Yesterday, kittencabal send me a really good article by Haley Nahman, who writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby and who seems very cool. The article was about EEAAO and the reignited debate over the film’s critical legitimacy in the wake of its Oscar sweep. I responded to Gia with an email that, in retrospect, was probably way too long, so I’m going to post it here. Ultimately, I have as little a problem with EEAAO sweeping the Oscars as I do with most movies that sweep Oscars because, at the end of the day, it’s very far from being a barometer of film quality. You can read my original review of EEAAO here.

I would say one interesting data point is the fact that here we are, still running our mouths with our respective opinions of this movie but, notably, it did just win 7 Oscars, so I think we can afford ourselves a bit more time to the endeavor of where EEAAO sits in the pantheon of ‘good film.’

To preface, I think she makes a good point, vis-a-vis Pauline Kael, about ‘consciously life-affirming’ movies, and their tendency toward cultural vacuum. From that perspective, I think EEAAO is more a test of tastes – are you somebody who enjoys nice things purely by virtue of their being nice things? Or do you want your nice things to come in the form of pretty pebbles on the way up the Sisyphean hill? Ironically, I usually find myself in the latter camp. I’ve hurled vitriol at the likes of Marvel and its descendants on more occasions that I can count, but, for whatever reason, I found EEAAO to be a newer, more refreshing take on what admittedly is an old, old story. Part of it I think, as we discussed, is that a categorical rejection (both thematically and stylistically) of cynicism captured my heart in a moment where the zeitgeist is begging us to embrace it. Maybe this is a way of saying EEAAO is consciously life-affirming in a time when conscious life affirmation has hit a collective, generational nadir. An interesting study to conduct would be to discover what’s a more empirically prevalent sentiment these days: optimism or cynicism. I say that because, as Nahman’s POV is contrasting with [anecdotal] platitudinous graffiti tags in Brooklyn, mine is contrasting with a particularly vehement strain of [anecdotally] observed doomerism.

More broadly speaking, and hopefully outside the Dan echo chamber, I remain unconvinced by the argument that everything is a commercially-driven assault on your attention and wallet. Some of that is unavoidable, as film is a commercial enterprise by definition, but there is a degree of latitude that we can (and should) give to art. EEAAO has obviously eclipsed the indie or underground cachet that fertilized it, but we should remember that this was, by most accounts, a fairly surprising success. Only after it was released and hit whatever nerve it did with people (myself included), did its notoriety begin to bloom to outsized proportions. Truthfully, I’m as taken aback by its Oscar contention and eventual triumph as anyone else. As I’ve noted myself, I don’t think it’s a groundbreaking story, so I agree with the notion that it’s not all that different from other Oscar winners; however, style, presentation, and all the other trappings of what “makes” a movie is usually still incorporated into the calculus of an affair as calculated as the Academy Awards. It became a frontrunner, for sure, but I would almost say in spite of those things rather than because of them. Against that backdrop, I would argue that credibility wavers as to EEAAO being a marketing ploy akin to paralympic Cheerio boxes. You need a market for that, and the market here came too late. Of course there’s the chicken-egg argument of, well this movie was made so that it would become a commercial success in spite of its sophomoric veil, but again, unconvinced. I think people, by-and-large, make movies because they like making movies. And judging from what little I’ve seen of “the Daniels,” they seem like guys who, for all their Millennial earnestness, are kind of just trying to have a good time. I’m OK with that. Thematically, if it seems like a marketing ploy to Gen Z or anyone else, that might just be because we need to get the message. At least every once in a while.

Now, if this movie inspires a new cadre of material with marginal (or infinitely) diminishing returns, perhaps we re-hash what it represents in greater context. There is certainly a legitimate argument against blindly embracing films with a message of conscious affirmation, because it would simply breed a castrated version of something that’s been done better in the past. It happens in every genre – I think specifically of things like White Lotus, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness all coming out within the same couple years. God only knows what horseshit we’ll have to endure covering the ultra-rich that isn’t nearly as thought-provoking or even as clever as some of those titles. There are larger forces at play that dictate these seismic patterns of course, like the fact that Hollywood as an entity seems uninterested in breaking new ground with anything remotely resembling a blockbuster, so again, degrees of latitude provided. For now, I think I need to take things one at a time. The Menu, for example, was shit.

At the end of the day, these are opinions. I liked EEAAO for my own reasons, some of which I think can be extrapolated and mapped on to wider, cultural trends. But, I appreciate that this is now a major Oscar winner, and as such is open to a real, substantive conversation about its value. I think there’s plenty of truth to the argument that it’s not that deep, contains juvenile multitudes, and is otherwise more similar to something produced by the Hollywood apparatus than not. That being said, I walked out of the movie theater having thoroughly enjoyed it, and feeling that it grappled with something I’d been over-intellectualizing on my own time. It felt good to, for lack of a better phrase, dumb it down to size and deal with it using simpler language. Is it the best movie I’ve ever seen? Not by a long shot. But I liked it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯