Sounds of Cinema: 2020

Last weekend's episode of Sounds of Cinema featured a countdown of twenty-five movies that defined the past decade from 2010 - 2019. The titles were selected and assembled as a sort of cultural collage based on how they reflect the trends in cinema over the past ten years and how their stories and subjects capture the culture in which we live.

Go here to read the full list and rationales for each title. Here are some highlights:

First Reformed (2018)
The 2000s concluded with a series of shocks to American life including the failed and unending wars in the Middle East and the collapse of the economy in the Great Recession as well as the ongoing threat of climate change. For the first few years of the 2010s there was a sense of hope but by the middle of the decade American life had turned sullen. Driven by angry opinion-makers, an apparently feckless government, divisive social movements, and an economy that served only its top one-percent, as well as the creeping realization that a seemingly unstoppable ecological catastrophe was imminent, the American public grew agitated and hopeless. No film of the 2010s captured that quite like Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. The movie cuts to the core of the disillusionment that characterized so much of American life in the 2010s, specifically the failure of traditional moral authorities who were compromised and even allied with those corrupting our politics and poisoning our environment. This film reflected the sense of helplessness to do anything about that and the rage and despair resulting from it. As the pastor puts it at one point in the movie, the conflict between hope and despair is at the essence of existence and that spiritual struggle was a defining aspect of life in the 2010s. And just like the film’s troubled pastor, Americans are not okay. Our screen-filled existence has put all the world’s problems on display and no one is coming to save us. First Reformed reflects those anxieties back at us with brutal honesty.

The Avengers (2012)
Superheroes dominated cinema and the culture throughout the 2010s and it was 2012’s The Avengers that solidified the place of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the franchise of the decade. It wasn’t just a superhero spectacle. By bringing all of these characters together so successfully, the first Avengers team up movie reconfigured what Hollywood franchises could be. At the time, The Avengers was regarded as a work of unprecedented ambition in the way it interpolated characters of different storylines into a single film. Looking at the 2012 movie now, post-Endgame, the Avengers’ first team-up movie is almost quaint. But the success of The Avengers is all the more remarkable in light how many other attempts to launch a similar cinematic universe failed. The Avengers is also representative of the decade’s obsession with apocalypse. Spectacle movies of this decade repeatedly threatened Earth’s existence, be it by natural disaster or alien invasion, and both Fahrenheit 11/9 and 2016: Obama’s America predicted the end of the republic if the wrong candidate got elected. These films visualized our anxieties about social and environmental collapse while also reassuring us that someone—a superhero—would show up at the last minute and restore order and save us. That implicit message, that an elite savior was on the way, is at the heart of the superhero genre. That idea is also reflected in the hopes that were invested in figures like Barack Obama and Donald Trump and the passions that drove their supporters.

God's Not Dead (2014)
In the early years of the decade, theaters transitioned from showing movies on physical celluloid to digital projection. This change was made on behalf of the major Hollywood studios in part because they believed 3-D was the future of movie going. Things didn’t quite work out that way but digital exhibition cut distribution costs and theatrical showings were suddenly affordable to independent filmmakers. Concurrent to digital distribution was the rise of “demand” services in which moviegoers could petition their local theater to show particular movies. Faith-based production houses seized the opportunity afforded by these disruptions to the theatrical industry and religious pictures poured into theaters throughout the decade. Among the most successful of these films was 2014’s God’s Not Dead. Unfortunately, God’s Not Dead was also indicative of a lot of the faith based genre as it engaged in anti-intellectualism, religious tribalism, and straw man arguments. Nevertheless, these movies were very successful and Hollywood studios eventually produced their own religious films with Sony even opening its own faith-based label.

Sharknado (2013)
One of the unexpected cinematic phenomena of the 2010s was the Sharknado series. Originally shown on the SyFy Channel, Sharknado quickly accrued an enthusiastic fan following and each subsequent installment became an event with celebrities trying to get themselves cast in the sequels, among them Donald Trump who vied for the role of President of the United States in Sharknado 3 (the role went to Mark Cuban instead). Sharknado also rejuvenated the sharksploitation genre. Throughout the decade an entire library of absurd low budget shark movies flooded home video and late night cable and after Sharknado sharks made their way back to movie theaters with films like The Shallows and The Meg.

11/8/16 (2017)
One of the defining moments of the decade was the 2016 presidential election. The contest pitted Hillary Clinton, a centrist who was a symbol of the political and economic institution, against Donald Trump, an insurgent candidate whose upset victory was a shock to many (including his supporters). The documentary filmmakers of 11/8/16 followed a range of citizens of different regions, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, and political allegiances as they cast their ballots and reacted to the returns. Some of the film’s subjects comment directly to the camera but for the most part 11/8/16 maintains an observational style. This film is an extraordinary document not only of that day but also of America at a moment when political and cultural divides and long simmering tensions that had been dismissed and ignored finally boiled over into something tangible and undeniable.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Much of the early 2010s was spent recovering from the Great Recession that had decimated the economy at the end of the last decade. Filmmakers eventually got around to telling tales about America’s economic woes and throughout the 2010s a whole field of movies that might be called “recession cinema” addressed what happened. For the most part, Hollywood kept its focus on the top of the economic food chain; the recession’s impact on Main Street was of little interest to Hollywood who instead saw the economy from the point of view of Wall Street. One of the clearest examples of this was Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Although this wasn’t about the 2008 crash it was nevertheless a part of the recession cinema genre. Jordan Belfort, played gleefully by Leonardo DiCaprio, was a horrible person but the filmmakers couldn’t help but glamourize his excessive lifestyle. That tension between revulsion at this man’s crimes and the attraction to his wealth gets to the core of American identity and why we’ve struggled to identify and deal with what caused the recession in the first place.