Marty Was Right

Or, Whose Action Movie is Afraid of Becoming Cinema?

I’ve been trying to keep to watching one film a week. To help cope with my ever cascading fear that the distractions of the world are changing and muddling the way that I engage with art, or can engage with art. The powerlessness and exhaustion I feel towards the act of being taken in by art[1] is cancelling out any desire to actually do so. Something I go into a bit more depth about in my last essay. And since my declaration in that essay, I have watched three films: the Palme d'Or winning Titane (2021)[2], the Oscar winning La Grande Bellezza (2013)[3], and Nobody (2021).

Nobody is the outlier on this list, being that it is a) a film from the United States, and b) an action film. Titane has some wonderfully choreographed fight scenes, but Nobody is from the people who made John Wick (2014), so it’s a bit of a different take. I was just in the mood for something easy to watch, senseless violence, and I had heard on the inter-web grapevine that Nobody really set itself apart from John Wick and other action flicks because of the main character’s arc. I really love Bob Odenkirk – Better Call Saul (2015—) is probably one of my favourite television shows of all time – so I thought I’d give it a go.

Now, the problem I have with the film is a pretty straight forward one, and it reminded me of something Martin Scorsese said a few years back. He got a bit of flack in 2019 when he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times explaining why he didn’t think the Marvel movies were cinema. At the time, I was a part of the great fan-boy rage machine: “he’s out of touch”, “he’s just jealous that they never asked him to make a Marvel movie”[4]. But then, I did this really weird thing that people don’t often do – I had a little think, and I went back and actually read his piece. And within it, he very simply describes the difference between “cinema” and a “movie” – cinema being this art work which adheres to storytelling, which gives a deep, intimate look at the psychology of a person to produce an affect, whereas movies, and the label he ascribes to the Marvel films, are theme park rides. They’re just there to be enjoyed, consumed[5], there’s nothing at risk. So, when I finished Nobody, this comparison really fell into place for me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the film for what it was – the eponymous Nobody, Odenkirk’s character Hutch, taking back control over his life. But the film gave the appearance that it was going to ask a fundamental question of Hutch. That question being something of a spoiler. But it’s an interesting question, one that I think adheres to Marty’s conversation around “cinema” v. “movies”, so I’m going to do a little bit of spoiling, but I’ll try to keep it in broad strokes. So if you want to see the movie for yourself, you can.

With that out of the way, the big question – what does it mean for someone to allow their life to be defined by their violent actions? And what does it mean when that person embraces their violent nature? What are the consequences/risks of those actions? There’s a key point in the film where Hutch delivers a monologue about how he tried so hard to resist his violent desires, but in the end, he wants the violence to be in his life. He relishes it. It’s a really great turn for the character, and a particular high point of the film.

Up until this point, the film has been pretty grounded. Is it beyond the realm of possibility to think someone around Hutch’s age and physic could take on five or six bad dudes on a bus? With his training? It sure is possible but he’s not going to walk away from the encounter unscathed, John Wick he is not. And the film adheres to this rule pretty well, with Bob Odenkirk taking a real beating at every turn. So, when it came to the film’s third act, I was under the impression that it would go along with the grounded(ish) story it was telling.

To briefly qualify this, a grounded story to me as a viewer is one in which the sort of social mores and overall psychopathology of a culture are in effect. And in this particular case: violence equals bad. As a society, it could be argued that the general population considers violence wrong, or a last resort. And with that in mind, my expectations of the film would be that there would be consequences to Hutch embracing his violent tendencies. But dear reader, Taxi Driver (1976)[6] the film is not.

Instead, the film’s climatic third act action set piece is, simply, Home Alone (1990), except with actual military grade house traps. And everyone involved is blowing dudes away with shotguns, pistols, rifles, machine guns and high-fiving[7] while doing it. Admittedly, I enjoyed seeing Doc Brown[8] taking down some mafiosos, but what I couldn’t shake from my mind when the credits rolled was this question of cinema v. movies. The film could have been cinema, but instead it turned into a fun-house in the last act. Hutch’s character has no consequences for his violent actions, receives no punishment for the events of the film which, ultimately, are his fault. Hutch picked the fight, he finished the fight, and ultimately, he gets everything he wanted. Hutch, and by consequence Nobody, is a bully, and in this film, the bully wins. And I just did not find that satisfying.

In cinema, Hutch would have had consequences/real risks to his actions. As a movie, he gets the girl and rides into the sunset leaving corpses in his wake, laughing all the way.

Part of me wonders, though, if this is really the message the film is going for. Part of me wonders if there isn’t some sort of Starship Troopers (1997)[9] satire going on under the surface here. That the superficial, stylised action set piece in which such carnage takes place, and the joy the characters have in doing so, is so over the top that it is also attempting to achieve a similar level of satire and parody. But then I reflect on the most recent action film I saw before Nobody, which was The Batman (2022), and how that film has a similar problem with asking interesting questions but never following through with them.

Now, The Batman I believe is still in cinemas, so I’ll do no spoilers for that one. But what I will say is that The Batman does something I’ve always wanted a Batman film to do: talk about systemic issues, and how one person can, or cannot, make a difference when faced with a system of villainy as opposed to an individual in make-up. It comes so close to being cinema, but in the end, it just decides to become a movie. I don’t know what the cause is, whether it’s a trend or studio interference or even aliens, but this big differentiation between cinema and movie now more than ever seems to be weighing on me. And it makes me uncertain as to what the future of cinema will be.

That uncertainty isn’t really my problem, though. It used to be, when I worked in film and TV, trying to piece together what will sell, and what won’t, and what I want to assign my artistic integrity to (if I ever had any as a script editor). But as someone who enjoys both cinema and movies, I guess it just boils down to my frustration as a viewer and consumer when one attempts to be the other, and has all the tools to do so, but then chooses neither. Ultimately, I think that’s where Nobody falls short for me. A movie that could have been cinema, deciding not to, and instead becoming Home Alone: Special Forces Edition[10][11]. A much less satisfying movie, and that’s a shame.

p.s.

I also just wanted to point out that my umbridge isn’t just directed at movies that could be or want to be cinema and failing. I share my distraught equally amongst films, and find it immensely frustrating when a cinema film attempts to be a movie. An example of this is The Guest (2014), a good film which also falls apart in its third act. Because it makes the decision of attempting a character turn that makes the film’s claustrophobic characterisation completely undone through a reveal about Dan Steven’s David Collins.

p.s.s.

Everyone should be encouraged to love the films that they want to love. Whether it’s cinema, or movies, you should just be allowed to enjoy the films that you like and I hope that my little exploration here hasn’t ruined anything for you. Because filmmaking is such a wonderful thing, and if I have to take twelve Batman films to get to one which is almost cinema, then I’ll happily take those in stride. As long as they promise never to do the “MARTHA!” scene ever again. I don’t want to see any more Sad-Afflecks.

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[1] See Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn, Illuminations, 1969, p. 18 <https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf>, and my previous essay: Love (& Art) in the Time of Distraction.

[2] I really loved Ducournau’s debut, Raw (2016), but Titane is on a whole different level. Narrative pacing aside, I found it hard to settle into the mechanical/biological bodily intersexuality that served as the main inciting incident. Regardless, there are some mind-boggling excellent performances – Agatha Rouselle and Vincent Lindon being particular standouts. Their scenes together are some of my favourite in the film.

[3] When anyone asks me about a formative film, La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) is one that I always cite. Formative sounds stupid, since I have never actually made a film (short-films not withstanding), but formative as a means of cinematic reading – how one interprets a performance, a camera movement, the semiotics of a frame and set dressing, costume, all of these things – the mise-en-scene. I love everything about this film, but most of all it’s Toni Servillo’s performance as a man condemned to the life of his own making, and potentially being freed from it, which makes me love it all the more.  

[4] I don’t know if people actually said this, but this is what I recall came to my mind when hearing about this on the news.

[5] Some proper Age of Distraction – creating art for capitalistic consumption’s sake – see Stephen West’s Philosophize This podacast, The Frankfurt School - Walter Benjamin Pt. 2 - Distraction, 163 vols (Spotify, 2021), cliii.

[6] Briefly, Taxi Driver is a film written and directed by Martin Scorsese in which a taxi driver turns vigilante and decides to clean up New York’s dirty streets with his own hands. But by doing so, and embracing his violent side, the titular taxi driver meets a disastrous end. Bad behaviour is punished, the moral scales of the world are balanced. Overall, cracking movie, which makes you the viewer feel complicit in the terrible violence on screen. It begs the question of the audience, “if you’re watching this, enjoying this, can you really consider yourself better than him?”

[7] This is an exaggeration, no one high-fives…I think…

[8] Christopher Lloyd plays Hutch’s father in the film, and it’s a bit of a spoiler that he does some rumbling, so I’m hiding it in the footnotes, which I imagine people don’t read anyway.

[9] Starship Troopers, upon release, was lauded for being this pro-propaganda, pro-military action film. But really, it’s a satire of those elements, with actual, highly stylized propaganda war adverts and recruitment videos in the film poking fun at the narrative and highlighting the anti-colonialist elements within. It’s really fun when you go back and watch it with this in mind. When I first saw it, I just thought it was a cool action movie where alien bugs go splat and boom.

[10] Don’t steal my idea Disney, who weirdly now have the rights to the Home Alone franchise after their acquisition of Fox…

[11] “Ready for a bit of the old Ultraviolence?” – A Clockwork Orange (1971)