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Photo illustration by Celina Pereira
The past decade’s clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feel like a moment, and a genre, of their own.
Hollywood has its eras, often apparent only in retrospect. Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of “Black Panther”? Do you remember when an all-female version of “Ghostbusters” was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a “Star Wars” film described the Empire as a “white supremacist (human) organization” after Donald Trump’s 2016 election? Has enough time now passed to say that was all a bit strange?
Looking back, you can see a period when identitarian politics were in cultural ascendancy; you can spot the moments when our media overlords — on their back feet over rage at the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the paucity of nonwhite nominees at the Oscars, the aftermath of George Floyd’s death — vowed to change their ways and atone for their past. But what was particular to the Hollywood of the 2010s was the way these politics fused with the industry’s insatiable demand for sequels, spinoffs and reboots, giving us a curious and mercenary new invention: the inclusive multimillion-dollar blockbuster. (The BIPOCbuster, if you will.) It’s the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.
Or at least it was. The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed. Many of the films it produced seemed to imagine themselves as barrier-breaking productions, landmarks like “In the Heat of the Night.” In reality, they have come to feel more like a niche genre of their own, the way spaghetti westerns or blaxploitation films do — unique products of a particular cultural moment that now require context and explanation to understand. They remind me, more than anything, of 1980s action flicks, a genre whose tropes and ideologies feel almost comically redolent of a specific era, whether the films are good or so-bad-they’re-good. This was the decade of Sylvester Stallone’s going back to Vietnam to try to win the war for Reagan’s America in “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” the decade of flat-topped martial-arts commandos, good cops who don’t play by the rules, gunshots that make cars explode, brawny henchmen machine-gunned by the dozens. But by the time we reached the 1993 meta-action-comedy “Last Action Hero” — an irony-laden genre sendup in which a boy magically gets to become the sidekick to a fictional hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger — you could hear the death knell of the kinds of films Schwarzenegger and Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme had been making for years.
Is that what watching “Barbie” might feel like in 10 years — once, perhaps, “the patriarchy” feels like a clearly of-the-moment choice for a Big Bad? The tropes of this passing era are as familiar and easily spotted as with older periods. There is, for one thing, the showy, self-satisfied gender-swapping, as with that 2016 election-year reboot of “Ghostbusters.” That movie prompted enough openly misogynistic and racist backlash to make it look as if it must be a noble endeavor — as if any Hollywood executives who got reactionaries frothing at the mouth must be accomplishing something important, even if all they did was tweak the balance of characters in a dusty franchise.
Hollywood was right that audiences were hungry for different stories.
Then there are the paper-thin “diverse” characters parachuted into major films — put front and center on every poster but given curiously little to do as the plot unfolds. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel was set up as the most powerful superhero in the Marvel universe but ended up playing no decisive role in its most important films. (She was later joined by a Black woman and a Muslim woman in the sequel “The Marvels,” another in a series of firsts, but still a throwaway film.) Many attempts to diversify old intellectual property only emphasized how awkward and unwelcoming those worlds were to the kinds of people they wanted to include: The characters could do nothing to change the old logic of the stories they were dropped into.
Other films tried too hard to correct the past, judging their original white male protagonists far more harshly than anyone in the audience did. In the final James Bond film from Daniel Craig, “No Time to Die,” Bond has been replaced as Agent 007 by a Black woman, played by Lashana Lynch (can you remember her name or her drink of choice?); he obsesses over girlfriends dead and alive; he is unable to seduce. (A much younger Ana de Armas laughs at the thought.) By the end, you’re just happy that this poor man, now totally out of time, has been put out of his misery. The old Bond films are distinctly of their era but feel timeless; what’s surprising is how quickly this one, in its desperation to be modern, has come to feel dated.
Yet this cultural moment did open doors. Hollywood was right that audiences were hungry for different stories, eager to see more types of people onscreen. The industry’s failure was in not finding enough creative ways to satisfy that appetite.
But just as the ranks of ’80s action shoot-’em-ups contain the odd “Terminator” or “Die Hard,” a cheesy era in movies can produce gems. In a previous age — even, perhaps, during the Obama years — “Get Out” might have been a cult horror film; in 2017, it instead became a global phenomenon, and Jordan Peele won the autonomy to make audacious films and turn into a rare kind of American auteur. And while Hollywood might have continued its overcorrection by giving “Everything Everywhere All at Once” seven Oscars, it is nonetheless fun to have a best-picture winner that has more in common with “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” than “Lawrence of Arabia.” The masterful, race-obsessed HBO sequel to the “Watchmen” graphic novel exists in large part because the creator of “Lost” learned about the 1921 Tulsa massacre for the first time. And streaming television has become excellent at providing light, fun entertainment rooted in a broader range of cultural experiences, from gay rom-coms like “Red White and Royal Blue” to bigger-budget adaptations like “Interior Chinatown” — projects that almost surely would not have happened a generation ago.
Hollywood is no less dependent than before on its original lore, its Aliens and Star Wars and Missions Impossible, recycled over and over to keep us entertained. The industry tried to update these formulas with new faces, but many of its efforts felt dutiful, insincere, too earnest and self-satisfied. Say what you want about the flaws of Schwarzenegger’s or Sergio Leone’s oeuvres, but they have survived the changing times because they are fun, something the P.C. blockbuster rarely had going for it. It’s conceivable that the close of this era will involve Hollywood’s backsliding away from any inclusion in films — that Shang-Chi was the last Asian hero and that we will return to Tom Cruise’s flying in to save the day. At least we no longer have to pretend to like something because it has the right politics, or because the people most vocally against it are Nazis.
Of course, cultural moments always look most dated right as we move past them. Who is to say that films from the diversity era cannot, down the line, return to relevance in unexpected ways? In “Dr. Strangelove,” from 1964, Gen. Jack D. Ripper starts World War III because he fears the fluoride in drinking water is robbing the nation of its “precious bodily fluids” — a detail that may, in a few months, have renewed resonance with the nation’s secretary of health and human services. Or consider these words: “In America, there’s a burglary every 11 seconds, an armed robbery every 65 seconds, a violent crime every 25 seconds, a murder every 24 minutes and 250 rapes a day.” Trump’s imminent apocalyptic inauguration speech about American carnage? Actually, those are the opening lines of “Cobra,” a violent, nasty 1986 film written by and starring Stallone. Hear it now, and you may no longer mutter, “It was a different time.”
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Source photographs for illustration above: Laura Radford/Marvel Studios; Nicola Dove/MGM and Danjaq LLC; David Bornfriend/A24; Murray Close/Getty Images; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Everett Collection; Nicola Dove/MGM, via Everett Collection; Marvel Studios.
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Kabir Chibber is a writer and filmmaker based in New York.
