Second, I read Anthony Lane's review of Bruno, where, putting his acid pen to good use, Lane questions whether American audiences have descended to an indeterminate space somewhere between childlike innocence and adult sophistication to perpetual puerility. Lane writes: "The two young women beside me howled at the talking penis (not a bad emblem of the average male, they would say), and, if I had tried to explain that the Marx Brothers—sowers of extreme sedition, like Baron Cohen—sustained an entire career of ignobility without displaying a single erection, they would not have believed me. Even so, there was something forced in the women’s laughter, as if they wanted to banish any suspicion of prudery, and to prove themselves far too cool for disgust." Ultimately, he's much tougher on Sacha Baron Cohen than audiences themselves, which, having broken my promise to stay home and having seen Bruno this weekend, seems entirely justifiable. But Lane's description of peer pressure at the movies seems to hint at something to me. We go to the movies to be entertained, of course, but for other reasons as well: to be able to talk about a cultural phenomenon that everyone's talking about, to show that we're brave, or sophisticated, or unflappable, or cultured. What Lane wonders is if something like Bruno tricks us into thinking we're urbane and sophisticated enough to sit through some doofily exaggerated sex scenes, when actually what we're participating in is dumb, crude humor that we don't necessarily enjoy very much.
While I think Lane is a sourpuss a lot of the time, I think in the case of Bruno, he may be correct. In a way, I think that's an emerging theme for this summer's blockbusters: we're tricking ourselves into thinking we want to see two and a half hours of poorly plotted robot fights, or a lot of Hugh Jackman's muscles going up against Ryan Reynolds after an unnecessary and grotesque round of plastic surgery, or Sacha Baron Cohen playing out a less creative and original stereotype than others he's peddled us before. And for me, at least, the reaction has been enough. The returns are diminishing: Transformers felt too loud, there wasn't enough good writing to justify Wolverine, and I walked out of Bruno today feeling like I was a level of jaded beyond a bunch of the rest of the audience, incapable of being shocked into laughter. Not that I'm particularly looking forward to the winter crop of Oscar bait either, the set of movies that pretends to offer a Very Serious Perspective On Issues that I'm supposed to want to watch to feel cultured, or deep, or whatever. Brothers looks like a depressing version of Pearl Harbor with Iraq substituted for World War II for the sake of relevance, and I don't want to watch it. I'm annoyed by the idea of Invictus, but I'll probably see it anyway. I'm so tense that I'm likely to get heartbroken over how bad Sherlock Holmes will probably be (Guy Ritchie is going to burn in hell for putting Irene Adler in a corset and nothing else. The Woman is far too smart to gad about like that).
What I really want is to go to some movies where the filmmaker and scriptwriters trust me to keep track of a complex set of characters and a plot that's compelling without having to teach me anything. I want Precious to come out, and The Informant and 9 (robots, not Daniel Day-Lewis and a lot of ladies). I'm sure I, and a lot of other moviegoers will fool ourselves into seeing a great many insipid other movies along the way. But that's our fault. Does that make us stupid? Does it mean we'd be smart enough to gravitate to better offerings if there were more of them, and they were more heavily marketed? Could we handle a nuanced biopic that takes on the evil that Winnie Mandela's done in her lifetime? It intrigues me that we're capable of putting The Dark Knight and Transformers II on par on their opening weekends. I think it's important to figure out why we do it. And I have to admit, I don't remotely have an explanation for that, answers to any of these other questions. But they're things I expect to be thinking about a lot.