Author’s note: Maura McHugh’s post “Extra Extra—summer is a coming in” of a few weeks ago inspired this train of thought, as it explains why a certain movie of the seventies—The Wicker Man (1973)—stayed so long with her. Check it out and subscribe to Maura’s substack.
First a confession: I don’t quite view as many movies as I used to do. One reason is lack of time—writing, maintaining this substack and the day job take up the majority of my life right now—but another is that, as far as I can see in my limited experience, there are not so many interesting movies that I wish to check out.
Of course, there are exceptions. I loved last year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and just caught up with 2021’s “Official Competition” which had me in stitches. As such, my misgivings are not with these—let us say—more arthouse-like efforts. It’s with the blockbusters such as “John Wick 4” and “Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One” and their ilk. And why many blockbusters of the seventies1 worked (and work) much better for me.
A few months in Australia, ago I went to “John Wick 4” with my sister. I’d call it a proponent of the ‘more is more’ credo of film making. In “John Wick 4”, everything is provided in excruciating detail. Every fight scene is put forth with such exquisite choreography and detail and moves so fast that nothing is left to the imagination. Absolute nothing, including the exotic backdrops of Tokyo, Berlin and Paris. It’s personal combat porn, and like actual porn it takes away the frisson, the thrill of the act itself. It diminishes the thing it’s evoking. Not to mention that it’s highly unrealistic (even the best fighter in the world would have succumbed from all the punches John Wick receives in the first couple of minutes of any fight scene in John Wick 4). Most importantly, though, I forgot all about the why. Why are they trying to kill John Wick? Why is John Wick fighting back? To seek redemption by killing dozens and dozens of people (even if each and every one of them is supposedly a criminal)? If there were any true motivations in this movie, they got drowned in the spectacle, were utterly forgettable from the start, or both.
Then there’s the latest instalment of the “Mission Impossible” movie series. I haven’t seen it, but I have seen a video on ‘the making of’ that shows how extensive the preparation for the stunts, and the biggest stunt in particular was. Tom Cruise did 13,000 paractice jumps to train this stunt to perfection. While this is an incredible level of dedication, it also shows how every millisecond of that stunt was planned, rehearsed and re-rehearsed until everybody could practically dream it. Possibly the best stunt ever (I’m no connoisseur of those), but it also leaves nothing to the imagination. Everything, exactly like John Wick’s fighting scenes, has been thought out and choreographed to perfection. And again, it leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.
And that, my friends, is my problem with a lot of today’s blockbusters: nothing is left to the imagination. Why? Seemingly because we can. Because technology and budgets have grown to such an extent that we can. Narrative threads are now written around the stunts or the fight choreographies. It makes me long back for a time when stunts and fights and other special effects happened in a movie for a reason, because they were an inherent, but not dominant, part of the story.
So let’s go back to the seventies (or beyond).
Because technology was less developed in those days, film-makers had to revert to other means of engaging the audience. One of these ways was to suggest rather than outright show. As such, the monster in a horror movie remains—until the final scenes, and sometimes not even then—off-screen. We see the havoc that it wreaks indirectly, meaning the film-makers allow our imagination to fill in the details.
Example: the first “Alien” movie (1979). We only get a few glimpses of the facehugger. Because it mostly remains in the background, unseen, is why we experience it as an such an intense existential terror. Highly effective.
However, as technology becomes ever more developed, it gives us the possibility to fill in all the details. The monster is not a figment of our nightmares, an image from our reptilian hindbrain anymore. No, every detail is filled in with modern CGI, to the latest pixel. And this, I’ll argue, lessens its capacity to fright, to install fear. It’s why the more detailed the facehugger from the original Alien movies was depicted in the later movies, the less fearsome it became2 (and don’t get me started on “Alien: Covenant” (2017) which is a masterclass in idiot plotting).
This ongoing capacity to fill in all the details—used to the point of overkill (“The Phantom Menace” (1999) in particular was an early offender)—leaves nothing to our imagination anymore. As a result, such movies have become the equivalent of visual popcorn; that is, forgotten the moment it’s digested while not providing any real sustenance.
The major problem with leaving nothing to the imagination is that imagination is a very important ability. Imagination shows us what might happen in the future, and as such is an essential survival mechanism3. It also helps us empathise with the other, feeling how the other might feel if we imagine us in their place, enhancing our empathy. Without imagination, every stranger is a cipher. With imagination, a stranger can become a friend.
Imagination fires innovation. Imagination powers progress. By limiting our imagination, the powers-that-be are creating a class of humans who are mainly consuming instead of producing (producing in the broadest sense of the word; that is, not just working but working on ways to improve life by volunteering, by helping others, by improving a community, and so much more). Limiting imagination is one way of dumbing down people, of achieving control over them.
Also, imagination thrives with ambiguity and mystery. Answering all the questions in a movie makes it more forgettable. So while Stanley Kubrick worked hard to make “2001, A Space Odyssey” (1969) into a visual spectacle, using the best special effects of its day, it’s the central mystery of Arthur C. Clarke’s story that drives its immense sense of wonder. Behind the grand vistas there’s a cosmic mystery full of unanswered questions whose ambiguity makes the movie just as powerful now as when it was released, more than fifty years ago.
TL;DR: less is more because it fires the imagination.
A very personal example: when I was a teenager, the Dutch TV series “Floris”—directed by Paul Verhoeven—ran for a single season in 1969. Rutger Hauer played Floris—a straightforward if somewhat naïve knight—whose companion Sindala—played by Jos Bergman—was the brains of the duo, using Eastern magic and tricks. In two episodes Floris was confronted by the ‘Lange Pier’—played by Hans Boskamp—a character based on the historical Pier Gerlofs Donia aka ‘Grutte Pier’ who was a Frysian freedom fighter. The original character was believed to be huge, and he was depicted like that in those two episodes. In reality, I suspect that Rutger Hauer and Hans Boskamp were not much different in length, but in those episodes the suggestion that ‘Lange Pier’ was huge, wild and enormously strong worked wonders on my juvenile brain (see image, even his sword was ridiculously large), as I imagined him to be so big that Floris would not stand a chance against him. Eventually, Lange Pier was overcome by a ruse rather than brute force. Nevertheless, the image of ‘Lange Pier’ chased me in my nightmares4.
In general, not explicitly showing everything works much more often than not. We only see Darth Vader’s face at the very end of “A New Hope” (1977), which greatly helped cement the character as one of the best movie villains ever. We only get glimpses of the shark in “Jaws” (1975). We never see any actual aliens in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977).
Nowadays, though, we can see every tiny scale of Godzilla’s skin and every little hair of King Kong’s pelt in “Godzilla vs. Kong” (2021). Give me the rubber suit—filmed through “suitmation”—in the original “Godzilla” (1954) and the gorilla suit in the original “King Kong” (1933) anytime. It just seems that the more time and effort a movie puts into the special effects (this includes stunts), the less story remains. The James Bond franchise was an early example, because the more involved the stunts became, the less involving the story was until the movies—especially during the Roger Moore years—became mostly grandiose self-satire (“Moonraker”, 1979)5.
Which just goes to show that the rot already started in the seventies, demonstrating that no era is perfect. Yet some are definitely better than others.
On top of that, I’ll argue that, in general, music of the seventies is also superior to what is mostly produced today in the second installment. And while I’m not particularly enamoured with most of today’ science fiction, I’m not sure if the seventies were its golden decade, either. About which more in essay number three. Thanks for reading!
Which I’ll define as 1969—1979;
Despite the exquisite design of the late H.R. Giger;
So much, that it’s embedded in our very consciousness;
Which was quite ironic, as Hans Boskamp had no Frysian roots, while Rutger Hauer did—which he later emphasised—and I am, via my paternal grandfather, also 25% of Frysian heritage. I should have cheered for the ‘Lange Pier’, not Floris…;-)
Until Daniel Craig turned the tide. Somewhat;