2014 has been a slog of a year, especially toward the end, and especially if you cover the entertainment industry. It’s been a year without a big, transcendent movie hit, a period in which a game-changing TV show, “True Detective,” reverted to every cliche in the book, and it all ended in the disaster of “The Interview.” Thank goodness it’s over! As we see 2014 out the door, here are three resolutions that pop culture’s power players might want to consider for the new year.
1. Get better in-house cybersecurity. And then get angry: Sony Pictures Entertainment’s handling of “The Interview,” an action-comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, in response to blackmail and terrorist threats from a group of hackers who call themselves the Guardians of Peace, would have been disappointing under any circumstances. The hack was a glaring example of what a totalitarian response to media really looks like, and Sony Pictures’ capitulation is the logical result of an environment in which culture and criticism are often met with threats of violence.
But Sony Pictures’ retreat is particularly shameful for an industry that likes to champion itself as the best the United States has to offer. The movie business “is both a beneficiary of and a champion for the First Amendment and freedom of speech,” Motion Picture Association of America chairman Chris Dodd wrote this year. “Not only do the stories we tell entertain audiences; they expand culture, educate and inform, and advance debates on important societal issues, constantly challenging us, as a people, to do better ... The movies and television shows we create also often serve as de facto U.S. ambassadors to the world. For many people, their first exposure to our nation has come through watching a film or television show. With themes of free expression and America as a land of opportunity, these films and TV shows have played at least a small role in the decision of many to seek our shores.”
Thanks to Sony Pictures’ retreat, and also to this increasingly cautious industry’s heavy reliance on tentpole franchises rather than daring original storytelling, that reputation is in tatters. In 2015, movie and television studios should make heavy investments in cybersecurity to remove as much vulnerability to blackmail as possible. Movie studios should start thinking more seriously about how to release and promote new features through streaming and video on demand services, especially if the members of the National Association of Theatre Owners are going to continue to be skittish about threats, no matter how little credibility they might have (Paramount has provided a terrible, cowardly example in blocking theaters from showing “Team America: World Police” as a substitute for “The Interview”).
And most of all, it’s time for movie and television companies to dust off their sense of chutzpah. Movie studios eager for market access have been making concessions to Chinese audiences (and Chinese officials) for quite some time. As Netflix plans to expand in Asia, the streaming company, which has produced both daring shows such as “Orange Is the New Black” and puzzlingly retrograde entries such as “Marco Polo,” will face similar pressures. This kind of compromise seems to have been good practice for the “Interview” catastrophe. With better technical and business defenses against this kind of disaster in place, Hollywood ought to try to reclaim its reputation in 2015, green-lighting politically and artistically challenging projects and refusing to be cowed by threats or embarrassment.
2. Remember that epics aren’t the only stories worth telling: Critics have been having this conversation for a while, but “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” the conclusion to Peter Jackson’s bloated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s children’s classic, has brought out some excellent writing on the subject.
“With his ‘Hobbit’ movies, Jackson has taken the epic style and themes of his ‘Lord of the Rings’ pictures and placed them on the shoulders of a tale far too slight to support them,” Chris Orr argued in the Atlantic. “‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ introduced filmgoers to hobbits and the shire, elves and Rivendell, wizards and balrogs,” Sonny Bunch wrote in an assessment of the franchise in the Washington Free Beacon. “But it did so on a smaller scale than that of later films, focusing on the journey of a few protagonists. Ironically, restricting the characters and locales magnified the sense of drama, and heightened the tension. We actually cared about what happened to the fellowship.”
In other words: Sometimes the journey there and back again is enough, without being garbaged up with higher and higher stakes that serve only to make the whole thing feel more duplicative of other so-called epics and more remote from any actual human emotion.
So many of the best stories of 2014 were small ones: Julianne Moore’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease in “Still Alice”; Jeffrey Tambor’s attempts to come out in “Transparent” and Jonathan Groff’s search for love in “Looking”; Jake Gyllenhaal’s midnight vulturing in “Nightcrawler”; the sweet, hopeful displays of solidarity between gay rights and labor activists in “Pride”; the unconventional marriage between KGB spies in “The Americans”; the novels of Adelle Waldman and Jenny Offill; Jeff Hobbs’s investigation of the life and death of his college roommate in “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.”
Even the strongest action movies of the year had something human-size about them, like the relationship between Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” or the attachment of Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) to his childhood mixtape in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” “The Lego Movie,” Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s riff on superhero epics, shrunk all the way down to miniature to find big lessons about the nature of heroism.
“Movies are no longer about the thing; they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint,” Mark Harris wrote in Grantland this month. This is one of the reasons that television, which seems to have room for big ideas in between midseason finales and summer climaxes, is ascendant, though even that genre is all too prone to serial killers and terrorists. Deescalating pop culture’s seemingly permanent state of war would be a blessed relief, and one that would open up the possibility of greater emotional connection than the same action sequence or same creative murder over and over again can possibly provide.
3. Remember that the world is big, and there are interesting stories to be found everywhere in it: Hollywood continues to be an imperfect mirror for America, much less for the global population that is increasingly its market.
But 2014 had signs of the uneven progress on diversity that is so often the industry’s hallmark. Roxane Gay had two hit books (the novel An Untamed State and the essay collection “Bad Feminist”) and signed on to edit a spinoff of the Toast, the humor and commentary site that is itself the product of a rollicking feminist vision. Amazon continued to prove that looking beyond common tropes and anti-heroes produces great television with “Transparent,” Jill Soloway’s series about a transgender woman coming out to her utterly impossible family later in life. Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” charged into the Oscar race as a sadly timely commentary on policing in the United States and a powerful refusal to succumb to the conventions of biopics. Chris Rock finally found his groove with “Top Five.”
In this environment, it didn’t even matter that some diverse entries were duds. “How to Get Away With Murder” may have offered Viola Davis the screen time and wig-removal opportunities she so richly deserved, but the rest of Peter Nowalk’s overheated law school drama is a mess. “Beyond the Lights” was an oasis in an ongoing romantic drama (and comedy) drought that suffered from a lack of chemistry between its leads. Any progress toward an environment in which stories by or about women, people of color and gay or transgender creators can fail or be bad without dooming similar projects is welcome.
So in 2015, let’s hope Hollywood expands its curiosity about the world and all the stories the entertainment industry currently isn’t telling. A greater commitment to diversity not just in staffing but also in ideas would be a great cure for pop culture’s present geopolitical cowardice and for the increasing fragmentation of television viewership. And if the past few years are any indication, it would be terrific for art’s sake, too.
