Risk aversion will be the death of cinema

In the opening scene of the overrated but highly watchable, La La Land, a daydream sequence sees commuters, stuck in one of LA’s famous tailbacks — surely as much an American icon as the Hollywood sign — break the boredom of commuting by performing a song and dance routine on the freeway and, more importantly, on the bonnets and roofs over the cars.

Or on some of the cars at least. It’s easy to predict which ones will suffer the indignity of dance: the old ones.

I don’t know if the untouched cars were product placement, though I suspect the Toyota Priuses, symbols of knowing self-mockery, that appear later in the film, probably were. In either case, it was nonetheless quite clear to anyone with eyes which cars would get stomped.

It is a similar story in the chase scene through the tunnels of Paris in the now forgotten Robert De Niro vehicle Ronin, a decent, if dated, yarn featuring Natascha McElhone and Jean Reno about an IRA splinter group trying to obtain a MacGuffin in France. There, too, any new motor would dodge destruction at the last moment, while any car more than ten years old, you can be sure, will soon be on its roof.

I was thinking about this when I read that Apple has apparently banned films from allowing its villain to use iPhones. Rian Johnson (pictured), director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, has courted safe controversy by complaining about the tech giant’s alleged policy of attempting to associate its products with only the good: “Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies, but — and this is very pivotal — if you’re ever watching a mystery movie, bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera,” he said.

Apple, in fact, can do no such thing. Filmmakers could glue iPhones to the foreheads of their actors, protagonists and antagonists alike. They just couldn’t get free ones from Apple to do so.

I didn’t know Johnson’s name, but on looking up his filmography I noticed his debut was the low-ish budget 2005 cod-film noir Brick. I won’t claim that I loved this tale of wise-cracking adolescents playing hardboiled detective — I’m too much of an un-ironic lover of the noir genre for that — but it at least demonstrated imagination and so deserved, one might say, a certain regard.

In which case I have an idea for Johnson, or any other director who happens to read this: quit with the addiction to product placement and buy your own damn props!

Buying your own props requires money, of course. In Abel Ferrera’s low budget New Rose Hotel, some derivative of the Palm Pilot — remember those? — takes the place of a future hi-tech communication device. At the time this was only slightly less incongruous than the bouncing bangers of Ronin, though it was a lot more forgivable.

It feels faintly absurd to demand filmmakers refuse to bend to commerce. Film, after all, has always been a commercial art form. Even the most obscure arthouse flick is intended to make money, with the exception perhaps of films by Stan Brakhage — and those are, frankly, more at home in the art gallery than the dream palace.

And yet, surveying the barren wasteland that is cinema today, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to the risk-taking spirit that once delivered masterpieces and failures in equal measure. Online critics accuse the film industry of pandering to the politically correct nostrums of the day, as if this was ever not the case. More novel is the apparent need to avoid risk at all cost.

Today’s films need to make money, and lots of it, hence the startling reliance on Chinese box office receipts to pay the bills. Gone are the days when, following the release of Behold a Pale Horse — a film about a veteran of the Spanish Civil War returning home to be murdered — the film company, Columbia in this case, could stand tall in the face of official opprobrium. No film company today would respond to a country banning its entire output by saying “Fine! Go for it. We’re still releasing the film”.

More damaging than that, though, is the fact that risk aversion results in worse films. As budgets have bloated, the need for returns has resulted not only on increasing reliance on product placement, but also on a stultifying dearth of imagination. Remakes, strings of sequels and franchises dominate. The supposedly edgy moves that so infuriate nostalgics — in truth, mostly tepid political gestures — disguise a deeper malaise. Hollywood may pose as Green, but recycling is not the answer for an industry that has lost the capacity to fight and lose.

Ironically, this risk aversion fails, as the diminishing returns at the box office demonstrate. The film as comfort viewing soon gives way to the soporific. Familiarity may not necessarily breed contempt, but over-familiarity certainly breeds boredom.

I can’t imagine Krzysztof Kieślowski, who despite operating under state censorship produced the masterful Dekalog (two parts of which formed the basis for the universally lauded films A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love), would have been troubled by the tantrums of tech executives.

But then, working in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Kieślowski didn’t have to earn $200 million just to break even. And neither did the directors of the Hollywood films of the era.