Cuckoo Clocks and Cartoons

Arrested juvenility in the current cultural climate

By Jack V. Booch

No serious new play performed on Broadway in New York has earned back its original investment for well over a decade now.

The public has spoken. The verdict is in. Only one of the five Academy Award nominees for Best Picture has grossed over $100 million at the box office.

That film, Juno, is a comedy/drama about a teenage girl’s unplanned pregnancy (and a topical treatment, many have suggested, that sends the wrong sorts of signals on the subject to young audience members).

The other four nominees were so-called “serious” pictures—art films, suspense and dramas. As far as I can tell, the slow trickle of moviegoers who have mustered the courage to go and see these films thus far have, on the whole, emerged from the cineplexes shrugging their shoulders in ambivalence and mild consternation.

All this begs the question—what are people rushing out to see?

Ratatouille (a feature-length animated film about a rodent with culinary ambitions) grossed over $200 million, and Alvin and the Chipmunks took in $50 million over its first three-day weekend alone and had just passed the $200 million mark as of this writing.

Knocked Up, yet another comedy making light of the subject of unplanned pregnancy, did more business than all of the recent cinematic treatments of the war on terror combined (The Kingdom, Rendition, In The Valley of Elah, etc.).

As DK Holm, VV’s astute film sage, recently pointed out online (blog.vanvoice.com), “that the rest of the American audience goes with this flow is emblematic of a general retreat to all things childish, be it literature (which is more popular with adult readers than literary fiction), clothing styles, comfort food, or pets.”

The latest installation of the National Treasure franchise was an immediate success in spite of uniform critical condemnation. As Holm pointed out in his essay online, NT really qualifies as a children’s movie, with its borderline cartoonish CGI and infantile and fantastical story elements.

But if box office grosses are to be taken as any indication of our current taste in entertainment, it would appear that Holm is, if you’ll pardon the pun, right on the money.

Reflecting on the desperation of a society which so clearly yearns to escape from reality into a cartoon world, I recall with glaring irony that many of our most productive artistic periods in history took place in times of change, struggle, and restlessness.

As Orson Welles’s character in The Third Man (1949) says, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Sure, we happen to be embroiled in a “fiasco” in Iraq, but there isn’t a compulsory draft after all, and most of the American middle class has little day-to-day interaction with the ongoing chaos and loss of life overseas.

The fact is that unless you’ve joined the armed forces or are related to someone who has, the war is likely to be little more than an unpleasant headline on the front page of The New York Times or in the wire service accounts buried in your local daily.

This fact is underscored by current polling in the presidential primaries which indicates that the general public is a lot more concerned with the state of the economy—interest rates, sub-prime mortgages, the price of oil, etc.—than with the war in Iraq.

Are we too fat and happy, too complacent, too disconnected from events in the wider world to produce or consume serious art? Aren’t we suffering enough to deliver popular art that is forged in the fires of our collective pain? Obviously, the answer is no.

We would rather see Juno than Rendition. We would rather amuse ourselves with mirthful accounts of juvenility (oh so briefly interrupted by the realities of parenthood) than confront darker and more difficult subject matter (such as the war in Iraq).

It makes a certain amount of sense if all we’re seeking as a culture is a diversion from the stresses of the marketplace and the hangovers associated with over-consumption. Really, after all is said and done, what is so terribly wrong with watching cartoons? I suppose not a thing. And I can’t think of a bad word to say about the cuckoo clock, either.