House of Eratosthenes

Birthdays of movies are entirely unimportant, but birthdays of entire genres are worth remembering. Why? Because a genre mirrors important events in the evolution of our society. There are reasons for them. Also, we haven’t really had too many genres in American cinematic history. Everything we’ve had since World War 2 falls into something resembling this:

1. A hard-drinking detective who sleeps in his office agrees to take a case that turns out to be more complicated than he thought
2. Swords-and-Sandals
3. Elvis
4. Spaghetti Westerns
5. Spies with cameras that look like belt buckles and guns that look like…cameras or something
6. Earthquakes, fires, floods and hijacked planes
7. Burned-out, hard-drinking, grizzled cop, or bereaved husband & father, or both, takes the law into his own hands
8. Forces of nature eating people
9. Outer space stuff with lasers that go zap
10. Hatchet-men like Jason, Freddy, Michael
11. A headstrong woman has a difficult relationship with her headstrong mother and they spend two hours showcasing their headstrong personalities
12. An ugly duckling in a new school is picked on by the cool-girls and an hour into the movie she gets a makeover that consists of lipstick and swirling her hair around, gets the guy of her dreams, humiliates the meanest girl in school at the prom
13. In an adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, it’s up to Jack Ryan to stop some sinister group of bad people from executing some devious plot to destroy something really big that would kill a lot of people and in the process he learns something about our government that is really interesting, incredibly disturbing, or both
14. Hollywood instructs us on what we’re supposed to think about Bill Clinton, his Monica problems, the military, hippies, global warming and radio talk show hosts — and charges us money for the privilege of being told what we should think
15. A tormented hip hop artist copes with a tough life in the hood before finally making it big
16. Martial arts specialists use wire-work to change the laws of physics to something resembling a Bugs Bunny cartoon
17. James Bond is brought back from the Dead
18. So is Star Wars

And that’s it. It’s a pretty short list for a sixty-year span, and with the exception of a few brave explorations here and there that didn’t pan out, there aren’t many movies that fall outside of this.

It should be noted that although “Forces of nature eating people” mostly failed to establish any noteworthy franchises, the flagship movie had to do everything right just to get this whole thing started. The preceeding “takes the law into his own hands” genre was a grassroots movement inspired by a public grown weary and agitated by a justice system that was bound & determined to flood every neighborhood with perverts and psychos walking around as free as anyone else. The Hollywood I remember back then, wasn’t cozy with the liberal establishment like they are today — they simply shared an anti-war agenda, and that was about it. Good money was to be made making “Death Wish” and “Dirty Harry” movies, which were relatively inexpensive to make, so the movies got made. The point is, if it were not for Jaws, this would have sputtered on forever. Or at least another 2 years before Star Wars came out.

Jaws may very well have saved lives. We realized that walking out of a movie theater with a phobia you didn’t have when you walked in two hours before, was actually pretty fun. We were reminded that the movie theater was a place for make-believe. Had we continued to wallow in our disaffections with the porous justice system over buckets of popcorn, maybe we never would have rallied to show that dissatisfaction at the ballot box. We may never have had a President Reagan, and who knows, even today we may have had a Supreme Court endlessly coming up with new reasons to let perverts and murderers out of jail.

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Happy 30th, BruceThursday, September 1st, 2005

Happy 30th, Bruce
Thursday, September 1st, 2005