TRUMAN’S PROGRESS

And yet unlike television, which has undergone a similar growth and vastly improved as a result, movies are getting worse and worse. This seems to be a violation of the principle of abundance: With all the chances they have to master their trades, writers and directors should be coming up with plenty of interesting new material. But except for James Cameron, the writer-director of Titanic, it’s hard to point to a single mainstream moviemaker who came of age during the VCR era and matured into a genuine pop-culture artist. What we get instead are careers like Michael Bay’s.

Bay started out with a forgettable buddy/action movie called Bad Boys, which made a zillion dollars. He went on to make the Sean Connery- Nicolas Cage buddy/action movie, The Rock, which made two zillion dollars. In the next few weeks, his newest buddy/action movie, Armageddon, opens. Bay’s growth is measured solely by the fact that he produced this one as well as directing it. These movies all have the same visual signature: They’re very dark, and when two people have a fistfight (which happens every ten minutes), there’s so much rapid-fire editing that you can’t tell who’s hitting whom. You just hear the punches and the groans, and when Nicolas Cage gets up off the floor, you know he’s won the fight.

Of course, Hollywood has always produced bad big-budget movies. There are just more of them these days, and there is a stultifying sameness to them: the shattering glass, the explosions, the tough-guy girlfriend who knows how to throw a punch, the killer who rises from the dead so we can witness another climactic battle on top of the one we just watched, the ticking clock that reminds us the hero has only twelve hours (or eighteen hours, or twenty-four) to save San Francisco from germ-warfare attack, the duet between a scratchy tenor and a trilly soprano that plays over the closing credits.

Michael Bay and his ilk account for half the moviegoing life of a movie critic. The rest of the time, the critic goes to “independent films.” The term was invented to describe small American movies made without benefit of a studio, but since most “independents” are now distributed by studios — and many of them are financed by studios — the term now refers solely to a style of moviemaking in which a young director offers an autobiographical account of the ennui and depression of his childhood and college years.

The movies are almost all false, of course. Whatever horrors they may accuse their families of, there’s hardly an independent filmmaker whose suburban parents didn’t raise $ 100,000 or more to help their child produce a script that does nothing but complain about the injuries done by mom and dad. Nobody who makes a movie in his twenties actually suffers from ennui and depression, because making a movie that young requires too much drive and energy.

The only good films of this kind are Swingers and the wonderful new The Last Days of Disco, both of which offer a satiric take on the subject. In The Last Days of Disco, the epigrammatic writer-director Whit Stillman hilariously captures the pseudo-intellectual justifications that America’s affluent and educated youth have always at the ready to explain away their many self-indulgences.

In an effort to comfort a young woman who contracts both gonorhea and herpes the first time she has sex, her friend points out that “VD is really a good way to get back in touch with previous partners.” Another explains the benefits of herpes: Either you end up with another sufferer who’s bound to be very experienced sexually, or you’ll be with a man who loves you so much that he’s willing to risk contracting the disease for you.

Another character gets out of difficulties with women by telling them he is a homosexual (the movie is set in the early 1980s, before knowledge of AIDS was widespread). He seems to believe it, but when asked whether he has actually had homosexual congress, he is offended: “That’s defining it rather narrowly, don’t you think?” He is also offended when a girl tells him he has a “gay mouth,” and she is offended in turn by the way he takes offense: “You’re not fit to lick the boots of my real gay friends,” she says dismissively. Later, the same nasty girl insults her roommate but can’t figure out exactly why: “Anything I did that was wrong I apologize for,” she says, but then stiffens her back and adds, “Anything I did that was not wrong I do not apologize for.”

The Last Days of Disco is a miniature, a portrait of a moment in time spent in a tiny but glamorous New York setting. I fear overpraising it, because then people who go to see it will come away disappointed. The same is true on a wider scale with The Truman Show. What’s most interesting about the movie is not its plot about a thirty-year-old man, played by Jim Carrey, who discovers that his life is a twenty-four-hour-a-day TV show. The world of Truman Burbank is too unreal — too bright, too white-bread, and so phony that the audience loses respect for Truman because he can’t see through it. “We accept the reality with which we’re presented,” the TV show’s creator, Christof, says to explain the fact that Truman has never questioned his existence. That sounds good, but never was a less true word spoken. What child hasn’t entertained the fantasy that he might have been stolen away from his real parents — the ones who would let him eat all the ice cream he wants?

No, what makes The Truman Show fascinating in ways that nag at you for days is that it is the first fullblown allegory in a long, long time. But as you might expect from Hollywood, it’s a perverse allegory. Truman is not Christian, the tortured soul seeking-the Celestial City and experiencing all manner of terrors and joys along the way in that greatest of allegories, The Pilgrim’s Progress.

If The Pilgrim’s Progress is about finding God, The Truman Show is about rejecting God. The world constructed for Truman is self-consciously Edenic: “Your world is the sick place,” Christof tells someone who is trying to rescue Truman. In the TV world, there’s no crime, no war, no ugliness of any kind — at least not until Truman attempts to escape and incurs the wrath of his angry creator. Truman is not cast out of the Garden of Eden. He flees, invoking and exercising the free will he never knew he had.

The director of The Truman Show, Peter Weir, has been making movies for two decades now — Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Fearless, Dead Poets Society, and Green Card among them. There isn’t a more provocative filmmaker alive, in part because his movies are all alive. Weir has the mystical ability to infuse a script with an emotional power that other directors seem incapable of creating. Screenwriter Andrew Niccol brings everything except real feeling to The Truman Show, but Weir is able to find it. He finds it not in Truman, though Carrey’s performance is all anyone could have wished for. The real journey is taken by the show’s creator, Christof (in a beautiful performance by Ed Harris), who loves the passive Truman with omniscient calm but loses himself in rage when his creation begins to realize the truth.

The Truman Show might well win Weir an Oscar, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone has won for the wrong movie. (Weir should have won for The Year of Living Dangerously or Witness, and, if they gave out prizes for the last fifteen minutes of a movie, for Fearless.) Critics don’t vote on Oscars; people who work in the movie business do. Those people are as sick of the stuff Hollywood makes as the critics are, and they love to anoint movies like The Truman Show to make them feel better about the business they work in.

But then they go right on making the junk. And it’s the critics who have to continue to sift through it.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz edits the editorial pages of the New York Post.