In the film business, images like the one I've just described from "Superman Returns" are called "money shots." This seems an appropriate turn of phrase, as it is shots like these -- momentary spectacles of unabashed cinematic wizardry -- that convince thousands of moviegoers to part ways with their hard-earned cash each summer. To put it bluntly, $200 million worth of audiences didn't pay to see soap star Brandon Routh emote in tights; they paid to see him get shot in the face, catch airplanes out of the sky and do lots of other really badass stuff.
The eye candy of "Superman Returns" (no pun intended) is only one example of Hollywood's perennial obsession with transitory spectacle. If trailers are to be believed, the following are just a few of the money shots coming to your local multiplex in the next few weeks:
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Bruce Willis will drive a speeding police car off a ramp into a nearby helicopter in "Live Free or Die Hard."
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Chris Evans will be hurled into space by an alien on a flying surfboard in "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer."
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Johnny Depp will sword-fight a giant squid monster at the prow of a ship that's getting sucked into a whirlpool at the edge of the world in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."
Since none of these films has actually been released yet, it would be monumentally presumptuous of me to make any evaluative judgment of them prior to viewing. But here I go. The combination of advertising campaigns and historical precedent suggests that not one of these movies will feature anything resembling a plot. In fact, it's probably safe to say that most of this summer's films were conceived and pitched not as stories but as marketable images to which the pretense of stories could later be attached. Such is the nature of the prototypical summer blockbuster, a shambling construct built upon the economically reliable assumption that, when it comes to winning over a mass audience, spectacle trumps narrative.
In "Bambi versus Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business," David Mamet points out that this principle is not unlike the one employed in pornography, another medium that begins with specific images then embeds them in a threadbare plot. The porn star tells us he's here to fix the cable, but we know that his true motivations are far less chivalrous. His cable repairman uniform functions merely to establish the fragile pretense of plausibility, at least as long as it remains on -- it provides a tiny scrap of nourishment for the miniscule portion of the viewer's brain that demands a modicum of legitimacy.
And so it goes with the summer blockbuster. To call upon one particularly ripe example from last season, Brett Ratner's "X-Men 3" made truckloads of money by banking on audiences' willingness to watch buxom actress Rebecca Romijn take off all her clothes, paint herself blue and kick people in the head. The film's storyline (the usual cocktail of government conspiracy, villainous conquests and so forth) served merely to rationalize the inclusion of such extravagant hijnks as these. If the film had been made up exclusively of money shots -- a continuous loop of naked blue babes kicking butt, say -- nobody would have gone to see it, not because they wouldn't want to (quite the contrary) but because they would have been unable to emerge from the theater with a shred of dignity. So instead, the producers hired a team of screenwriters to throw in some stock lines like "The time has come for our last stand!" and suddenly audiences had something like a plot to convince themselves they were watching a real movie.
As recent history tells us, this formula is fantastically lucrative, particularly during those precious summer months when teens -- the current target demographic of more than half of all studio releases -- are out of school and looking for a means to liquidate their overworked brains for $10 or less. Early May traditionally marks the commencement of this summer blockbuster season, and 2007 is no exception. This year's starting gun was fired on Friday with the release of "Spider-Man 3," a feverishly anticipated flick that made history by grossing a record $150 million in just three days.
Not that it matters in the face of such a jackpot, but the critics were far from ecstatic about "Spider-Man 3." The most scathing review was penned by Anthony Lane of "The New Yorker," who called the film "pathetic" and claimed that it possessed "an infantile lack of grace." Nevertheless, he conceded that "Spider-Man 3" contains one indisputably awesome scene, when Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) tumbles into a Particle Physics Test Facility and demolecularizes into a hulking sand monster. As Lane describes the sequence, "you can pretty much leave the theatre once it's over, but for those three or four minutes you wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
Now hold on a minute. There are few more popular pastimes in the critical community than grousing about the poor quality of summer blockbusters, on the grounds that they are narratively incomprehensible, intellectually devoid or as Lane succinctly puts it, lacking in "formal coherence." But let us meditate for a moment on the amount of time, effort, and yes, creativity that it must take to convincingly demolecularize Thomas Haden Church. What makes the craftsmanship of such singular images as these less worthy of praise than more highbrow considerations such as story or character development? As Mamet points out, the artistic pantheon is filled with mediums, ranging from porn to performance art, that are more concerned with money shots than structural cohesion. In an age when innovations like YouTube have conditioned public taste to salivate over momentary spectacles, it seems fitting that commercial cinema should follow suit. You could even argue that summer blockbusters are a (much) less artistically ambitious response to the French New Wave, when a pack of European auteurs made a bundle by abandoning the structured, novelistic approach of classical cinema and going for broke with the visuals.
Well maybe that's a bit much. But it's also beside the point; the problem with money shot movies is not that they're bad (hey, I actually liked "Mission: Impossible III"...) but that they're currently the only option for summer entertainment. Plotless blockbusters have been the product to beat in the marketplace for so many years now that studios have stopped making anything else, and when they do, the audience for them is all but extinct. The year has already seen its share of casualties -- David Fincher's "Zodiac" is the best film of the year so far, but it sank like a stone on opening weekend, weighed down by two and a half hours of dense, meticulously detailed narrative. The movie that topped the box office that weekend? "Wild Hogs."
You're going to have a lot of movies to choose from this summer. Some will be great. Most will be incomprehensible. Don't ever let anyone tell you that the two are mutually exclusive. But as you delight in the exploits of Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter, Jason Bourne and all the rest, just remember -- there's more to the movies than money shots.
