Why are Movies Boring Now?

Why are movies so boring now?

I saw this headline somewhere on social media, forgot to watch it, but when I searched for it, there were many videos with a similar title. There were many theories and many more comments approving, disagreeing, or offering new theories. So I’m going to dive in as well.

The arts exist in cycles, like everything in the known universe. Nature is cyclical, and we are natural, so we can not help but live cyclically. Ideas are created. They spread like wildfire if enough people think they are good. Call it the mind virus or simply herd mentality, it is innate in all of us to follow a good/interesting/potentially rewarding idea. We struggle to have completely original thoughts; most of us repeat what we have heard or read. Same for artists. There are more practising artists now than there have ever been. There is still a hierarchy of appreciation because, like footballers or taxi drivers, not all of them are great all the time.

Only half of major Hollywood studio movies make a profit. Only 4% of independent movies do. Most artists are making personalised necklaces or rude birthday cards to stay afloat, and are side-hustling as teachers. Musicians face the same reality; only they use an upturned hat and a depleted high street instead of an online store to pay the bills or buy a coffee. Movie makers often work as waiters/waitresses. We live in a world where it is financially risky to express your culture or personal creativity.

In one sense, this is good. When the arts become all about money, then they become exploited, controlled, saturated, normalised and then inevitably boring. Money ruins art. But artists still have bills to pay.

The arts have become boring because they were extremely successful. When a movie does well, the suits come in and make as many copies as they can because they believe they have found a winning formula. What they never consider is how to look after that formula, or how or why that formula worked. They sell it to death, destroying its credibility in the process. And then the creatives have to find a new meaning of life before the end of the next fiscal year. Van Gogh didn’t know how lucky he was.

There is also another cyclical routine going on: rebelliousness. Every art movement that has existed (especially in Western art during and after the Renaissance) has usually been a reaction to the previous movement. Somebody somewhere didn’t like the new direction, so they went in the opposite direction. Rebels are usually pretty black and white about everything, too angry to be nuanced.

The arts dictate where society is going. Like it or not, the creatives among us determine what we should think about next. They dip their ideas into the societal sea to see if they can change its colour. Usually the sea barely notices, especially if it’s an ocean. But a small, stagnant pond will definitely react to any ideological skinny-dipping.

Why do we rebel? It is our natural instinct to rebel against something we don’t want to do. That instinct shouldn’t be repressed in anyone, for their own safety and sanity. However, we are more self-indulgent than ever, so everyone is rebelling against something, even if it might be good for them. Some are genuinely rebelling just to feel alive. Think of spoiled teenagers whose parents approve and even supply their drugs and alcohol; they’re still pricks, they’re never satisfied or happy, and still cut their skin to feel alive. If you don’t let your kids rebel against you, they will find a way to piss you off or make you frightened of them. It’s more natural to rebel as a child; children are fighting for their independence from day one, in my experience. They need to feel self-assured and secure as soon as they can, but they will resist every attempt to restrain them, as is their natural duty.

So what do societies/governments/authorities do with this natural instinct? Restrain it at every turn. Toddlers are screamed at/ignored or they’re put in nurseries where their every utterance is documented and signed off on a checklist. Children are restricted to pasta for their artwork and denied the opportunity for unanswerable questions. They must now follow a rigid curriculum taught with rigid/politicised guidelines because the school will get a slap on the wrist if they don’t abide. Teenagers are forced into as many after-school clubs that exist within a twenty-mile radius and given a digital device and unlimited apps to keep them quiet in between. Their education is even more rigid and limited to what a political party campaigner thinks is the right thing to do.

Some grown-ups actually proudly announce that they want to make their child’s life easier than their own was. This is taking away the child’s opportunity to learn resilience and grit. Resilience is now taught on a PowerPoint, usually with alliteration. The kids hate PowerPoints; they hate alliteration; they are bored senseless in schools. Schools train them to pass exams, and little else. I have been a teacher since 2000. It saddens me to see kids in classes today; they obediently copy, compliantly recite and passively adhere. Except for the ones whose parents don’t give a shit, they do rebel, but against being quiet or not telling the teacher to “fuck off”. Nobody is learning much about life, despite the exam board’s statistically manipulated PowerPoint to prove otherwise.

Because everyone continues to treat everybody like children until the age of 50, people are generally rubbish at fighting or flighting anymore. We never used to be; Spartans left their babies on the side of mountains, allegedly. We keep them at home and pick their damp towels up off the floor until they’re 40, just so we can remain friends or they can avoid being hurt. As a society, we haven’t made as much progress as we think since ancient times. Perhaps we’re regressing.

So rebelling is good for you, but is it good to keep rebelling just out of boredom? Art-movements used to take a generation to embed before the inevitable rebels could dismantle them. Today, because of the speed of communication, an idea can be celebrated and destroyed on the same day. Nothing has time to embed, to be absorbed or appreciated before its flaws are hung out for everyone to ridicule. Society is operating like heroin junkies. We are all either high on ideas and meanings, coming down off them, or desperately searching for another one.

Which is why movies are boring. A movie takes years to write, approve, pitch, rewrite, cast, react to pressures, recast, rewrite and fund before any attempt is made to make it, which can be years before it is released. By the time it is released, society has moved on and regurgitated something from the 80s several times over. Movies cannot catch up and will have to stick to universal or timeless themes. All artists will have to stay away from big ideas and different meanings and interpretations of meanings if they want to survive what is coming next.

What is coming next is hard to predict. But as everything is a cycle, it will probably be something we’ve seen before: war and devastation. Not necessarily the destruction of people and buildings, though, just ideas and ideology. They are being blown up and wiped out every day with little mourning or memorial. We are in a world war, a war of words, lies, truths, opinions, feelings, inherited trauma, revenge and ideas (most ancient or recycled). We are living through psychological warfare. When the alternative is annihilation, it had to be.

Our herd is not one herd. It is many herds that keep overlapping, fighting, merging, and stampeding in multiple directions. The noise of the hooves means those who know a cliff edge is nearby can’t be heard.

Something else ruins creativity; self righteousness. The busker in the street should be sublime; they should enhance our shopping experience and make us stop and think. However, in my local depleted high street, they are often out of tune opportunists who live by bumper sticker advice and follow their dreams, even with no discernible talent.

I’ve seen many art students present mediocre and sometimes disturbingly poor quality work that passes as art because conceptual art allowed anyone with an idea to express themselves. Talent is nothing without discipline. Many talented people have topped themselves because true talent is hard to control or maintain. But now we have talentless people making mediocre stuff with no discipline or training, because nobody wanted to tell them they were rubbish, and are therefore never going to learn anything important enough to tell the herd.

People really believe they are special, even when it’s obvious they are not. A skilled artist might paint a realistic portrait, but without training or experience, they may as-well have taken a photograph. A skilled violinist might play Mozart every evening, but they might never make someone close to tears as Mozart did the first time he played a new tune. Talent isn’t enough. Fairy dust is. People like the talented to have that little sparkle of something unusual or otherworldly to get noticed. We don’t like mediocre; we don’t like everyone being the same - that’s why communism continues to fail; because humans don’t enjoy being the same, we don’t like being bored. Our brains have evolved to be inspired. If most of us are mediocre, then why would we aspire to be mediocre?

There’s something else missing from the art appreciation experience because of self-righteousness and molly-coddling; the experience of awe and wonder. We are so up our own arses that we don’t appreciate when someone else makes something special. All we focus on is our own failures, or those that prevented us from creating something special, or the failures of those who made something special so we can believe they’re on the same level as us. Is this the sum total of human endeavour? To be the same as everyone else? To be no better or worse than anyone else? To be clones, to look and behave like sheep? Even the occasional sheep has a bit of personality and jumps an invisible gate. Do we really just want to copy what everyone else is doing? Awe and wonder do not come from repetition. The first sheep is cute; the rest are laughable.

So, what do we really want? Any more ideologies? Britain has always walked a tightrope between personal, eccentric freedom and devoted national loyalty. We had just perfected it when some others decided they wanted something different.

The duality of man, or woman, is obviously played out on a mass scale when ideas are amplified. Should we turn the noise down?

I do not despair. I know a reaction is coming; it’s inevitable. The biggest motivational prod that has ever existed is annihilation. The best way to get people to react to something bad or soul-destroying is to threaten them with annihilation. Annihilation is good for you. Or the threat of it is.

If you look at the vastly different levels of advancement in technology across different countries over the last thousand years, you notice it is vast. When the Aborigines/First Nation people of Australia saw Europeans land, they could not compete with their spears against cannons or rifles. It doesn’t mean the Aborigines couldn’t have invented rifles or cannons; they just didn’t need to. They were not threatened with annihilation for hundreds of years by their geographical neighbours, largely because no one knew they were there. They could exist relatively peacefully for millennia. So no canon or bullet was required. Technological advancement is pursued when you are being chased and threatened with either annihilation or domination. It is natural to invent something that will protect you. The most technologically advanced are the most threatened.

This works on a smaller scale, too. If your beliefs are threatened with destruction, you will fight to protect them, no matter which end of the political spectrum you reside. Which is why we are in a psychological war. Two sides fighting for survival, trying to avoid being consumed/destroyed by the other. It is still better than nuclear war, so remember that.

I heard something interesting today: that algorithms have made people boring. I would argue that people have made the algorithms boring. The herd mentality is strong with our species; even individuality looks the same now. Algorithms respond to what we like and dislike. The algorithms have shown us that the vast majority of people are interested in what other people they like are interested in. Influencers are as dull as dishwater, but they still have followers. Shit sticks to shit. I’m sorry, but most people just can not be as discerning as they should be.

As a teacher, I saw this every day. Every class had a mixture of abilities and understanding. You can never make everyone A*. There is always a broad range of achievement, with most filling out the middle grades. It’s not poor teaching; it is different abilities, different strengths, different weaknesses, different interests, different energy levels, and different personalities amongst an infinite number of other variables. Even the most amazing teacher who can get high grades out of an entire class has not taught them to be amazing at everything in their other classes. And there’s no evidence that a high grade means those students can utilise that knowledge in their later life to the same degree. All that happened was that they were trained to pass an exam better than another class.

Cynical, I know. Observed though. I have taught thousands of students.

For every boring movie made now, a counter-movie will already get pitched right now. And the movers and shakers of the movie world will acquiesce when they check their balance sheets. So the arts will return to awe and wonder once the psychological warfare dies down. Movies will be fun again once new ideas may grow on the battlefield after the psychological bodies have been repatriated.