The Last Decade of Cinema by Scott Ryan
25 Films from the Nineties
Fayetville Mafia Press
336pp
£21.95
“I have a rule about being mean to art and artists,” says Scott Ryan; deploring Hollywood’s battery farm of listless, artificially-swollen superheroes, he doesn’t name names. But could this prevailing attitude itself be a chemical in the serum?
These eulogistic twenty-five essays are interspersed with personal reflections on a twilit empire: the last days of Home Video. Ryan laments with breezy internet sass; one warms to the winning unprofessionalism of shouting out a pal mid-sentence: “I’m looking at you, Courtenay!” Less endearing are the transcribed interviews in which he schmoozes with nineties doyennes: “I love that.” “I love that you love that.” “I’m having a lot of fun.” The book could have done without this.
Since the nineties, says Alexander Payne, “the A and B pictures have switched,”1 supporting Ryan’s argument that, following the death of mid-budget productions, mainstream movies degraded into “meditations on just one emotion.”
Each essay spotlights a single film, with irregular wattage; from a brilliant reading of Goodfellas as warped nostalgia for American competence to hazier appraisals like: “T2 is shot on 35mm and it is beautifully shot.”
Ryan will be pushing an open door with most readers on the vanished art of cinema etiquette. Yet, from material worth a porch-chair hurumph or two, the author weaves an ongoing, strained harangue about this new generation and their five-gee-whatcha-macallums. Eventually, shushing a dog only doubles the noise.
More tiresome is the author’s habit of addressing the reader with mock regard: “You have to, and you might want to hold on to something for this next sentence, you have to think on your own to understand what the film is actually about.”
Objectionable enough on its own merits, it seems particularly remiss of a book lauding nineties cinema for treating its audience like grown-ups to treat its readers like babies. This schtick gets jammed between the gears of grouchy aficionado and pop-cultural dissident:
“The best way to select a movie is by doing research. (Ugh. You mean it has to be work? I’m out.)”
Ignoring the apparent poignancy of Ryan being parenthetically back-chatted by his younger self, this moment reveals the author’s two-headedness; simultaneously memorialising movies he cares about while affecting to be too anti-authoritarian, too “Gen X”, to care about anything.
Gen X, Ryan says, resisted categorisation, but that won’t stop him trying. We hear how Gen X stood for peace, how Gen X stood for nothing, how Gen X is the forgotten generation, how Gen X is enshrined evermore in Reality Bites, how Gen X spurns anything popular, how Gen X just loves Winona Ryder.
I can’t say I learned much about Gen X but I can report that by the hundredth time “Gen X” appeared on the page, I was chanting back “Gen X!” with a psychic b-boy stance. Consequently, I must take Ryan’s word for what Gen X meant and gladly concede I had to be there. If I read him correctly, X marked the Gen that combined the raw power of not giving a whizz with the sheer cheek of being too cool to show it.
Stimulating as this sounds, it makes a perilous foundation on which to mount a critique. Being against the world leads inevitably inwards, and Ryan is nothing if not a critic wearing his biography on his sleeve. Some friends are hoping this book will be a memoir - I can’t share Ryan’s fears they will be disappointed.
Without a sustained argument, evaluations lapse into abstraction: “its not told like a movie, its told like a story.” Story is nebulously configured as a material films have more or less of; the name under a dial on the Hollywood machine that broke off around the millennium.
Ryan makes a commendable point about the disappearance of kindness from modern movie storytelling. For today’s screenwriting Yodas, victimhood is a character’s path to morality: ‘angsty’ leads to ‘troubled’, ‘troubled’ leads to ‘damaged’, ‘damaged’ leads… to virtue. However, Ryan frequently has kindness confused with schmaltz.
Addressing The Shawshank Redemption, that misty-eyed look at the winsome side of prison, the author sighs: “What can be said about perfection?” A pity: it would have been instructive to learn what a crowd-swerving Gen-Xer found to like about IMDb’s most popular film of all time.2
“My hope is that you revisit these stories and then you join in the conversation with me about how well written and directed these stories were,” says Ryan. A conversation presuming the agreement of all parties is no conversation at all and despite a lifetime on the outskirts of popular taste, Ryan anticipates no dissent from his. I never felt further estranged from the author than during his ovation to Quentin Tarantino.
Given Pulp Fiction’s relentless allusions to bygone tat, cosily retro soundtrack, and distinction of being so compulsively quoted that singalong screenings are financially viable, I cannot accept Ryan assessment of it as “a film that was the opposite of comfort.”
He might consider Tarantino’s dialogue the antithesis of Marvel pabulum but it is not hard to detect a family resemblance between the incessant tortuous wittering of the Avengers and the iconic tortuous wittering of a Tarantino ensemble.
“Cinema ends with the invention of Jar Jar Binks,” says Ryan, casting that maligned amphibian as Hollywood’s Trinity Test.
And in a way, he’s right. After George Lucas made his Star Wars prequels, studios became wary of franchises built on an individual vision. Inventions as idiosyncratic as Jar Jar would be smoothed out in writer’s rooms, until the later Star Wars sequels achieved the sidekick’s physical ideal: a chirruping sphere.
The Phantom Menace, coinciding with the internet boom, arrived to unprecedented online backlash from fans. Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks) and Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker) have both spoken of the abuse they were subjected to, and experiences like theirs are invoked in one of today’s social media adages: “just let people enjoy things.”
Narrowing the distance between creator and audience, the internet inspires consumerist piety, which Ryan jokily articulates: “you either give me a five star review or you don’t review at all”.
If the nineties was The Last Decade of Cinema, it was also the last decade of cinema criticism, as distinct from customer feedback and “fandom”. By equating criticism with meanness, fans and consumers permit media conglomerates like Disney and Universal to continue thinning the gruel. To oppose this effectively, we must be critical to be kind.
Payne also quotes editor Kevin Trent: “Now everybody’s making Roger Corman movies and spending $200 million on them”.
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