Culture as Scapegoat for Plain, Bad Writing

Noah Millman over at The American Conservative responds to a piece over in The Atlantic exploring the alleged decline of modern romantic comedies and makes a surprising and compelling argument: surprising in that he makes precisely the opposite argument I might have expected from a conservative outlet by disagreeing with The Atlantic's premise that a modern, pluralistic society has killed the comedic conflicts that fuel rom-coms. Instead, he argues,

The romantic comedies that suck are the ones that adhere to a formula that none of the great romantic comedies of yore followed. They try to make both protagonists as “relatable” as possible by making them into everymen and everywomen – thereby depriving them of any interest. They focus overwhelmingly on the romance, treating the rest of the universe as so much “business” for low comedy, rather than exploring other themes that might reflect productively on the romance at the center. And they gin up artificial external obstacles instead of persuasive, character-driven internal ones. But these kinds of flaws bedevil movies in general.

He goes on:

Most movies most of the time are terrible. They were mostly terrible in 1940. If you want to make a great romantic comedy today, go back to the great comedies of 1940 and ask why they worked. It isn’t because there were arranged marriages (there were none) and it isn’t because women couldn’t get a divorce (all the female protagonists of the movies I cited are or get divorced) or couldn’t have sex (no virgins in evidence – though I don’t mean to suggest that virginity is an obstacle to a successful romantic comedy; far from it). They work because they go internal, into character, to find both the conflict and its resolution, and they work because they don’t isolate the world of romantic love from the rest of the social universe. 

That’s a formula that will never be obsolete. Because it isn’t a formula at all.

Millman's argument leads me to wonder: there are commentators today who expend so much energy and so many words to lament the state of Hollywood and all its deplorable output no doubt fueled more by money than by quality (I mean, really, how else do you explain this or this or this or this?), yet to me it all hardly amounts on its own to a need to estrange oneself from that side of culture. Millman's piece hints at it, that so little of it truly reflects a representation of the best of our creative minds. Worse, we somehow have cultivated an assumption about movies (and, I think, music too) that "everything is basically okay/pretty good". But, as most kids learn after graduating from Little League (where everyone gets a trophy), after a certain point you don't get a pass just for showing up. Most people learn this, and it's a hard adjustment when your minimal exertion can be no longer be considered praiseworthy; somehow this concept hasn't much translated to movies or music. Millman nearly comes out and says it: Most of it sucks. Most of it has sucked. Our baseline assumption ought to be adjusted for less optimism until the artist proves otherwise. You may not need overarching cultural analysis when the heart of the matter remains that good writing is good writing (rare) and that bad writing will invariably produce bad movies and music (which is most of the rest).

(There's something of course to be said about the difference between appreciating quality and enjoying entertainment. I mean, my favorite movie of all time remains Bad Boys II, and there's literally nothing redeeming or even good about it- but I like it. But these are different things.)