My take going into 2024 is that we need to smash the arthouse-pulp divide because actually both are good and necessary - and often the best pieces of work are ones that straddle this divide or act like it doesn't exist. Take David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., one of the most acclaimed films of the 21st century: it started life as a failed television pilot starring a B-movie actress (Naomi Watts) and a daytime soap actress (Laura Harring, fresh off of NBC’s Sunset Beach). Or the BBC's hugely lauded Happy Valley: is it a timeless Greek tragedy of revenge and trauma set amid the drug-addled squalor of post-industrial Yorkshire, or a pulpy crime thriller starring Raquel from Coronation Street and Janice from Benidorm where characters hurl insults like "shitpot" and "wankatron" at each other?
It’s on this note that I'm quite happy to come out and say: The Marvel Cinematic Universe is fairly good, actually. I've watched enough difficult eastern European arthouse cinema to be able to say that comfortably without causing people to gasp, clutch their pearls and question my taste and intellectual credentials - but even if I hadn't, it would still apply. By and large, the MCU is successful because it is good.
Pulp storytelling - such as soaps, dime-store thrillers, chick lit, action movies, romcoms, space opera and high fantasy - is something that is going to emerge organically in pretty much every free consumer society that has a market-driven mass media, and if it's going to exist, it should at least be done well. Marvel is so ubiquitous now because, at least for that first decade of the MCU (2008-2018), it was done well - and a big part of why Marvel succeeded while other studios failed was a focus on characters and character development. Spectacle can only get you so far: audiences return because they develop emotional relationships with the people on screen and want to know what happens to them. (For the same reason, Stranger Things - which I admittedly quit after series 2 - is far more than just a nostalgia trip.) Numerous other attempted sci-fi, fantasy and superhero franchises that other studios tried to launch in the 2010s failed, and a big factor in that is that they weren't character-driven, they weren't grounded and compelling in the same way as those first three phases of the MCU. Of these, the films I like best (the gung-ho jingoism of the first Captain America, Ant-Man And The Wasp’s 80s-style family comedy, the self-parodic sandbox of Iron Man 3, the glorious, knowingly ridiculous mess that is Thor 2, Black Panther’s sumptuous audiovisual take on H. Rider Haggard) aren't necessarily the ones that dyed-in-the-wool Marvel fans tend to like best (Captain America 2 & 3, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Endgame, The Avengers, the Tom Holland Spider-Man films).
Let’s flit back to euro-arthouse for a second: there’s a wonderful scene in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds Of Sils Maria where French actress Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) watch the latest superhero flick in the cinema then discuss it over drinks afterwards. It encapsulates the whole debate around popular fantasy, and the truth lies somewhere in between Maria’s scathing mockery of the film (a well-observed parody of an X-Men-style blockbuster) and Valentine’s spirited defense of it.
I recently finished watching FX’s techno-thriller A Murder At The End Of The World, written, produced and directed by indie filmmakers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who graduated from making features like The East and Sound Of My Voice (both of which premiered at Sundance) to Netflix’s extraordinary The OA. While the latter stands up as a phenomenal piece of craft with a voice all of its own, the deeper that Marling and Batmanglij have dived into the world of genre television, the clearer it has become that their lack of grounding in pulp TV is leading them into pitfalls. While enjoyable and compelling for most of its runtime, A Murder At The End Of The World falls apart in its final episode for entirely avoidable reasons. As science fiction on the topic of AI, it ends up doing badly things that were done better by Star Trek episodes 30 years ago, and as a murder mystery revolving around a group of disparate characters trapped together in an isolated luxury location, it could learn a thing or two from Agatha Christie. You have to know the rules before you try to break them.
Perhaps pulp isn’t the issue in itself - I’d much rather people watch and read great pulp than either bad pulp or nothing at all - but the fact that we’re increasingly marinated in a cultural landscape of nothing but pulp; one where non-pulp is uncool, marginalized and harder to access. I grew up on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Sliders, British sitcoms and Sue Townsend novels, but as an adult used that as a springboard to watching Wajda, Zvyagintsev and Romanian New Wave films, and reading Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Michel Faber. You can’t live on candy without some vegetables, and sometimes the candy is the vegetables and the vegetables are the candy and it’s all just vegetable candy. Geek culture itself has become a thing I abhor, and massively dumbed-down since the 1990s, revolving around cultish worship of media properties and with an aversion to critical thinking - and I can hardly find anyone to talk about the things I am passionate about with, as they are mostly foreign and not the cool kind of foreign (Korean/Japanese). Being a self-described nerd or geek has mutated into a kind of comfort blanket, complete with a reflexive aversion to any media or pastime that isn’t nerdy or geeky, that isn’t socially approved by other geeks, or that invites contemplation or uncertainty or poses genuinely difficult questions.
All I can suggest going forward is that each of us try to mix it up a little more, to try not to get stuck in a media silo of algorithmically curated content. Challenge and surprise yourself. Seek out the uncool, the old, the strange. The highbrow and the lowbrow, for sometimes they come disguised as each other. Use mainstream as a jumping-off point for non-mainstream: if you liked Inception, try Lost Highway. If you liked Parasite, try Save The Green Planet. (You’ll never look at sandpaper the same way again.) If you like heartwarming romances in sun-drenched locations, try the BBC’s Who Pays The Ferryman, set in 1970s Crete - which pretends to be a lightweight love story for the first six episodes before it goes balls-to-the-wall and most of the characters end up dead.
Then, when you’re done consuming: criticize. Create. Connect. I think it was Lisa Gerrard who once said that in an ideal world, each of us would make our own art. Well, with the sheer diversification of media and the technological capabilities now available to us, we’re getting closer and closer to that point - yet also more and more distracted. I accidentally dropped my six-year-old Macbook on the floor and smashed the screen last week, and if I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have written this column. The best reason to create your own art is because however bad you fear it might turn out, however amateurish your efforts, at least you are human and thus what you create will also be human in origin. And in a world where more and more of what we consume will soon have been created by AI, that is worth something in and of itself and has a value to the soul. Merry Christmas.
Completely agree with your comments about the cultural dominance of pulp, nerd culture/fandom and the collapse of high brow art consumption. I am old enough to remember going to the cinema with film major friends and watching “art house” - all those beautiful, often slow-paced, subtitled, atmospheric films that pulled ideas and emotions out of me I’d never anticipated. And sitting in record shops with muso friends, looking for rare vinyl and digging up the bands that had influenced your current favourites, or discovering a new band none of your friends had heard of. There was so much cachet in loving something no-one else had discovered yet!
The trickiness has been stripped out of cultural consumption. With everything on-demand, people are used to being effortlessly pleased. I agree the answer is to start to make, but to keep it small and local to establish some of that special exclusivity that barely exists anymore. I tell my kids: make your own scene, and guard it from the mainstream. Treat it like the old free parties, all word of mouth and secret locations so it has a buzz and all the fun, but can’t be churned out far and wide to anyone with a bit of FOMO (which is now everyone.)