The Cool Jacket Decades
Trendy Windbreakers and Dhamer Eyeglasses are Symptomatic of Hollywood’s Period Piece Problem
I saw Love Lies Bleeding yesterday and quite enjoyed it. My full review can be found here. My friend Alex (whose Substack can be found here) did not like it as much. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (Seinfeld voice). If anything I rather appreciate some critical distance from my friends when I get it. I have a policy of never making people apologize for their taste (provided, of course, that I’m not expected to apologize for mine). An inherent problem of sites like Letterboxd is peer pressure. I tend to watch a lot of the same movies as my friends. That’s a social thing, as in; we go to the theater to watch the movie together. But I also tend to absorb a lot of recommendations through the online social ether. There’s an anxiety inherent in being lukewarm on something your peers capital-L loved. There’s a compounding effect there too, worries about whether you like things of your own volition or simply because you’d like to engage in liking things together with your friends. Do we become friends because we’re similar or do we become similar because we’re friends? Scary thought.
In any case, Alex and I found common ground in one central complaint we both lodged against Love Lies Bleeding. It had nothing to do with the direction or screenwriting of Rose Glass, or the performances of an able cast. It had everything to do with the diorama they inhabited, built to resemble what social media aggregators would have you believe the 1980s looked like. “Diorama” is the key term there. There’s a certain aversion to naturalism, a curated quality to it all. Optimized to be fodder for film-centric social media accounts and the aesthetes who comprise their audiences. I do not mean to single out Love Lies Bleeding, it’s not an isolated incident. There’s been a quiet epidemic in modern Hollywood. A commodified package of vintage clothes, bad haircuts, and needle drops. A philosophy of filmmaking which has flattened the 60s, 70s, and especially the 80s into what I’m calling “The Cool Jacket Decades.”
The Bedazzled Hydraulic Press Comes for Us All
It’s long been a dirty secret of the entertainment industry that this flattening is simply business as usual. Product design is about efficiency in production and efficiency in consumption. Vice presidents become senior vice presidents and C-suite big boy executives through optimization. The Suits™ are rarely a sympathetic demographic, and they do a lot to earn their reputation. But we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that they don’t make the system work from time to time. You don’t know Norma Jean Baker but you sure as hell know Marilyn Monroe. She wasn’t born, someone designed her.
The same goes for anything and everything else sold as mass market entertainment. Take the western, for example. The progression of the classical western from pulp novels and comic books to expensive blockbuster films is a story of flattening aesthetics and removing ambiguities. Certain things are emphasized, and certain things are downplayed or removed entirely. More photogenic leading men, gorgeous technicolor vistas, and thrilling gunfights. Fewer sympathetic indigenous peoples and cases of dysentery/cholera/scurvy/etc. Again, I’m not unsympathetic to the perspective of those who bankroll these films and seek to profit from them. We go to the theater to be entertained and I find it generally entertaining to watch Gary Cooper roll up for the shootout at high noon. At the very least I imagine I enjoy it more than I’d enjoy seeing him defecate in a bush after five weeks of rough sleeping in the Great Plains.
It’s a similar logic that drives the diorama quality of modern Hollywood’s 20th century. The effect of modern period pieces being so immaculately arranged, so lovingly curated, is that they cease to resemble their antecedent time periods. Just as John Ford or Douglas Sirk’s Old West no longer resembled its actual frame of reference, modern Hollywood’s 20th century looks less and less like 20th century our parents knew. Jean Baudrillard defined the concept of “hyperreality” as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” The commodification of reality by the entertainment industrial complex is the transmutation of the real into the hyperreal. Something resembling real life is flattened into something that can be sold back to us.
Seen a Guy Who’s Literally You? Thank a Costume Professional
I have a deep and abiding sympathy for costuming professionals, set dressers, hair stylists, and makeup artists. They arguably do the most to make movies work and get thirty seconds of recognition a year between the Golden Globes and the Oscars. When I am king, the actors and directors will be expected to mime their acceptance speeches so some crazy people who sewed all the leather pants for the new Mad Max movie can talk about whatever they want for a half hour apiece. I see and hear from them less and therefore have much more incentive to hear what they have to say. Ain’t much novelty in televised speeches from people paid to talk on TV.
Having said all of that, it’s depressing to conclude that the work of these professionals props up so much of that diorama feeling. I stick with that word because it indicates a loving, handcrafted quality. These creatives operate on the opposite end of the spectrum from The Suits™. Bespoke projects rather than mass-produced. Driven by the passion of the individual rather than the cold calculus of the market. I think, like so many passionate people operating within somewhat insular niches, there’s a point at which you lose the ability to understand how the layperson relates to your work. The costume professional, makeup artist, set dresser, or hair stylist may imagine that they’re helping a new generation appreciate the bygone aesthetics they hold so dear, fostering the same love for the past which brought them to their career. In reality their work aids the annihilation of an authentic past, so that a more saleable, hyperreal version of history can take primacy in the minds of people who did not experience it firsthand.
Selling the Past to Treat the Symptoms of the Present
People in period dramas generally do not dress or act like people in real life. That has always been true. I’d bet irresponsibly large amounts of money that Liz Taylor was much better looking than Cleopatra VII of Ptolemy. So what’s the big deal?
I don’t demand doctoral thesis historical accuracy from my movies or TV shows. I don’t object to anachronism for the sake of a better end product. The rule of cool is alright with me. But I fear the effects of these practices as they march closer and closer to modernity. We’re already so divorced from our history, even our recent history. We know for a fact that the media we consume shapes our view of the world. It’s only in recent years that we’ve seen a concerted effort to rediscover and reemphasize the reality of Golden Age Hollywood favorites like the American frontier, the antebellum south, and Victorian England. These efforts encounter inevitable resistance from people raised on these hyperreal myths, who simply can’t let go of the comfier, less morally gray version of the past they were sold.
In the absence of grounded, naturalistic depictions of the recent past, I fear we run the risk of seeing the trials, tribulations, and painful lessons of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s buried under an avalanche of cool jackets.