I moved alongside a small group of peers from my exact demographic from an Imax movie into a theater corridor. We were stopped dead in our tracks by the sound of something emerging from a nearby theater. It was heavy and roaring. By the time we saw them it was too late. A horde! No! A scourge of marching teenagers descended on the corridor like locusts. If there were boys among them, I did not see. My graphic-tee festooned brethren and I could do nothing but step into shadow and wait for the tide to ebb and make our escape.
This blog post is dedicated to those who did not emerge from the shadow.
The movie I watched was called Edge of Tomorrow, a Tom Cruise-reinforced Sci-Fi that was pitch-perfect (for the first two acts anyway). The movie that crushed it at the box office was the Y.A. tearjerker, The Fault in Our Stars.
Before I go on, I should be clear. I haven’t seen The Fault in Our Stars, but it’s “guaranteed fresh” by Rottentomatoes.com and I trust that. I think these were probably both great movies.
Edge of Tomorrow goes out of its way to deliver the kind of raw escapism that colors the best of its genre. It has $178 million worth of Maverick and a Brit actress of the moment twirling through digital wreckage and explosions. So why did it get schooled by melodrama that cost the studio a piddling $12 million?
You could blame marketing, including the cheesy title that sounds more like a bad soap opera (vs. the soap opera story with the hip sounding name?) But I think there’s more to Star’s $20 million lead than teen mania.
There was a palpable energy around The Fault in Our Stars that played out over the course of that weekend. Stars had a cultural impact that Tomorrow just didn’t, which is a little mystifying. Without spoiling it, the concept of Tomorrow is a real evolution of video-game narrative mixed with socially familiar characters and digital melee.
I think it’s clear example of personal relevance.
Yes, all art is driven by relevancy. Even the kind that gets labeled irrelevant is communicating something to someone. It’s just built into the definition of art. If you’re telling a good story, you’re telling a story about our lives.
Familiarity and probably Orange is the new black
There’s something more distinctive than general connectivity that characterizes the way our culture picks its narratives right now. It seems like we either want remakes of things we’ve seen or we need to be convinced that the characters in the conflict are exactly us or the people we care about.
For the time being, we seem to want idols with a healthy slice of familiarity. Taylor Swift, while no doubt glamorous, works because she kind of looks like a girl you went to school with. She giggles and writes journal entries about guys who are also named Taylor. If that’s not Middle America, I don’t know Middle America. (There’s a chance I don’t)
The Fault in Our Stars took a successful book and gave it a lead actress who feels like a mean version of everyone who bought the book. It’s a story with a super familiar character, played by the kind of actress the audience sees as a reflection of themselves. In 2014, that, for better or worse carries more weight than spectacle.
Movies populated with familiar, down to earth characters have always been successful. But there’s a public freeze-out of original material in bigger movies that smaller, character movies seem to be immune to.
I’m not saying that Edge of Tomorrow should have casted someone who looked more like their demographic (though that would have been hilarious). I just wonder how it would have performed if the main character were more of an everyman and the trailers screamed that at you up front. I’m not saying it would have been better for that, just that it might have pushed more people into theaters.
Last summer, Brad Pitt had his most successful movie to date. It was a big, loud action movie, just like Edge of Tomorrow. But World War Z opened on a vision of what must be every young family in America. They nailed it. Dad makes breakfast and has some Dad banter with his daughters and we get a tiny whisper that he might be some kind of professional bad ass.
Boom. The world unwinds and the Zombies are closing in. We’re in morning traffic. One of the girls wants her blanket.
“It’s in the back. We’ll get it later”.
There are zombies and busses tipping over and we’re reminded of an exact thing we’ve said to our daughter many times.
“Put your seatbelt back on!”
— Right before a Mac Truck plows into us and ushers us into the next threshold of the story. Here we are now in another world, not Brad Pitt.
Orange is the New Black explores a wealth of cultural and social dynamics that are scarce in the cinematic landscape. Would the cultural tidal wave it’s currently experiencing be the same if the whole thing weren’t hung on a “typical” American girl at the center to hold our hands? I’d really like to think so, but I have to wonder.
Pleased to meet me
I don’t know if it’s the reality TV or the social media empowerment, but we like “us” more than we ever have and we’re not going to go down an unknown road unless the “us” is in plain view.
As always, there’s tons of exceptions, though they seem to be allocated to television more than theaters. Well written stories with exciting characters will find a big audience despite the pop culture rollercoaster.
In the end, as a writer, I take the lesson. I’ve always wanted to tell stories where people look at the screen and say, “hey, that’s me” and right now, that ideal is getting fortified. Who knows, if I ever make it to Hollywood, we might be in a state where we’re sick of ourselves. That would be my luck.
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