I celebrate the guy's entire catalog

Oscar Watch:

Actually, I hate the Oscars. But this post is based on my prediction that The Departed is going to win Best Picture. Lately Academy Awards have been doled out based on a split agenda of affirming market trends and assuaging faux-liberal guilt, the latter being the reason for the success of the hilariously atrocious Crash (apologies to Robert Ebert).

Here is my theory about the "improbable" victory, last year, of Crash: it is based on the Schindler's List-principle in entertainment that movies that are "good for you" (i.e., which address "real" (i.e., tragic, traumatic, uncomfortable, or topical issues) require you to suffer. This is the flipside to entertainment that relieves you of the burden of thinking (which for some of us constitutes an equal degree of suffering).

The logic of Crash operates as follows:

We really can offer no answers for the quandaries presented by race relations in America (such as, for example, a decidedly un-entertaining discussion of intersection of economic power relations with race). But we can make you suffer, via a ludicrous script in which every single event, character and conversation is structured around racism and a score, particularly in the last fifteen minutes, that is the musical equivalent of waterboarding. Through this suffering, you, the moviegoer, have done your penance and are forgiven for your racist thoughts and desires.

This year, the joyless Babel occupies the place of Crash, substituting a nonsensical discussion of globalization for its predecessor's nonsensical discussion of race. But the joyless, guilt-ridden flick won last year, and the market demands constant adaptation. Thus my money is on the genuinely wildly entertaining The Departed, which just might represent a new trend in Hollywood.

What trend? I'm not sure I have the words for it. Last night I was discussing both The Departed and the strangely similar Casino Royale with some friends, and different terms came up: "campy," "parodic." None of them seemed quite right. The consistent thread in these two films, which is surely the kernel that makes each so fun to watch, is a remarkable level of self-awareness in two closely related genres (cop and spy) that normally have utterly none.

Both films implode spectacularly at the end. Casino Royale, perhaps because it was cut down from a longer version, becomes incoherent. The Departed becomes bizarrely cynical about itself, wiping out all of its characters (not to mention its love subplot) with maximum arbitrariness and minimal pathos, culminating in the much-loathed concluding shot in which a rat is framed before Boston City Hall. This truly pathetic metaphor for corruption (both the city's and the mob's) is a sort of fuck-you to the audience, a total surrender of any attempt to conclude the film at the level or tone that it begins (that of a "quality" Scorsese picture).

Both films depend upon a certain thrill of inconsistency, a kind of fake transgression of genre. Casino Royale, being the "first" Bond (even though it is set today, definitively after all the periods of all the other Bond films), shows us "Bond in formation": he doesn't order the drink right, he loses at cards, he gets flustered, he falls in love, he has no idea what's going on in the last fourth of the film (a trauma bigger than the death of his only love). The Departed features a dead-on, absolutely earnest performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, and then a series of increasingly camp performances from the rest of the cast (Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg and Jack Nicholson most of all). Wahlberg in particular doesn't even bother to act, and that is probably the perfect way to have played it-- his line readings are all text, completely unrealistic; they are written, their humor in the foreground. Thus the film keeps oscillating between different registers, from serious drama (the ever-more-stressed DiCaprio channeling Pacino in Serpico to laugh-out-loud camp (Wahlberg's chains of insults, Nicholson's "rat" speech) to the flatulence of the final shot.

What is it about these two films that might represent a turn in Hollywood movies? It is as though it doesn't matter one bit that they are not particularly well made or consistent-- they feel like a new mode of stripped-down entertainment. Some pretension has in the process been gleaned away. Maybe.