Last June, culture critic Sarah Vowell addressed the issue in her column for the online magazine Salon. "Guilty pleasures in the USA?" she gasped. "No such thing. Why should anyone, especially any American, waste a single pang of regret on affection for pop treats? On liking something?" Yeah, why?
By the end of the last decade, for reasons that linger in the psyche like a virus, it was not only unfashionable to admit to liking anything popular, it was downright seditious. In Seattle anyway, the aesthetic orthodoxy that calculates purity in measures of obscurity made unassailable taste into a false god, and as a result, we were left with a fractious and embittered culture, self-censoring, joyless, and afraid to surrender even our most private thoughts for fear of being fooled again.
But what has any of this to do with Tom Cruise?
Well, Tom Cruise, and by extension the Hollywood blockbuster machine, represents the behemoth that the staunch defenders of "art" hold up as the enemy. The fear that presided over the great disappointment of the '90s--and here I refrain from discussing the prevailing fear of modern life: poverty--had everything to do with not wanting to be subsumed in the communal audience, the one that makes cities into markets and people into empty vessels. What power we have in a world devoted largely to the pursuit of entertainment lies in our ability to discern, to refuse to swallow what the trash merchants tell us to. Wielding that power, we have fetishized the underground, mindful of Johnny Rotten's admonition that the most excellent flowers are often to be found in the dustbin. Like a few other things Johnny Rotten said, that remains true. But it's important to remember, now that the underground is no longer a secret to any but the most clueless among us--now that even zines have publicists--the dustbin might be right in front of you. You're soaking in it.
The idea of discernment is to look for art and entertainment in the least likely of places. And when it comes to movies, what place is less likely than the summer blockbuster?
OVERWHELMING THE DISBELIEFLet's define terms: Just because a movie is released in the summer, is dumb, and makes a lot of money, doesn't mean it's a true blockbuster. The action comedies, dramatic star vehicles, and children's fare that annually ooze down Hollywood's meretricious pipeline are almost uniformly hopeless. This season's offerings--Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy in drag fat suits in Big Momma's House and Nutty Professor 2, Mel Gibson as a Revolutionary War hero in The Patriot, Nicolas Cage as a car thief in Gone in 60 Seconds--all look terminally worthless. (The jury's still out on Shaft and Me, Myself and Irene, but I won't be missing Chicken Run.) The real "event" films are the ones with the special effects and the epic proportions: Gladiator, Mission: Impossible 2, A Perfect Storm, X-Men, Hollow Man. These are the films, along with their historical antecedents (Jurassic Park, The Abyss, Star Wars, and others), that do what obscenely expensive movies must in order to justify their existence: They show us things our imaginations can't even imagine. They don't suspend our disbelief, they overwhelm it. There it is: a dinosaur, an asteroid, flying motorcycles, blazing chariots, a wave the size of Australia, Wolverine!
Much of the appeal of blockbusters is ascribed to our thirst for violence or the desire to shut our brains off. And while that's not entirely wrong, it's not the whole picture. But it is why the spectacle is relegated to the realm of the guilty pleasure, the kind you don't defend when your aesthete friends are flogging Abbas Kiarostami. Blockbusters are a different kind of art, granted--neither mirror nor candle: more like a big-ass blowtorch. But gradually, I think we (and again, I might just be projecting my philistine impulses onto the big "we") are letting down our collective guard and letting ourselves like them. And we're the better for it.
People like to call blockbusters insulting to the intelligence. An easily insulted intelligence is a feeble one. There will always be room in the pantheon for the films we all know are great, so why should we feel threatened by Gladiator? After years of hearing the mavenly groupthinkers who secretly run this town make mock of American thralldom to spectacle, I say this: The first step is admitting you want to see it. Only good can follow.
Of course, the sense that merely by going to see the "event" movie you are letting them put one over on you isn't unjustified. Spectacle or no spectacle, a lot of these movies blow, as anyone who saw Independence Day or, I presume, Battlefield Earth can attest. In fact, any time a blockbuster offers more than spectacle--Starship Troopers' subversive conflation of America and fascism, for example--it's a welcome surprise. But the larger truth (and everything related to the blockbuster is a question of size) is that these movies defy the stock criteria for judging what is good and bad. By delivering graphic evidence of the literally impossible, of hugeness beyond conception, they expand the parameters of our capacity for wonder. They don't exist to expand the intellect; they engage the body. You don't believe it, you see it. And you don't really discuss it much afterward, except maybe to say, "Oh, and that part where the guy jumps off the building and skis down the blimp into the exploding swimming pool!" and "Yeah, but what about when the Arc de Triomphe spins around like a centrifuge and turns the Seine into a tsunami that knocks down the Eiffel Tower?"
Normal critical standards need not apply. Ludicrous stories, plot holes, implausible moments, unbelievable characters--these are the tiles that build the collage. To pick it apart misses the point. You either embrace it, ignore it, or spend an absurd amount of time in a process that yields nothing but a quantified measure of insignificance. Avoidance is fine, but resistance is futile, pompous, and wrong. The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to step back far enough to see the whole picture; to surrender; to let yourself be blown away.
If you can't recognize the art in that, you're doomed.
