Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "dumbing-it-down-intellect-dune"

Like Grandpa Simpson, I need little in the way of provocation to go on a tirade about something I find annoying, wicked, or just plain stupid. In this case I was set off by a single line of dialog in Denise Villeneuve's cinematic adaption of Frank Herbert's all-time sci-fi classic, DUNE. The most cerebral character in the entire sprawling cast, a man who is quite literally a human computer capable of staggering feats of mental computation, Thufir Hawat, gets on the radio and tells his fellows, "OK... we're good to go."

I am not sure what the writing team behind this adaptation was thinking when they made the decision to cram contemporary banalities in the mouths of what are essentially erudite Medieval characters...well, actually, I am sure what they were thinking, and that is what upsets me. If I may presume to read their minds, they were thinking what almost everyone else in Hollywood has been thinking for the last 25 years: DUMB IT DOWN.

You can say what you want about David Lynch's 1985 adaptation of DUNE, but you can't say the dialog was all that much out of tune with the way Herbert wrote it in his novel -- sometimes cerebral, sometimes mystical. But even when it was terrible, it was, so to speak, in-universe. When Gurney Halleck tells Paul Atriedes, "Guard yourself for true!" we understand that this is the way they talk in the DUNE world: we don't need Gurney to say "Put up your dukes, shit's about to pop off!" to understand his meaning. Whatever the ultimate result of Lynch's cinematic effort, he wasn't afraid of Frank Herbert's towering intellect, and he trusted us to "get it."

One could argue with considerable force that cinema has never been an intellectual stronghold, but this argument, while viable and packing plenty of ammunition, is far from invincible, because while vastly outnumbered, film, and yes, even television ("that bottomless pit of shit" as Stephen King once called it) also have long traditions of producing much which is thought-provocative. Arthouse cinema specializes in this, but the now-vanished mid-budget movie is where much of what was truly creat in cinema found its roots, and as late as 2007 were still producing winners. Meanwhile, the peak of witty, clever, intelligent stories making their way to the big and small screen was roughly around this same time, when entertainment made by such people as Dick Wolf, David Simon, David Chase, Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, Chris Haddock, Shawn Ryan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc., etc. either reached maximum popularity or its maximum level of cultural influence. It was more or less expected by this point that anything which wanted to be taken seriously within its field -- even comedy -- had to bring a higher standard of dialog, a larger and more obscure array of pop-cultural references, wittier banter, and so on to the table. The rigid, cliche-ridden, unchallenging formulas of the 80s and early-mid 90s had been smashed, and in their place were stories actually pitched at the adult level. Exposition was cut to the bone: audiences who didn't understand what they were seeing were challenged to figure out in in context. The presupposition of this crop of writer-producers was that audiences were smart, and would be able to keep up. And they were right.

It was, however, also around this very rough period that we saw the next generation of "creators" begin to helm their first major projects. In particular, in 2009, J.J. Abrams got hold of one of the most beloved -- and intelligent -- franchises in history, STAR TREK, and proceded to give it a frontal lobotomy. Gene Roddenberry's ground-shattering sci-fi show had tackled complex moral issues, and created characters who were just as smart, thoughtful and principled as they were daring: hence the show's enduring legacy. Abrams' reboot was an embarrassment, a noisy, empty-headed action film less memorable than the taste of the popcorn you ate when you watched it. I'll never forget the obscene rant of one guy on Tumblr, who howled "Abrams decided he would 'honor' the memory of Star Trek's most beloved Lady [Uhura] and turn her character into a dumb whore that Kirk fucked and promptly forgot about." However, as a more sober Michael Hare wrote in Film Experience at the time: "[Abrams' movie] is homogenized Star Trek, but that's less the fault of J.J. Abrams than it is merely a result of the current cinematic culture as a whole."

Hare was right: Abrams' unoriginal, one-dimensional and vacuous as his movies are, is merely a symptom of a generational problem: characters are only as smart as the people who create them. For the last 30 years or more, our culture has been engaged in a slow but systematic purge of everyone, in every field, who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, "modern" feminism, and the unrelated, but parellel "cult of youth" which assumes anyone 40 or older is evil or useless, we have managed to do away with the technical class which serviced us creatively, without actually training their replacements. The modern crop of writers and directors were promoted far too quickly and given entirely too much power: even the very talented ones lacked the seasoning of their seniors, men and women who had come up slowly through the ranks of writers' rooms, who had learned their craft through apprenticeship: the result is a collision of ignorance and arrogance, which produces from its impact only mediocrity, a mediocrity which shakes the bar loose of its old, lofty standard and drops it to a level where as visually sumptuous a film as the new DUNE can have characters say shit like, "OK, we're good to go."

The anti-intellectual element of so many modern movies and television shows, their faux-cleverness, their vulgarity, their deafening volume, their substitution of stale political bromides for plots, and archetypes for characters, are the result of people who are either stupid themselves, were picked for the wrong reasons (sex, gender, race or age rather than skill and passion) or who have been directed by higher-ups to knock thirty or forty IQ points off the script so as not to intimidate the sheep-like masses they believe audiences to be. But audiences are not anywhere near as sheep-like as cynics like to think. They do not need dialog or concept to be dumbed down. They may want it occasionally -- mindless entertainment definitely has its place -- but need it? From OPPENHEIMER to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and back again, we have ample evidence that what matters to audiences is that they be entertained, challenged, provoked, forced to think or at least to feel, and that assuming them stupid and witless is not only cynical and self-defeating, it's wrong from a purely practical standpoint. Put another way, it's bad business.

You will think by now -- and possibly be right -- that I am kicking a mole hill into a mountain. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's seeing the underlying, even unconscious motives in what seem like harmless artistic and cultural compromises. In the last 35 years we have already seen the human attention span artificially shortened, first by the increasing use of razzle-dazzle, frame-fucked, MTV-style editing in the 90s, and then later, through the popularity of mobile devices and their accompanying effect on the dopamine centers of the brain. The ability to concentrate, to think critically, to apply logic to situations is visibly dying before our eyes. The last thing we need are the most intellectual of our intellectual properties being turned into "content" because the directors entrusted to bring them to the screen aren't smart enough to understand them. Let the stupid stick to their own lane. The one we're in is narrow enough as it is.