Hollywood is a kind of fantasy land and yet also the most imaginative guide to the American psyche.
I grew up with Hollywood’s cowboy films. The world was divided between good cowboys (White Hats) and bad cowboys (Black Hats). This made sense in the era of the Cold War, when the good sheriffs (the US, Nato and western democracies) battled the bad outlaws (Russia and the Warsaw Pact). Native Americans were always called “Indians” although they had nothing whatsoever to do with India and there were no African-American Hollywood cowboys.
Clint Eastwood changed that. In 1992, Eastwood’s film Unforgiven famously featured Morgan Freeman as a cowboy. Freeman wasn’t the first black cowboy on screen, but he certainly was the first world-famous Hollywood star to make it clear to my generation that “cowboys” were not always white even if they had been portrayed always as white in previous Hollywood westerns. The civil rights movement, Martin Luther King and race riots changed America and changed Hollywood, too.
The profound cultural change in the 1990s helps explain why in the troubled 2020s, top-rated Bafta and Oscar-nominated Hollywood films are so perceptive about the US today.
They give a sense of change, uncertainty and even fear through brilliant stories in some disturbingly dystopian movies given great prominence in the current awards nominations on both sides of the Atlantic. Three of my own favourites fall into that category – Sinners, Frankenstein and Bugonia. They are very different, very entertaining and perhaps also very disturbing takes on monsters of various human (and nearly human) kinds stalking our fearful world in the second quarter of the 21st century.
Sinners has a record 16 Academy Award nominations. It’s a “vampire movie”, although that brief description is only part of a much more complex picture. Set in the 1930s, in America’s Deep South, it is the story of two black brothers (both played by Michael B Jordan) who have been involved in Chicago’s gangland. They return home and set up an entertainment venue for African Americans in the segregated south, but their business proposition is interrupted first by vampires and then by armed Ku Klux Klan racists.
It’s difficult to tell which monsters are the most unsettling. Frankenstein is the familiar tale of humans creating a monster, but the humanity of the monster – and the extraordinary cinematography – are the most endearing features.
Of the three, Bugonia is perhaps the most alarming. It’s based on the conspiracy theories that pollute social media in our information age. Two young men living in poverty in a remote shack believe that the US is being taken over by aliens from outer space. The are convinced that the chief of a local pharmaceutical company is really the leading alien conspirator. They kidnap her and try to force her to tell the “truth” about her plans for aliens to take over the US and ultimately planet Earth.
What these three extraordinary films – and some others released in recent months – have in common is the sense that the world has entered very unsettled and unhappy times. It is a world filled with monsters and demons, outsiders and threatening enemies.
At the peak of westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, it felt as if there really was a binary choice between good and evil, western values and communism, Nato and the Warsaw Pact. Now in the 2020s, one strong theme in those three films (and others) is that monsters of various kinds in human or semi-human form are among us, unsettling our way of life and potentially could destroy us.
Imagine, for example, what it must be like in the real world of a protester on the streets of Minneapolis right now, in mourning for Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, demonstrators killed by the US federal immigration and customs enforcement service, also known as ICE. For activists on the political right or left, culture wars have always been present in American politics. But for the rest of us, these culture wars have been weaponised for a new generation by the anti-ICE demonstrators and the administration of US President Donald Trump, which permits such outrageous ICE activities.
Our modern culture war confrontation is at the heart of a fourth well-reviewed movie One Battle After Another.
It follows the story of an ageing American political activist trying to settle down to a more normal existence while dark and oppressive forces on the far right of politics undermine his life and threaten his family. Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is the former 1960s left-wing radical living in hiding and trying to protect his daughter, Willa, from a deranged, white-supremacist military officer.
All these films remind us that the perpetual story in Hollywood is still – as with the old cowboy movies – good versus evil. Great films reflect back to us a sense of our times. Monsters, conspiracy theories and political hatred are on the big screens in cinemas right now because they are also in the minds of the most creative movie makers and - inevitably – they are also in the minds of the rest of us, too.
