Uber Driving & Middle America's Take On Hollywood
What I've learned talking to Ohio about movies. [10/10/2023]
I've been driving for the Uber rideshare app for about six months now, all along the northeastern quarter of Ohio. As a driver, I've taught myself how to interact with passengers in order to leave them with friendly interactions for which they’ll want to tip me. Some prefer silence, perhaps with the radio quietly dribbling out acoustic, while others immediately engage in conversation. Naturally, because I'm me, I often discuss movies with the latter. Doing so has, in my own limited way, given me a perspective on what I think, the average middle American wants from Hollywood.
The first and most distressing pattern that emerges in these conversations is disregard and irreverence. Younger passengers especially will say that movies are cheesy, predictable, and slow-paced. Readily they will admit their short attention spans. If I am able to engage with them about media, the conversation quickly shifts either toward superhero blockbusters or television. I hear complaints about long run times in the same breath as praise for shows binge-watched on Netflix. Their taste in movies in the theater is limited to horror, and the only filmmaker’s name they might recognize is Quentin Tarantino (usually for his later works like Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). To these youth, culture’s peak must be today; I must forget bringing up anything slower or older than the original Star Wars. Everything is about pacing and pop, and movies often don't scratch that itch for these viewers. Weep my readers, for this is the future.
Conversations turn apocalyptic with older riders. They'll be impressed that I can speak to them about The French Connection or The Godfather, then spew disdain for modern Hollywood's " wokeness". Escapism, they say, is the goal of a moviegoer, and Hollywood has abandoned this for their forced political statements. The word “diversity” never drops into the conversation, but hangs in the air invisibly. I've tried to challenge these notions with references to decades my guests are more aware of. "Rocky IV is a very political movie!” I’ve pointed out, “That's an explicit Reagan-era piece about fighting communism." “Yeah,” came their response, “but back then we already knew we had to fight the communists. Now movies always feel like they’re trying to change your mind about something." If they have watched a recent movie in the theater, it will be something like Top Gun: Maverick, which is hailed as a return to older (and better) times in Hollywood.
Both of those camps share a viewpoint, though it may not be apparent; neither wants to be challenged at the theater. The first, younger camp hates being challenged aesthetically. Likely because of the current blend of child and adult cinema that has been wreaking havoc on Hollywood blockbusters since Pixar, YA fiction, and the superhero boom of the 2000s, younger audiences want their pop culture to be irreverent, self-aware, and childishly snappy. I call this the post-Shrek mindset, because the movie at the time was so much about making fun of the tropes of previous movies, and was filled to the brim with potty humor and winks to the audience. By these viewers, it is considered a classic, even when so much of its humor was a farce of previous classics. Hollywood doesn’t cater to them as much as the thousands of other media outlets they can grab from.
The older crowds are the same, but instead find their challenges in worldview. They may think movies have never needed to have takeaways, but cinema is an art form, constantly exposing viewpoints. They may praise older blockbusters for not being forceful about their messaging, but that’s not the problem; truthfully the only thing that has changed is the messages themselves. As movies are dying, those keeping the candle lit are particularly progressive artists on either coast that middle America doesn’t relate to. They want to like movies but don’t feel seen in them. Many of you readers might think these people are easy to dismiss as ostriches pushing their heads into the sand and groaning about how it was better back in their day, but personally I can feel a bit of sorrow for them. With the clamor to correct historical wrongs through representation, the old guard of movies doesn’t feel represented.
I don’t really have a takeaway from all this. Movies shouldn’t feel the need to get faster or change mediums completely to appeal to younger audiences or else, as we’ve seen in blockbuster homogeny, all media will become the same “content” based mess, losing everything that makes cinema an interesting art in the first place. Neither should Hollywood be trying to make its viewers comfortable in the fact they will only watch something that agrees with them when they sit down in the theater. Regardless, both young and old groups’ overall disinterest in and disillusionment with Hollywood is foreboding to me, and another signpost towards American movies’ funeral.
More Anthony:
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