With the New Year (and the events of Sept. 11) now blessedly in the past, most of us are slowly moving back into our regular schedules. Admittedly, we still keep an ever-watchful eye out for the likes of crazy shoe bombers, but we’re also going to the movies like mad.
In fact, in the wake of these “uncertain times,” the box office is booming and what of it? Maybe it’s just that we feel we can momentarily put our angst aside by stepping into another world.
Thus it’s no coincidence Hollywood is lining the theaters with opportunities to jump out of our present state of woe and escape these troubled times.
Period films, in particular, have been popping up recently–Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Affair of the Necklace (France in the 1760s to the 1790s) and Gosford Park (England in the 1930s)–and while they all seem packed with bloodshed, the movie-going audience seems ready and willing to partake, despite the recent terrorist tragedies.
It’s true that movies have always been a way to put our own lives on hold while we peek into someone else’s on the silver screen, but entrance into the world of these films–of times and places already passed–may lend added reassurance that as time becomes history, our present times of unrest will pass, too.
Still a lot of violence
OK, so none of these films are going to win the Oscar for Most Peaceful. (Wait, that’s not a category anyway–whew). Brotherhood of the Wolf, especially, is a dark film filled with plenty of bloodshed, scalping and a big, sneaky beast; The Affair of the Necklace is no stranger to corruption and conspiracy, rife with Marie Antoinette’s machinations; and the entire premise of Gosford Park hangs on the “whodunit” murder question.
So what does our going to see these films say about our sensitivity to current events?
Perhaps bloodshed is easier to rationalize when there’s a very clear good guy and bad guy. (Ahem. That could be good gal and bad gal, but you know what I mean. Brotherhood of the Wolf‘s peasant-eating machine certainly leaves gender a matter of question, and The Affair of the Necklace already has a built-in, evil, very female Marie Antoinette.)
In Brotherhood, the beast is bad and the guys sent to slay it are good. In Affair, the queen is bad and the girl who seeks to avenge her name is good. It’s a classic antagonist/protagonist situation. Very clear.
What’s not so clear is wondering what kind of an anonymous human would spread anthrax by mail. It’s much easier to blame a monster. These movies create for us a sort of elegant “other-world” where blame is easy to place, even if it has a scary face.
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Perfect imperfection
Remember the saying, “Those were the good ol’ days?” Well, the “good ol’ days” had just as many mishaps and terrible events as the present, yet we tend to remember them with fondness, as if everyone had a perfect place for him or herself. The peasants liked the feudal system, right?
Gosford Park‘s director Robert Altman does a great job with this. There are so many characters (of both low and high society) who all seem to have that perfect place, yet there’s something scary about their economic division, especially given the Depression Era in which the film is set.
The servants are “polished,” with freshly ironed uniforms and witty, revealing dialogue. (One maid opines, “I’m the perfect servant. I have no life.”). Alternatively, the rich are exquisitely beautiful and look down on the hired help.
While we watch with secret longing to live (even if only for a day) in the rich person’s shoes, we have in the back of our minds the knowledge that in a matter of minutes, this fantasy will be over as we touch our pockets to feel for the car keys.
Oh, good. They’re there; now back to the movie.
Director Charles Shyer pays special attention to this detail in The Affair of the Necklace, as well. The costumes, ballrooms, bedrooms and royal courts are so lavish, so sumptuous, we are tricked into thinking we’re one of the spectators in the ballroom. We simultaneously love it all for its beauty but hate it for its cost of humiliating the “have-nots.”
A neat (and short) little package
The best and worst thing about a movie, of course, is when it ends. It’s over and now we have to remember where we parked and if it’s worth it to wait in the ever-long restroom line.
The period on which we just relished an hour or two may have chronicled a lifetime of emotions, but it was so neatly packaged that it hardly seemed real, and certainly not as planes crashing into buildings now seem real to us. It was another life we escaped to when we pushed our own life’s pause button.
In real life, our problems don’t go away that fast; they take time, and often solutions never come. But in film–especially in a film based on a time already passed and one in which we already know the historical outcome–may be just the therapy we need to soothe our tender emotions.
We know that in film, just when the problem and the journey get intense, the solution always comes.
