At the end of ‘Air’ the classic printed texts appear about the characters informing us about what happened to their lives, a resource widely used in biopics, normally reserved for great feats in which the heroes of the film go through a fight, an unfair trial, a search for human rights achievements or face large corporations with everything against them. But in Affleck’s film they look more like a power point of a sales report from those companies.
They tell us the quantities of shoes that Nike managed to sell and that Michael Jordan continues to receive $400 million in annual liabilities, as an aspirational trigger, rather than to inform us of the fate of those characters with whom we have sympathized, giving a mythical product like sneakers that many have not considered wearing in their lives but that right now has a follow-up similar to mass collecting. A full-fledged consumer phenomenon.
Cinema measured in data, followers and brands
It shouldn’t be surprising that in a world where a movie is made about emoticons or ‘Angry Birds’ something like this ends up happening. Everything is ostensible to generate a new associated merchandising product, and that is why ‘Super Mario Bros. The Movie’ has become the highest-grossing animated film in history. Hollywood has learned that branding is necessary to do business, first came remakes and then adaptations of anything with enough of a name. Now comes the era of products.
Apple released ‘Tetris’ and ‘Blackberry’ and ‘Pinball’ are yet to come, exploring the story behind everyday objects that were once important, scratching at their history, twisting and embellishing to make it worthy of being told in a feature film. So they can sell us that the guy who licensed the game for Game Boy lived a passionate espionage story and dangerous. The magic of cinema and the power of money. The important thing is that behind all these products there are lives of businessmen, entrepreneurs and business people, who are somehow presented with a heroic aura.
It is cinema designed for a couple of generations obsessed with “how many Ks” you earn, which follows youtubers who teach them how to invest in crypto and who see more content than they think sponsored by different types of bookmakers and other types of regulated scams . A mode of business that is built on the dubious assumption that we are smarter than everyone else and whoever does not bet does not win. That is precisely the only clear message that ‘Air’ gives, with that messianic and television final speech by Matt Damon, who is presented to us as a casino player —a real fan of an Affleck who lost half a million dollars in a single hand. —, and whose bet is to do his job.
sign of the times
But this is not new, Hollywood is a reflection of a national mentality that has been imprinted throughout its culture and is a sign of the times. Docuseries like “Tiger King,” “LuLaRich” and “The Oath,” explore the life of a guru or con man, but many have turned into docudramas, where the sentence becomes hazy. ‘Who is Ana’ is a notch of how platforms like to have movie stars and elegant settings, the adventures of people who defrauded investors looking for the reasons why the fraud, scam or cult was successful.
Many of them have starred tech entrepreneurs, including ‘Super Pumped,’ ‘The Dropout,’ and ‘WeCrashed,’ reflecting the rosy era of technology that enabled the frauds of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Uber’s Travis Kalanick and Adam Neumann. from WeWork, young people, who represent a kind of frustrated American dream. But the way of telling these chronicles is a false story with a moral, because they tell us about the lives of entrepreneurs who have already had their moment of glory and when they return to being the center of attention of series, even if they are critical, a general fascination is perceived that as a whole creates the idea that at least they did something.
This trend had a first contact in biographies of technological founders such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in ‘The social network’ (2010) and Steve Jobs of Apple, in ‘Jobs’ of 2013 and ‘Steve Jobs’ in 2015. Facebook has not yet been It had become a questionable political tool and Apple was still being lauded for its iPhone, the widespread condemnation of labor violations in its factories and the use of conflict minerals mined by children having not touched its mark. Everything is a consequence of a moment in American cinema that has been leading to this. Capitalist cinema is not destroyed, it is only transformed.
A decade of fascination for the mighty knight
The history of Facebook contained a story of betrayal, but in the last decade, the fictional stories of mediocre Americans willing to do anything for success. Pacts with the devil that are treated as personal feats in characters such as ‘Nightcrawler’ (2015), in which success was linked to a lack of scruples, which later led to half condemnations, such as ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013), which show us how much fun scams are in times of appalling neoliberalism.
Scorsese came to tell us that the new mafia is in the offices, plays with tickets and takes advantage of the trust of the one next to them, and it was soon followed by ‘Gold: the great scam’ (Gold, 2016) ‘Barry Seal: the trafficker’ and ‘The Founder’ (The Founder, 2016), which breaks the morality of the fable by taking the process to a known and present product. Perhaps in the film with Michael Keaton there was the germ of the strange fashion of celebrating brands and recent products and the tendency to mythologize commercial licenses.
It’s just another different expression of the same wave of neoliberal cinema, in which it seems that the most interesting thing is the intricacies and negotiations more than “the wonderful untold story” of products, an interest that is camouflaged in nostalgia and mythomania of objects for sale, as if history had stopped and now what really interests humanity is the story of who made money The conflict of ‘Air’ is getting Michael Jordan to sign a license agreement with Nike, along the lines of ‘Moneyball’ but instead of a meticulous study of statistics, it speaks to us of a gut feeling and the willingness to risk everything.
all red
We build the emotional element on a magical intuition, like when we bought the Christmas lottery ending in five. In ‘Tetris’, Taron Egerton risks everything for a video game because he thinks he’s going to blow it. In ‘BlackBerry’ he plays with the same idea as the designer of ‘Air’, the guys who make the product and do it better than anyone else are weirdos, far from perfect nerds. These movies are set in the 80s and 90s, they are lfull of nostalgia, agile scripts, great songs and a lot of humor, Seeing these men (all men, except for sexy secretaries, femme fatales, and suffering mothers, in all of them) scream, think, and decide has to be fun.
It’s hard to create dramatic tension when we know the ending. The narrative gear is to show us how they convince the skeptics that they are right, but at their core they are essentially running a big corporate marketing video capitalist to the core. Just be rich. The dramatic base of these films is close to that of sports movies, the mechanism against Goliath, but here the villain is a ghost, “winning” is that the company “meets objectives”, which in real terms can be filling in a table of kpi’s Excel.
We are watching and wishing you make a lot of money, which continues the idea that millionaires and billionaires are to be admired. They market to the sentiment that the down-on-his-luck guy who risked his last dollar on a big bet and made it deserves respect and represents that, then maybe we can too. It doesn’t matter that for every success story there are hundreds of failures, bankruptcies and even suicides. On the big screen, the story is told by the winners. It is the same narrative as the visibility of the great successful streamers.
The carrot at the end of the stick
If normal people like Rubius or ibai can succeed, then you too can give hours to a company with the eternal promise that maybe you can live from it. The most important good that is sold in these films is making money, which can lead us to think that admirable figures in history, movement leaders, humanitarians, scientists and artists who can serve as examples are still missing. But they simply do not interest the public much. In the case of ‘Tetris’, we are not dealing with a real political thriller, but the story of an unscrupulous business tourist.
A good thriller in the USSR, tense and with a taste of Mamet or Pakula cinema, is ‘The English Spy’, based on true events of a man who really risked everything for a cause, but who no one was interested because it does not sell any product. Hollywood is making new heroes with people who managed to combine good business sense with luck with the classic structure of breaking the mold to a business achievement that would be an anecdote if it were not tied to a well-known logo. It should come as no surprise, with the companies behind these movies: Amazon or Apple.
The result is cinema that seems made to motivate ADE students, romanticizing that great secret that they are explaining to you, while revealing, ironically, that all the figures are because of the great economic apparatus behind it, recounting the ideological decalogue to make it clear that only those who risk it succeed. A trend that does not seem conscious, but rather typical of people who produce what they know and a public that responds to the echoes of their own individual aspirations within the great Platonic illusion of the consumer society.
In Espinof | These are the 70 great series and movies of 2022: recommendations and favorites from the Espinof team