Plus ca change

Here's an interesting little passage I stumbled on recently.  See if it chimes for you the way it did for me:

"The formula is one of "near-tragedy".  Four acts of tragic violence and guilt are followed by a fifth act of redemption and innocence regained.  "Near-tragedy" is precisely the compromise of an age which [does] not believe in the finality of evil.  It represents the desire…….to enjoy the privileges of grandeur and intense feeling associated with tragic drama without paying the full price. This price is the recognition of the fact that there are in the world mysteries of injustice, disasters in excess of guilt, and realities which do constant violence to our moral expectations. The mechanism……allows [the hero] to partake of the excitement of evil without bearing the real cost."

Has this guy nailed the current malaise in Hollywood mainstream, or what??!!

Well…….

Not as such, no.

In fact, this is a quote from George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy, which I'm re-reading for the first time in about twenty five years.  The book was published in 1961, based on lectures given even earlier, and takes as its subject matter (as you'd probably guess from the title) what has happened to tragic vision in art and literature since the time of Shakespeare.  The excerpt in question deals with the abject failure of the Romantics to carry on the Elizabethan/Jacobean torch in their own attempts at tragedy.  I've taken a couple of liberties with the original here to disguise it – [does] was in fact "did", the elision in the fourth sentence hides the full phrasing "….the desire of the romantics to enjoy…..", and in the final sentence "The mechanism of timely remorse or redemption through love – the arch-Wagnerian theme – allows the romantic hero to partake…."  It's not contemporary Hollywood that's under attack here – Steiner's talking here mainly about a period from the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.

But the cap does fit rather well, doesn't it.

Anyway, it's always nice to be reminded that the cultural tectonics you find yourself getting so hot under the collar about are not , in fact, some new and alarming Decay in the State of Things, but more often than not the simple re-iteration of age-old patterns in human behaviour.

What's of most interest to me, though, re-reading this section of Steiner's book, is the close parallel in didactics between the Romantics as he describes them and what seems to have happened to Hollywood movie making in the period since the rise of Reagan and, even more intensely, in the last ten years.

According to Steiner, the Romantics insisted on exemplary lessons in their story-telling – the Essential Goodness of Humankind, the Perfectibility of Man, the Redemptive Power of Remorse and Love – despite the corrosively detrimental effect it had on the drama itself, and this was why they failed dismally to produce any decent tragedy to compare with Shakespeare.

Now map that onto mainstream Hollywood's similarly crass penchant for crowbarring into everything the endlessly recurring themes of:

the Noble Heroic Male (and latterly Perfect Family Man) who Triumphs over Evil, and goes home to wife and kids/gets the girl, apparently completely unscarred and untroubled by his trials,
the jeered at/put upon/low-born young No-Hoper (but with a Hidden Talent or Destiny), who Follows His Dreams and Shows Them All,
Stranded Fatherless (or Father-distant) Masculinity, redeemed at last through hideously unlikely father/son rapprochements,
and of course, latterly, to a sinister and alarming degree, the implication in the narrative of Gaaahd.

All with, I should add, similarly catastrophic results when it comes to decent story-telling.

In defence of the Romantics, I suppose you can at least say that their aspirations were thoroughly modern and forward-looking for the times, nominally encompassed the whole of humanity, and seemed at the time to have a justified basis in the emerging rationalism of the period.  By contrast, the didacticism of contemporary Hollywood strikes me as increasingly paternalistic, parochial and backward-looking.

And that's a bit of a shame, for the most advanced movie-making machinery on the planet.