A.O. Scott: Neo-Neo Realism; Richard Brody: About "Neo-Neo Realism"

(I thoroughly enjoyed reading these two different perspectives, first a current film trend outlined and mapped by Scott, and, his original perspective is then critiqued by Browdy. We may ask which perspective is right, instead, I think they both have good insights that do not necessarily negate the other's perspective. They both gave me something to think about and films to watch. Courtesy of David Hudson. Update 3/23/09: below, A.O. Scott responds to Brody's critique...)



Neo-Neo Realism
by A.O. Scott
New York Times

...

WHAT KIND OF MOVIES do we need now? It’s a question that seems to arise almost automatically in times of crisis. It was repeatedly posed in the swirl of post-9/11 anxiety and confusion, and the consensus answer, at least among studio executives and the entertainment journalists who transcribe their insights, was that, in the wake of such unimaginable horror, we needed fantasy, comedy, heroism. In practice, the response turned out to be a little more complicated — some angry political documentaries and earnest wartime melodramas made it into movie theaters during the Bush years, and a lot of commercial spectacles arrived somber in mood and heavy with subtext— but such exceptions did little to dent the conventional wisdom.



And as a new set of worries and fears has crystallized in recent months — lost jobs and homes, corroded values and vanished credit — the dominant cultural oracles have come to pretty much the same conclusions. Remember the ’30s, when we danced through the Depression with Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley and giggled amid the gloom with Lubitsch and the Marx Brothers? (Not many of us do, of course, which makes this kind of selective memory easier to promote.) Then as now, what we wanted most was to forget our troubles. In recession, as in war — and also, conveniently, in times of peace or prosperity — the movies we evidently need are the ones that offer us the possibility, however fanciful or temporary, of escape.



Maybe so. But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.

To Read the Rest of the Essay



Here is Richard Brody's New Yorker response to Scott's essay:

About “Neo-Neo Realism”



Here is A.O. Scott's response to Brody's critique:

A.O. Scott Responds to New Yorker Blog on the Value and Definition of Neo-Realism