The new Scream sequel, The Matrix Resurrection, and every Marvel movie is now obsessed with pushing moments for fan service.
Remember when nerds weren't cool? If you were born in the '90s or later, the answer might be no. For that decade, geeks dusted off, stripped off their underwear, claimed that pop culture was their own, and filled our movie and television screens with a generation of idols whose real-world inspirations required little to decode.
Quentin Tarantino's movie Bandits argue over gangster movies. Kevin Smith's staff quarreled over Star Wars. Both filmmakers came to prominence overnight. Suddenly, cinema is not happening in the film world, it's happening in our film industry, and any screenwriter who wants a hit has to put their cultural credentials on the table – the better. Dead-end video store jobs have transformed from a red flag of failure to a basic qualification on the road to Hollywood glory.
On the small screen, Buffy's team of suburban crime fighters, calling themselves the "Scooby-Doo Gang," can be heard quoting everything from The Untouchables to The X-Files, while Sainfeld's character is primarily obsessed with Superman comics, who make fun of his own format by designing sitcoms in sitcoms.
But there's one movie that stands out, first of all, its meta-rival: Scream, a machete movie whose characters nod wildly and blink wildly dismantle the machete movie formula. The film is a triumph of the postmodern era: Kevin Williamson's screenplay sends out the genre's rulebook in just as much love and ferocity, inspiring 1 million serious undergraduate papers in the process. It's probably the coolest movie of a decade.
But that was a quarter of a century ago. A new reboot scream was released last week, as one of the murderous supervillains once said: "There's nothing more pathetic than an elderly hippie." ”
Maybe it's a bit harsh for the new film, which is a perfectly decent machete in itself and contains some highly innovative highlights of extreme violence. But what's pioneering and clever about the original — the quick meta-commentary provided by its central cast of teen movie nerds — is exactly what is wrong with the new work. We've seen this movie before – too many times. Postmodernism has aged.
It's not the only recent film that has been forced through a fourth wall and grossly winked at the audience: "No Time to Die" is full of footage, lines, and entire scenes from Bunz's previous films; it's also heavily inflated at two thirds of an hour.
At least that one is worth paying attention to. Not so much The Matrix Resurrection takes a full five minutes of montage time to tell the various popular interpretations of the original Matrix movie. Worst of all, it has a scene where a suitable bad guy tells us, "Our beloved parent company Warner Bros. decided to make a sequel to the trilogy." The first matrix makes us question our existence; this matrix has only interest in proving its own existence.
Curiously, each new Matrix and Scream movie begins with an informed, mirror-hall rework of the original film's iconic opening. Even stranger, when the new characters watch the original movie (or a barely fictional stand-in) in a new movie, both manage to be in cages. Of course, it's all very self-aware. But this is mostly self-indulgence. Two films that won gold by provoking the world around them can now only be seen inward.
Perhaps this is a symptom of the bleak state of Hollywood today, where franchisees rule habitat and create nostalgia — or "fan service" — that is every producer's top priority.
But there is another problem. Back in 1995, the self-awareness that marked screaming was a truly maverick move. It positions the film — and, by extension, the audience — as a savvy outsider, wise about mainstream conventions and contemptuous of the garbage that comes with it.
But it didn't take long for self-reflexiveness to become mainstream in itself. After Pulp Fiction, every movie rogue is a scholar of pop culture. On television, simulation became the preferred format for whip-up smart comedy, with sitcoms starring comedians proliferating as fictional versions of themselves, but not all sitcoms do much good. As if to confirm all this, the Scream movie itself was sculpted into laughter by the horror movie series. Since then, horror movies about horror movies have turned into a dime.
The fact that many of these '90s trailblazers failed to regain their early genius didn't help metafilm slide into mediocrity. Smith's work soon became a victim of the law of diminishing returns. Tarantino's films have become a monument to the labor of his own fetish film obsession. Williamson's reinvigorated drama high school horror brand burned out before the end of the decade.
There is an outlier here. Joss Whedon, the show host who dreams of Buffy and the nerd she kills vampires, has seen his star continue to rise over the next two decades, so much so that his star may be Hollywood's most popular signature. He has also experienced the most infuriating out-of-favor of the past few years, his moral rather than artistic failures.
But before that, through various famous script tampering, writer and director tasks, hang themselves in place and become the key figure behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which built its brand on the basis of the same push-push disrespect that was popular years ago. The brand is worth $25 billion and, quantitatively, a lucrative brand.
It turns out that his clever Scooby-Doo Gang is just a prelude to the smart superheroes on today's box office charts. Twenty years on, ironically, once a sanctuary for vitriol outsiders, it has become the tone of the biggest and most cynical cash cow in the history of cinema.
The life cycle is already cyclical. Sadly, for The New Batch of Potential Villains and Victims of Spell's Hot, Self-Awareness No longer comments on the Hollywood formula, but the formula. There is now an irony.