Michael Cieply
?The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media.?
?Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler.
?I?m actually part of this weird wolf pack.?
?Stu Price, The Hangover Part II.
If the season?s movies have a message, it doesn?t have much to do with the existential heroism of a Die Hard, or the deep romance of a Titanic. This year Hollywood is doing a group thing.
To an extraordinary extent, the major studio films from early May through mid-June have been wrapped around ensembles and the core values and problems of friendship and belonging rather than the more traditional Hollywood themes of the committed loner or the triumph of romance.
In X-Men: First Class the many heroes fight in tribes?after sorting themselves out in a bonding bash that would do the characters in The Hangover Part II proud. The Bridesmaids are about one another, of course?never mind the lucky couple who survive the women?s antics.
In another collective effort, a brave band of Spielbergian kids confront an alien with their home-movie camera in Super 8, from the director J J Abrams. Next comes Mr Popper?s Penguins, in which Jim Carrey gets his priorities straight by hanging with a gang of birds.
That a certain clinginess has crept into the blockbuster season owes something to Hollywood?s demographic obsession. It is easier to cover the bases with a mass audience when plot points are spread among characters who are diverse in their ethnicity, sex or, in Carrey?s case, species.
No spring hit has relied on the sort of star power Will Smith brought to Hancock or Tom Cruise to the Mission: Impossible series. Johnny Depp was prominent in the advertising for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but the film proved to be an ensemble adventure.
The season?s closest approach to a solitary hero is Hal Jordan, the renegade test pilot played by Ryan Reynolds, who becomes the earth?s protector in Green Lantern. Jordan wrestles with the memory of a dead parent, and he goes his own way?until eventually he connects with a corps of 3,600 Green Lanterns.
Siegfried Kracauer, a scholar, now long deceased, who studied the psychology of pre-Hitler Germany through its popular cinema, would probably find meaning in the wolf-pack ethic of The Hangover Part II, or in the fact that Thor bonds with buddies in a bar and depends on an extensive crew of fellow gods and monsters when faced with a challenge. Stephen Ujlaki, the dean of the Loyola Marymount School of Film and Television here, suspects that economic stress is now pushing people, and their movies, toward a more communal posture. ?There is understandably less focus on one?s individual satisfaction and more interest in emphasizing man as the ?social animal,?? noted Ujlaki.
The character clusters in our current films are certainly haunted by a yearning for togetherness?tinged with nostalgia for simpler times, back when gas was cheaper, perhaps, and theme songs by Billy Joel, Wilson Phillips or Salt-n-Pepa were still fresh. X-Men: First Class ends with two bands of mutants split like Democrats and Republicans, if not Crips and Bloods: Is the plot yearning for a less partisan moment? ?I just wanted things to stay the same,? says Zach Galifianakis?s character in The Hangover Part II. He might just as easily be speaking for Kristin Wiig in Bridesmaids or Kate Hudson and Ginnifer Goodwin in Something Borrowed: Like Mater, the buck-toothed tow truck who is temporarily banished from the gang in Cars 2, these friends are looking in the rearview mirror.
Another theory suggests that the group impulse isn?t nostalgic but technological?that this year?s movies are catching up with an ethos born of our constant immersion in other media.
?The truth is, we?re more communal than ever before,? said Craig Mazin, a writer of The Hangover Part II. He says that social media like Facebook and Twitter may have made viewers more receptive to friendship-driven plotlines.
Scot Armstrong, who also has a writing credit on The Hangover Part II, cautions that comedy is inherently prone to multiple characters and plotlines. ?I can?t speak to that?I don?t know,? Armstrong said of the possibility that the movie actually says something about the people who watch it.