Directors who like to “shock” need to grow up
When I was studying filmmaking at college, I vividly remember an experience I had involving one of my so-called classmates that after all these years has stuck with me, and not in a good way.
At one point in the middle of the semester we were all given a personal project to work on, which was to film and edit a short film that would then be presented to the entire class for review.
I was excited to dive in to the project because I felt that I had something worthwhile to bring before the class. I remember enlisting the assistance of my brothers and friends over the weekend to help me put my short film together.
Once done, I was pleased with the result because I had tirelessly spent all my spare time making my little film as good as I could possibly make it. The irony is that I can’t even remember which short film it was that I made, but I do remember the feeling of accomplishment I had when I presented the film to the entire class.
For the most part my professor and fellow classmates liked my contribution but still gave me helpful criticism and advice that I found helpful.
I felt good because I put in hard work and received positive feedback.
After a few other students presented their films…this one guy came along and presented his. I remember watching as a simple text crawl came up on the projected screen which I assumed was going to be a satirical opening before the actual film that the student shot presented itself.
I started reading the text and came to the sudden realization that what I was reading in the crawl was a beat for beat description of the Michael Bay film, the original Transformers.
It didn’t take long to put two and two together and figure out that this classmate of mine had simply copy and pasted text from the Transformers Wikipedia page and inserted it into a text crawl. All of us students sat there stupefied waiting for something to happen; for there to be some point to what we were viewing, but it never came.
When the crawl came to an end, so did the short film.
That was it. That was the entirety of his project.
Not only did he not complete the part of the assignment that specified that you had to actually film something and edit it into some kind of narrative, he effectively plagiarized a Wikipedia page — which is one of the most cowardly and laziest things possible — just for the satisfaction of having the entire classroom sit in bewilderment and utter boredom.
I remember sitting there livid because while I had gone through the effort of creating something hopefully worthwhile, this student hadn’t even tried. All he attempted to accomplish was to get a specific reaction out of everyone around him, and to that effect, he succeeded.
I remember his face as he smirked and chuckled at everyone’s bewildered reaction.
Just like that misguided film student, there are actual real-life directors that still haven’t outgrown this similarly juvenile need to shock their audiences for some kind of twisted personal satisfaction.
There are two recent examples of this fact that come to mind.
The first is Matthew Vaughn, the recent director of Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Before I delve into this, let me first say that I think Matthew Vaughn is a very talented guy. I quite liked his contribution into the X-Men films with X-Men: First Class.
But there is also no denying that Vaughn is a professional shock artist and provocateur.
The Golden Circle came under fire even before its release because it featured an extremely graphic sex scene that many felt went “too far.”
When asked about the sex scene in question, actor Taron Egerton who plays main character Eggsy in the Kingsman films had this to say: “It’s what Matthew [Vaughn] does, it’s his signature thing. He likes to do something that shocks. In Kick-Ass it was Chloe Grace Moretz saying the C-word, in Kingsman it was the bum shot of the Swedish princess, and in this one it’s the thing. And, you know, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, but it certainly gets people talking. All it is is explicitly showing what Bond alludes to and says in a double entendre kind of way.” Link here.
Egerton went on to defend the sex scene — because of course he would — but the most revealing thing he commented on and gets absolutely correct is Vaughn’s inner need to shock the audience to get people talking about his work.
But of course Vaughn misses the point of art and uses the most shallow and perverted of things to get people’s attention.
Instead of getting them to talk about what a good film he made, he instead gets them talking about that “shocking” sex scene.
If you need to feed your vanity by inserting a sex scene into your film that “goes too far”, then you’re either desperate or you don’t take your craft all that seriously.
The problem with someone like Vaughn is that he makes movies for himself to laugh at the audience, not to entertain or enlighten them. It’s inward instead of outward artistry, if you can go so far as to call his films art.
The other film that comes to mind in recent memory was Darren Aronofsky’s ill fated Jennifer Lawrence vehicle, mother!
Before I get into this one, let me point out that it is almost always never a good idea to trust anyone when they say that someone is a visionary, a term that is often attributed to Aronofsky, most recently by his current girlfriend, Jennifer Lawrence.
Aronofsky is the type of person that likes to tell people what they believe instead of showing the world what he believes. For this fact, all you have to do is take a look at his interpretation of Noah which was unintentionally hilarious, not deep and introspective like he clearly meant it to be.
But even aside from his comical interpretations of biblical stories, Aronofsky has an inner need to push the boundaries of film in such a way to illicit a response from those viewing his films.
Jennifer Lawrence said that she texted Aronofsky after reading the script for mother! saying, “There is something seriously wrong with you.” She went on to say, “But it was like reading poetry or scripture, or Darren’s diaries: excerpts from a f***ed-up mind.” Link here.
She reportedly even threw the script across the room because of how “F***ed up it was.” Link here
Aronofsky takes his extremely cynical outlook on humanity and layers it over the guise of biblical narratives in an attempt to appear “visionary.”
When did it become admirable to openly display debauchery? Why do critics and Hollywood elites celebrate dark and disturbing minds?
We live in a shock culture where every creator is trying to one up each other in a twisted game that keeps spiraling out of control. They boast in their own inner perverseness as if depravity is a virtue.
I understand that as a creative artist that these directors and filmmakers think that they have to do something new and crazy to get attention, but they don’t understand that that this mindset is crippling them, not pushing their craft forward.
New and shocking doesn’t always equal fresh and original. We live in an oversaturated age when doing something genuinely new is almost literally impossible.
If your goal is to shock us you’re doomed to fail because we’ve been shocked to death.
Shocking isn’t new, and it’s quite frankly not even shocking anymore.
Audiences crave freshness, not filth. There’s a difference, and just like that particular film student I once had the unfortunate pleasure of knowing, these shallow artists need to grow up and realize that acting childish in the cinematic world is a hollow way of getting attention.
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