Hollywood vs. Sincerity

Scott Hardie | February 3, 2025
I haven't been able to stop thinking about a video about sarcasm vs. sincerity in Hollywood since watching it. I've seen a few videos making the same case, this one probably being the best.

To summarize: Hollywood has stopped asking us to take movies and television seriously. Everything now has an ironic vibe that refuses to take itself seriously, winking at the camera with jokes that depend on the characters understanding that they're fictional. Some do this quite bluntly like Deadpool while others are more subtle like mockumentary sitcoms, but the corrosive effect is the same: We in the audience can no longer be genuinely stirred to feel emotion by what we're watching, which is the whole point of cinema as an art form. (And some titles are especially lazy about it, saying and doing things that sound like jokes but aren't.)

I agree wholeheartedly with the author's argument, and I appreciate his examples (his point about Spaceballs feels dead-on), but I think there are at least two major factors in play that he doesn't mention, and that I haven't heard other videos mention either.

One, comedy is both necessary and difficult. It's necessary because comedy sells tickets at the box office. People flocked to Mad Max: Fury Road because it was pitched as a comedy about some crazy lunatics in the desert, while they avoided Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga because it was pitched as a drama about a woman suffering assault and amputation and other horrors, even though they involved the same characters, setting, and creative team. Marvel has the most successful film series in history, but poll the fans and critics, and you'll consistently hear that its worst titles are Eternals and Thor: The Dark World, the two that are the most serious and sincere. Even Peter Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy was praised for its sincerity in the aforementioned video, had a flop with his follow-up film King Kong, which asked audiences to take the giant ape seriously, decades after it had become a cultural punchline. So yeah, you're a Hollywood executive with your job on the line; which project do you green-light, the funny ironic one that audiences like, or the straight-faced one that doesn't sell any more?

But at the same time, comedy is really difficult to do well. Just like with horror movies, where you get a genuinely good one every few years and a whole lot of repetitive, uninspired hack jobs (ha) in between, really excellent comedies are rare because the perfect chemistry is hard to pull off and good comic tension is hard to sustain. Do you know what's much easier to write and act? Self-aware, ironic "jokes" that are really just winks and nudges at the audience to acknowledge that the movie knows it's stupid, haha amirite? Studios crank those out by the dozen because they're easy and they sell.

Two, we've lost interest in sincerity because we've lost faith in everything else. I've brought this up in other recent TC discussions, but in short, we Americans have spent the last half-century losing faith in our government, our churches, our schools, our journalists, our businesses, and each other. Why wouldn't our culture reflect this? At the risk of invoking bullshit "generations," if Boomers were the first to feel disillusionment at politics in the late sixties, Generation X expanded it to culture in the early nineties with ironic entertainment whose subtext was always, "Nothing really matters. It's all just a joke." After a few more decades, that perspective has metastasized; it's now prevalent in everything, everywhere. Depending on your level of cynicism and paranoia, you might be inclined to think that this defeatist worldview was deliberately manufactured by a rich and powerful oligarchy who want us not to resist them, but you don't have to believe that in order to appreciate why audiences find familiarity and comfort in this jaded attitude when it turns up in pop culture. What are we supposed to believe in, stories where values matter and people's actions can make the world better? Ha!

I truly hope that Hollywood finds its way back to sincerity, as the author of that video suggested was starting to happen. But that's not going to occur on its own. Culture reflects the world we live in, and so first, we have to find a way to believe in the value of our institutions again. I hope that I'm wrong about generations, because if we're going to find a way to stop sinking further into this dystopian morass, a refreshing new perspective is one of the likelier ways to achieve it.

What do you think about any aspect of this? Can movies and television be saved? Can we be saved? Or are that video and I being too hard on entertainment that just wants to have some fun?

Samir Mehta | February 3, 2025
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