The Half Empty Glass Does NOT Runneth Over

I admit it. I am a pessimist. My glass is half empty. But so is yours, all of you.

Be honest. You love to be miserable. It explains the popularity of dystopian sci-fi and fantasy. Post-apocalyptic fiction such as “Mad Max” proliferates on screens big and small. The Undead in many forms haunt the airwaves. Teen vampire love stories tell us something about what we think of the likelihood of permanent happiness in relationships. Even in love stories involving living characters, the most popular versions seem to be telling us that it is hopeless, or at least, unlikely. (Eg. “500 Days of Summer,” “Titanic,” “La La Land.”) The most frequently re-told tale of woe is “Romeo And Juliet,” the quintessential teen love tragedy.

In classic Hollywood films, a common trope was the tacked-on moral, the happy ending that mollified censors after the sex and violence wreaked by malevolent characters won the first two acts and thrilled audiences. The modern rom-com does something like that. In “Trainwreck,” Amy Schumer’s self-shaming and ascerbic persona gathers most of the laughs until she melts in the end, yielding to conventional love. We like her better when she is a bitter pessimist about love.

The same is true of the Judd Apatow style of comedy, in which the man-child goes through life getting high and palling with other stoned losers until a serious adult woman comes along who demands change in return for love. Once the motherly woman takes over, most of the hedonistic lazy fun is done. The losers become strivers, give up their porn, get jobs, get serious. See “Knocked Up,” as a template. The male stars of these films all have the same personae; think Adam Sandler, Jason Segal, Will Farrell, Owen Wilson, Jack Black.

This is a drastic change from the notions idealized in the screwball romantic comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As I’ve detailed in another post, the most common plot of those films had one serious character being loosened up by a free spirit. Sometimes it was a ditzy heiress who charmed an uptight man (“Bringing Up Baby,” “My Man Godfrey”); in others it was the working girl heroine who was freed to laugh by a man who often was a rebellious son of privilege. (Think Ray Milland or Melvyn Douglas in any number of films.)

Of course, in The Great Depression, there were plenty of films that reflected the pessimism of the age. “The Grapes of Wrath” is a real downer; “Fury,” which is about lynching is chillingly bleak. Nathaniel West’s novel, “The Day of the Locust” and Horace Mc Coy’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” epitomize this pessimistic outlook.

In the 1940’s, after the real horror of World War, pessimism in the form of the popular notion of “existentialism”—defined as “the overwhelming sense of dread in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world”—took hold in literature and films. The French label of “film noir” dominated the era in Hollywood films. The popular films made of James M. Cain’s novels, “Double Indemnity,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” and “Mildred Pierce,” elevated the anti-hero and femme fatale to dominant status as iconic characters.

In the 1950’s, sci-fi found another cause for pessimism: the atom bomb. Mutated monsters arrived from Japan to warn us that we were tampering with Nature at risk of our survival.

With the rockets came the prediction of space travel.  The optimism this engendered was quickly overwhelmed by the negative implications. The UFO phenomenon was (and still is) basically pessimistic. There are many more tales such as “War Of The Worlds” and “Invasion Of The Body Snatchers” and “The Thing From Another World” than “The Day The Earth Stood Still.” (I would argue that even that film, though the space alien is benevolent, is ultimately pessimistic: Earthlings begin by destroying his gift that might cure cancer, and end by failing to heed his warning of total destruction by Gort if we go on like this. The recent remake was a failure, except for the modern twist—that the alien came to save our planet from our destructiveness.)

In the 1960’s, assassinations, the generational split, urban riots, and unpopular war marked the era and led to disillusionment and depression. The “turn on, tune in, drop out” attitude was pessimistic about the macro world, and tried to put a positive face on giving up on society by turning to drugs, free love and communal living—which resulted in male domination of lost women and led to frightening cults like the Manson Family and Jim Jones. The uplifting “Jesus Movement” often turned to the apocalyptic negativity of “Revelations.”

In popular music, Bob Dylan began as an inheritor of Depression Era activism, but his innate moody disposition soon turned inward and often dark. The Beatles began the era singing “All You Need Is Love” and ended in “Revolution” and “Helter Skelter.” Monterey led to Woodstock and then to Altamont. Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin were pop’s JFK, RFK, and MLK, Jr.

In the Nixon and post Nixon era, films reflected the mood of paranoia and sadness: “Parallax View,” “Apocalypse, Now” “All The President’s Men,” “Chinatown,” “The China Syndrome.” The inexorable monster of the era was “Jaws.”

In the Reagan 1980’s, greed and self-interest exiled altruistic liberalism. The decade in films was ruled by Spielberg and Lucas, with escapist, pre-adolescent, sexless adventure movies. (“Back To The Future” was one they missed.) Of the top ten grossing films, the only “dark” one was, fittingly, “Batman.” As reformulated, the dark knight of comics was far from the “Boom! Pow!” TV caricature of the 60’s. He was an avenging vigilante who reveled in sadistic torture of villains.

Even so, “Batman,” like “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish,” reflects law-and-order pessimism, a violent reaction to the perceived “permissive coddling” of criminals—i.e. the Warren Court’s recognition of civil liberties in criminal justice. “The Star Chamber” depicted judges who secretly got together to condemn criminals who foiled the system.

One film that was not a great hit in 1982 was “Blade Runner.” Its darkness was contrary to the trend of the era and wasn’t appreciated until DVD releases gave it a cult following. The dystopian vision of a most noirish future Los Angeles fit with the image of pessimistic futurists. The ambiguity of what makes humanness as shown by the striving of the androids for life strikes a chord with people searching for individual identity in a cold, impersonal world.

            Philip K. Dick died the year this film was released. His novels and short stories were fixed in 50’s and 60’s issues: paranoia about a big brother government, the implications of the drug culture, doubts about mental illness, reality, and identity. His stories have been adapted often: “Minority Report,” “Total Recall,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and the anthology series, “Electric Dreams.”  

Spielberg,moved from uplifting adventures to darker futuristic themes: “A.I.,” and “Jurassic Park.”  “A.I.-Artificial Intelligence” dealt with another futuristic choice between optimistic and pessimistic outlooks. The notion that humans may create smart machines that have emotions and make their own choices is fascinating and scary.

Recently, two movies have explored it in interesting takes on the familiar genre male romantic fantasies. “Her” had a shy young man smitten with his operating system—as voiced by sultry Scarlett Johansson, who wouldn’t? “Ex Machina” uses the idea of the “Turing Test” to question the android’s degree of humanity, and ends with the robot as femme fatale gaining her freedom.

Both of these films expand the sci-fi form from its traditional male fantasy to comment on issues of sexism. The adolescent fantasy of creating a subservient, compliant, sexy female is challenged in both films. “Samantha” in “Her,” and “Ava” in “Ex Machina” escape the male’s fantasy trap by their own intelligence. Ava, in fact, is smart enough to use her attraction as bait. While Samantha is more philosophical, mostly because she exists without a physical body of her own, she manages to achieve a higher plane of “existence” than mere humanity.  

“Game of Thrones” is another example of drama with a pessimistic outlook. The quasi-Medieval setting is almost always bleak and forbidding. The action is often brutal and violent, and that includes it famous sex scenes that sometimes end in blood. It is a cruel world where children learn early to kill or be killed. The competing monarchs, especially the dominating women are ruthless, willing to torture and kill their lovers, brothers, (in one case, lover/brother) to gain or maintain power.

The White Walkers are a version of the ultimate bogeymen of fantasy literature: the undead. We all fear the unknown and nothing is more unknown than what happens after death. But in the usual story line, death is the end, especially death of the villain. The dragon is slain, the ogre falls to the hero, the tyrant is beheaded and his army surrenders.

Even in fantasies like “Star Wars,” the emperor, Darth Vader, and innumerable henchmen, all meet their final comeuppance. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and the redeemed Darth return in spirit to advise Luke to “use the force,” but that is more sentimental than literal.

In the dystopian, post-apocalyptic scenario, the end is harder to come by. There is a never-ending supply of undead to stalk the living. In the “Terminator” and “Matrix” franchises, humans are threatened by machines (i.e., computers), which are as inexorable as the undead. This theme seems to derive from video games that provide a plentiful supply of henchmen to dispose of as the user progresses through the maze to the next level in the infinitely complex labyrinth.

The game can never be “won” because that would end the interest: there must always be another, more challenging level to conquer. This parallels the struggle we face in life: we are always like Sisyfus, fighting to move that boulder up an impossibly steep mountain.

“We can never win; we can only hope to endure.” (I couldn’t find the source of that wisdom; maybe I made it up because I believe it . . . and so do you.)