion, but I love Brick so much that it's impossible not to feel depressed that Johnson is reduced to extruding this kind of vacuous Netflix bilge. The big climactic sequence was ridiculous; it looked like an 'edgy' perfume advert.
Rian Johnson is an interesting case. I've enjoyed some of his films and found them inventive, but his recent "billionaires/rich people suck" kick with Glass Onion, parts of Poker Face and his SW film feels very preachy and smug coming from a guy who sold his film franchise to Netflix for half a billion. (And also made who knows how much money writing and directing that mostly shit Star Wars film.)
Brick is so good! I recommend it too anyone who asks about movies because it's so obscure and deserves to be seen (actually because I want people to understand me when I quote it).
Coffee and Pie! Oh My!
Turns a black 'tang.
Tug. It could be a drink, like milk and vodka.
Lunch is a lot of things. Lunch... Is difficult. (I say this when someone on the crew asks if we should take lunch, and they think it's just a weird thing I say.)
Let's take you back upstairs. With the living. (any time I have to bring the dog up the stairs.)
Good essay, I agree completely. But while we're on the subject of cinema, I'd like to make a pitch for a rather radical idea: a return to old-fashioned chronology as part of a structural underpinning to story-telling. The current obsession with time-shifting has devolved into an annoying tic. Perhaps that's the reason for the lack of thematic subtlety, to compensate for the confusion sown by showy overuse of this device!
Like anything else, it's a tool that can be used well, but there needs to be some kind of justification for it. There are many reasons I didn't like "Oppenheimer", and a minor one was that I didn't think the anachronic narrative structure actually added anything to the experience. I was perfectly able to follow the story (stop sucking your own dicks, Nolan fanboys, it's not that I didn't "get it"), I just don't think the time skips contributed anything to the experience.
I found "21 Grams" a very moving film, but it'd be interesting to see it recut in chronological sequence. I suspect it wouldn't actually lose anything in emotional impact.
I read a review of "Breaking Bad" (a show I really don't like) years ago where the critic argued that the use of in medias res often betrays a lack of confidence on the part of the creator, as it's almost a tacit admission that "I know the chronological beginning of this story is kind of boring, but I promise it gets better later guys, check out this scene from the end of the episode/arc". Like anything else it can be used well, of course, but I think some creators use it as a crutch to relieve themselves of the burden of making the laying of the groundwork of the story engaging in its own right.
It's kind of a cheap screenwriting trick to open an episode or series or film with a "whoa!" moment and then back track. A lot of it has to do with grabbing a reader's attention from the jump to keep them interested and turning pages, but it's becoming increasingly trite and overdone.
This reminds me of a review I read of one of Oliver Stone’s films back in the 1980s. Don’t recall which movie it was, but the reviewer’s setup was this: Stone participates in a spelling bee.
“Oliver, your word is ‘subtle.’”
“Subtle. O-v-e-r-k-i-l-l. Subtle.”
I’ve ignored about 80% of the movies produced in the past 5-8 years in favor of the far superior films of the 1990s.
Excellent Michael Douglas performance aside, "Wall Street" is garbage, and is full of the kind of thing Freddie's complaining about here.
We want to establish that Martin Sheen's character is a heavy smoker, to set up the later scene in which he is hospitalised for lung problems. But we couldn't just have him light up, heavens no. We have to have him put the cigarette in his mouth, have his son snatch it OUT of his mouth, and then have him testify retort "oh leave me alone, smoking is the only thing that makes me feel good anymore" or something to that effect.
Fucking Bud Fox, feeling conflicted about his recent career successes and the ethical violations he's committed to achieve them, standing on his penthouse balcony in the middle of the night asking no one in particular "who am I?"
When we are encouraged to identify personally with characters (remember the bizarre way people conflated Daenerys Targaryen with Hilary Clinton), it means that these same characters cannot possess complexity and nuance, for fear of the backlash that comes when a favourite character turns out to possess a flaw. It is a particularly stupid form of Puritanism, perhaps related to the way we are encouraged to have parasocial relationships with social media figures.
Sort of related to your post, John F, but I think modern entertainment steers away from subtlety not because the audience may not get what they are saying but rather because the audience may get a different message than the entertainer intended.
Any Western creator is probably acutely aware that, as soon as they publish their book/movie/TV show, there will be an army of randos on Twitter ready to clip passages or lines of dialogue and present them out of context in such a way as to present the creator in as negative a light as possible. Perhaps certain creators include these explicit-thesis-statement lines of dialogue as insurance in case they are later victims of attempted character assassination.
Somewhat related - the most annoying part of Oppenheimer, which I otherwise really enjoyed, was Alden Ehrenreich’s Sensate aid character who initially exists as an exposition vehicle, but ends up dunking all over Strauss in a pretty ham handed way by the end. We know Strauss is defeated! Do we really need the whole mic drop for the audience?
Oppenheimer was full of this. When he had to put his child into the care of his friend, I cant exactly remember the phrasing but, his friend said something along the lines of "I understand why you cant cope, because you are a genius and not being able to cope sometimes is the price of being a genius"
So ridiculous, no one would say anything remotely like this.
Funny you mention The Sopranos in a piece that brought to mind something that annoys the shit out of me in TV and movies, which is when somebody makes what would be a funny malaprop if the writers didn't feel compelled to have another character immediately point it out in response. The Sopranos was one of the few to understand that explaining the joke by having somebody respond, "Uh, I think you mean ________," doesn't elicit much of a laugh from those who missed it and straight up ruins it for anyone who caught it.
What makes malaprops funny in that context is when no one on screen notices it, and I think drama is similar in that the most powerful moments often come from the characters themselves not realizing (at least not consciously and in the moment) the poignancy of their predicament.
I gotta say, I watched season 2 in January and it stuck with me in a way other shows have not. I’ve described WL2 to others as a book, with character portraits unique but real. Thank you.
It's definitely one of the homogenizing tendencies that has made me more appreciative of abstraction in art (especially animation) as I've gotten older. It also makes me miss properly weirdo-intellectual European directors who still managed somehow to claw a budget again and again like Raúl Ruiz.
I recently read the novel Real Life by Brandon Taylor, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. I found it heavy-handed and obvious and full of all the expected identity grievance. And yet, one of the top 5 reviews on Goodreads (out of 4000+) says, "My first extreme disappointment with Real Life stems from how I feel like a lot of the problematic and oppressive things within the novel are not addressed in a way that really calls them out." Meanwhile I thought the book was almost comically NPRish in its fixations on those themes. So part of this whole phenomenon is an all-or-nothing, everything-bad-must-be-explicitly-denounced rule emanating from the wokish blob that demands all art must be activism. I have often wondered if it's that they think other people -- the bad people who must learn -- are not as smart and so lessons must be made clear and unambiguous.
My other thought on this is how some of the lines Freddie cited feel like Instagram mantras: “You’ve experienced trauma. When you bottle feelings up, it doesn’t take much to trigger them again” is totally something you would see as a standalone post in that space.
I agree with so much of this, Freddie, and especially love the nod to that perfect Sopranos scene (we all know the one).
But, the beauty of Past Lives is that it is about much bigger and more delicate themes of identity dressed up in what might look like, to the casual observer, "a woman’s struggle over whether to stay with her husband or leave him for another man." It is not a romantic conflict, despite having the common beats of one, and it is more successful for it. Your commentary there fully misses the mark. What I think is masterful about that movie--though I agree it is tinged with melodrama, maybe--is that it takes all the scaffolding of an oceans-apart long-lost romance but applies it to her identity, sense of self, and challenges to assimilate. I thought it was successful precisely because it was so much bigger than the obvious (and, IMO wrong) perception that it was about romance.
*previously posted as threaded comment because top-level comments weren't working for me, but now posted here*
Totally agree to disagree with Freddie on Past Lives. I thought it was a beautiful bittersweet story about being an immigrant to the US and how ultimately for her it was the only way for her to be her fullest self even as she had to leave some things behind. And that’s the beauty and the pain of America.
I was talking to my mum the other day and she made a rather sad admission. She says if she's watching a foreign-language film or TV show on Netflix, she tends to find it more relaxing and immersive than watching an English-language film or TV show on the same platform.
Why, you ask? Because if she's watching something with subtitles, she's forced to give it her undivided attention or she won't be able to follow the story. Whereas if it's in English, she can half-watch it while looking at her phone.
I despair. How hard is it to just watch a movie without looking at your phone?
That explains why I have so much trouble finding anything I want to watch. If it doesn't grip my full attention, why bother. I hate watching the same thing over and over. I hate it when I can predict exactly what fluff is going to come out of the characters mouths.
However, I think a lot of people like that. My parents spent much of their later lives in front of the screen. Hours and hours. As my mother's brain deteriorated she'd watch the same thing over and over. I think it was comforting.
Come on Freddie: Hamas/Israel. What you got for us
Alternative take: we know what Freddie thinks of Hamas/Israel, he’s written about the issues several times. It’s good to remember there are other things in life than tragedy. Restraint is sometimes admirable in these matters. Like in art?
Good post, Freddie.
He's been keyboard warrioring on his notes page. I'll say that the number of comments over there that offer what I call a pragmatic eliminationist view - "Israel is responsible for what has become of the Palestinians, and for that reason they will never be prepared for coexistence" - is disturbing.
Hey guess what's not gonna happen here - we're not going to backdoor an a Israel/Palestine conversation. If I choose to write about it here, I will do so.
You got it.
Sorry
If it makes you feel any better, I was going to ask as well. :-)
Don't ruin this for everyone
This is why I like Korean TV shows 🤷♂️ they're grounded in storytelling, not thematic head-bashing.
I loved The Americans. The suspense I felt watching people place envelopes under park benches was rewarding every time.
I liked it too, but I gave up on the last season pretty quickly because all the restraint shown previously was gone.
I'm not sure I should have been disappointed by Glass Onion, but I love Brick so much that it's impossible not to feel depressed that Johnson is reduced to extruding this kind of vacuous Netflix bilge. The big climactic sequence was ridiculous; it looked like an 'edgy' perfume advert.
Two more to come, aren't there? God help us.
I love Brick too.
What is even being accomplished, in plot terms, with all that glass smashing?
I know! The plot is literally over at that point (such as it is ... )
Rian Johnson is an interesting case. I've enjoyed some of his films and found them inventive, but his recent "billionaires/rich people suck" kick with Glass Onion, parts of Poker Face and his SW film feels very preachy and smug coming from a guy who sold his film franchise to Netflix for half a billion. (And also made who knows how much money writing and directing that mostly shit Star Wars film.)
Brick is so good! I recommend it too anyone who asks about movies because it's so obscure and deserves to be seen (actually because I want people to understand me when I quote it).
Coffee and Pie! Oh My!
Turns a black 'tang.
Tug. It could be a drink, like milk and vodka.
Lunch is a lot of things. Lunch... Is difficult. (I say this when someone on the crew asks if we should take lunch, and they think it's just a weird thing I say.)
Let's take you back upstairs. With the living. (any time I have to bring the dog up the stairs.)
I thought that movie was absolutely pointless. I couldn’t believe how bad it was
Good essay, I agree completely. But while we're on the subject of cinema, I'd like to make a pitch for a rather radical idea: a return to old-fashioned chronology as part of a structural underpinning to story-telling. The current obsession with time-shifting has devolved into an annoying tic. Perhaps that's the reason for the lack of thematic subtlety, to compensate for the confusion sown by showy overuse of this device!
Like anything else, it's a tool that can be used well, but there needs to be some kind of justification for it. There are many reasons I didn't like "Oppenheimer", and a minor one was that I didn't think the anachronic narrative structure actually added anything to the experience. I was perfectly able to follow the story (stop sucking your own dicks, Nolan fanboys, it's not that I didn't "get it"), I just don't think the time skips contributed anything to the experience.
I found "21 Grams" a very moving film, but it'd be interesting to see it recut in chronological sequence. I suspect it wouldn't actually lose anything in emotional impact.
I read a review of "Breaking Bad" (a show I really don't like) years ago where the critic argued that the use of in medias res often betrays a lack of confidence on the part of the creator, as it's almost a tacit admission that "I know the chronological beginning of this story is kind of boring, but I promise it gets better later guys, check out this scene from the end of the episode/arc". Like anything else it can be used well, of course, but I think some creators use it as a crutch to relieve themselves of the burden of making the laying of the groundwork of the story engaging in its own right.
It's kind of a cheap screenwriting trick to open an episode or series or film with a "whoa!" moment and then back track. A lot of it has to do with grabbing a reader's attention from the jump to keep them interested and turning pages, but it's becoming increasingly trite and overdone.
This reminds me of a review I read of one of Oliver Stone’s films back in the 1980s. Don’t recall which movie it was, but the reviewer’s setup was this: Stone participates in a spelling bee.
“Oliver, your word is ‘subtle.’”
“Subtle. O-v-e-r-k-i-l-l. Subtle.”
I’ve ignored about 80% of the movies produced in the past 5-8 years in favor of the far superior films of the 1990s.
Give the 70's a try. You'll have to change your sheets.
Excellent Michael Douglas performance aside, "Wall Street" is garbage, and is full of the kind of thing Freddie's complaining about here.
We want to establish that Martin Sheen's character is a heavy smoker, to set up the later scene in which he is hospitalised for lung problems. But we couldn't just have him light up, heavens no. We have to have him put the cigarette in his mouth, have his son snatch it OUT of his mouth, and then have him testify retort "oh leave me alone, smoking is the only thing that makes me feel good anymore" or something to that effect.
Fucking Bud Fox, feeling conflicted about his recent career successes and the ethical violations he's committed to achieve them, standing on his penthouse balcony in the middle of the night asking no one in particular "who am I?"
Ugh.
When we are encouraged to identify personally with characters (remember the bizarre way people conflated Daenerys Targaryen with Hilary Clinton), it means that these same characters cannot possess complexity and nuance, for fear of the backlash that comes when a favourite character turns out to possess a flaw. It is a particularly stupid form of Puritanism, perhaps related to the way we are encouraged to have parasocial relationships with social media figures.
Sort of related to your post, John F, but I think modern entertainment steers away from subtlety not because the audience may not get what they are saying but rather because the audience may get a different message than the entertainer intended.
Any Western creator is probably acutely aware that, as soon as they publish their book/movie/TV show, there will be an army of randos on Twitter ready to clip passages or lines of dialogue and present them out of context in such a way as to present the creator in as negative a light as possible. Perhaps certain creators include these explicit-thesis-statement lines of dialogue as insurance in case they are later victims of attempted character assassination.
in her memoir she actually compared herself to Cersei, which is even funnier
I immediately thought of this gem from Futurama: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBhR4QcBtE&pp=ygUiUm9ib3QgZGV2aWwgc2F5IGhvdyBjaGFyQ3RlcnMgZGVlbA%3D%3D
Somewhat related - the most annoying part of Oppenheimer, which I otherwise really enjoyed, was Alden Ehrenreich’s Sensate aid character who initially exists as an exposition vehicle, but ends up dunking all over Strauss in a pretty ham handed way by the end. We know Strauss is defeated! Do we really need the whole mic drop for the audience?
Oppenheimer was full of this. When he had to put his child into the care of his friend, I cant exactly remember the phrasing but, his friend said something along the lines of "I understand why you cant cope, because you are a genius and not being able to cope sometimes is the price of being a genius"
So ridiculous, no one would say anything remotely like this.
I've seen people praise Oppenheimer for its subtlety and I'm just like, did we watch the same movie?
Strauss himself goes on a big motive rant about how much he hates Oppenheimer and exactly why he does. It felt like something from a soap opera.
Funny you mention The Sopranos in a piece that brought to mind something that annoys the shit out of me in TV and movies, which is when somebody makes what would be a funny malaprop if the writers didn't feel compelled to have another character immediately point it out in response. The Sopranos was one of the few to understand that explaining the joke by having somebody respond, "Uh, I think you mean ________," doesn't elicit much of a laugh from those who missed it and straight up ruins it for anyone who caught it.
What makes malaprops funny in that context is when no one on screen notices it, and I think drama is similar in that the most powerful moments often come from the characters themselves not realizing (at least not consciously and in the moment) the poignancy of their predicament.
Revenge is like serving cold cuts.
Especially when it creates dysentery among the ranks.
I think I remember the Sopranos having a "prostate with grief" in there somewhere.
Yep, Tony in session with Melfi (about Chris).
"You're at the precipice, Tony, of an enormous crossroads."
A place where a pint of blood costs more than a gallon of gold.
Makes me think of Paulie, “Sil, did you hear what I told him?”
Captain Teebs.
Thank you for not shitting on me and my show. I am a fan and your dad was my thesis advisor at Wesleyan and I really adored him. Peace.
What is your show? Please pardon me, I am unwashed and uncultured.
White Lotus
Too subtle, I guess.
I gotta say, I watched season 2 in January and it stuck with me in a way other shows have not. I’ve described WL2 to others as a book, with character portraits unique but real. Thank you.
I loved Enlightened and wish it had gone on longer, not sure if it was too subtle for some per se but it was one of my favourites
White Lotus rules! Hope you are kicking ass and having fun writing the new Despicable Me! Also I gotta watch Chuck & Buck
It's definitely one of the homogenizing tendencies that has made me more appreciative of abstraction in art (especially animation) as I've gotten older. It also makes me miss properly weirdo-intellectual European directors who still managed somehow to claw a budget again and again like Raúl Ruiz.
I recently read the novel Real Life by Brandon Taylor, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. I found it heavy-handed and obvious and full of all the expected identity grievance. And yet, one of the top 5 reviews on Goodreads (out of 4000+) says, "My first extreme disappointment with Real Life stems from how I feel like a lot of the problematic and oppressive things within the novel are not addressed in a way that really calls them out." Meanwhile I thought the book was almost comically NPRish in its fixations on those themes. So part of this whole phenomenon is an all-or-nothing, everything-bad-must-be-explicitly-denounced rule emanating from the wokish blob that demands all art must be activism. I have often wondered if it's that they think other people -- the bad people who must learn -- are not as smart and so lessons must be made clear and unambiguous.
My other thought on this is how some of the lines Freddie cited feel like Instagram mantras: “You’ve experienced trauma. When you bottle feelings up, it doesn’t take much to trigger them again” is totally something you would see as a standalone post in that space.
hard agree on the heavy-handedness of Real Life!
https://crabbygirl.substack.com/p/real-life-by-brandon-taylor
I agree with so much of this, Freddie, and especially love the nod to that perfect Sopranos scene (we all know the one).
But, the beauty of Past Lives is that it is about much bigger and more delicate themes of identity dressed up in what might look like, to the casual observer, "a woman’s struggle over whether to stay with her husband or leave him for another man." It is not a romantic conflict, despite having the common beats of one, and it is more successful for it. Your commentary there fully misses the mark. What I think is masterful about that movie--though I agree it is tinged with melodrama, maybe--is that it takes all the scaffolding of an oceans-apart long-lost romance but applies it to her identity, sense of self, and challenges to assimilate. I thought it was successful precisely because it was so much bigger than the obvious (and, IMO wrong) perception that it was about romance.
*previously posted as threaded comment because top-level comments weren't working for me, but now posted here*
Totally agree to disagree with Freddie on Past Lives. I thought it was a beautiful bittersweet story about being an immigrant to the US and how ultimately for her it was the only way for her to be her fullest self even as she had to leave some things behind. And that’s the beauty and the pain of America.
How can affirmation art affirm the affirmed if they don’t know they’re being affirmed?