Hear Me Out: We’re in the golden age of bad allegorical films
One of the best things about going to the cinema is sitting down afterwards and chewing the fat about what you’ve just seen. But it is not the best thing. The best thing is being entertained for an hour or two, maybe three at an extensively justified push. In recent times, there seems to have been an active inversion of that fuelled by filmmakers determined to make the post-match punditry of their movies more important that the actual game.
While there is a solid argument that the two are inseparable and much of the best cinema is littered with meaning and metaphor, the balance seems to have tipped lately towards thinking too much and feeling too little. Hell, the irony is that I personally love an allegorical message in a movie, my favourite directors are the Coen brothers and their films are effuse with undercurrents of societal commentary, biblical allusions and comments on the carnage of capitalism, but they’re not so bloody obtuse with it to have it dictate the picture.
I have, however, sat through countless films in recent years that insist on routinely telling you – in no uncertain terms – that what you are watching is an allegory. This method of over-implying the subtext has become a device by which filmmakers can openly excuse their movie for being bland, nonsensical, annoying, difficult to follow, devoid of any major plot, and, in essence, enjoyable. Then they have the gaul to suggest that this actually makes their film smarter than ones that have put in the effort to work on all fronts rather than a single preordained connotation. And that if the movie proves divisive then c’est la vie, it’s probably because ‘some people just didn’t get it’.
This has left a fair chunk of us going, ‘No, we got it – it was, in fact, rammed down our throats with all the subtlety of a policeman’s knock – it’s just that we didn’t really care for it because we didn’t come to the cinema for a clever quip on cancel culture, medicated America or some other hot topic spread over three irritating hours of boring ‘entertainment’.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to all modern allegorical films. As I say, if you can make a movie work on a multitude of fronts and offer a lesson to the attentive then that is practically the pièce de résistance of art, adding a golden nugget of wisdom to an entertaining journey. Last year, The Banshees of Inisherin did this brilliantly, conflating the myriad rigours of the Irish Civil War into a tragicomic tale brimming with vital humanity that worked so well that ironically the subtext might have been lost on many.
However, the beauty of Martin McDonagh’s movie is that you didn’t even have to know a jot about the allegorical undercurrent to actually enjoy it. It was full of enough heart, tear-jerking performances, the odd micro-penis the size of a wheel-nut, laugh out loud moments (not merely ‘Oh, that’s very funny’ New Yorker sniggers), gripping plot and subsuming story, to make the film enjoyable above all. Which, in these trying times, is what is needed most from movies.
That’s a point that seems to be going missing on the whole as many in the entertainment industry would rather be the clever person putting the world to rights than the beloved folk making us happy. Alas, the point is that you can’t, in fact, do one without the other. People adore Succession and it’s masterstroke is that it has opened the eyes of millions to the workings of corporate-driven capitalism simply by making them giggle along and gasp at glorious plotting, whereas others cull the laughs and story in favour of a confused abstraction that nobody cares enough about to decipher or cherish.
It’s also not necessarily the case that even the obtusely allegorical films are bad films, it’s just that they are hamstrung by being caught up in this new alternative vogue that fun and enjoyment are facile. They might be clever, inventive, well-made and worth your time but they never really connect, and as a result nobody is going to pin the poster to their wall so to speak.
And hopefully, if I have done my job here, evidence of this current miscue comes from the fact that I haven’t mentioned a single guilty film, but you will no doubt have seen one recently that you can easily apply this criticism to.
