I remember exactly where I was when I read the obituary for the music industry on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: it was a gray and cold morning in March of 2002 and I was standing in line to get a coffee at the Atlas Cafe in San Francisco. <\/p>\n
While the report<\/a> noted that there were many contributing causes it also suggested the main cause of death was a flawed risk model: record companies were spending huge sums on just a few albums in the hopes that these big bets would hit jackpot. Unfortunately for all involved, the labels were picking the wrong albums \u2013 perhaps, and ironically so, out of disdain<\/a> for popular tastes. <\/p>\n This past week, I watched two movies at home: The Hangover<\/em>, a seemingly vulgar yet entirely anodyne comedy from 2009 and Jeremiah Johnson<\/a>, a potentially treacly yet startlingly ruthless western from 1972. Where the former attempts at being for the people while mocking their intelligence, the latter, despite its high-brow tendencies<\/a>, is as blunt and dangerous as a rioting mob. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Yes, the former was a huge hit<\/a> at the box offices, delivering a margin of +690% in just six months. But, then, so was<\/a> the latter, with a return of 530% in its nine month run with reportedly<\/a> little promotion.)<\/p>\n For all its bluster, The Hangover<\/em> works hard to be inoffensive. It borrows the famously amoral Mike Tyson only to deem him a “good guy”. Figuratively and literally, it invokes the heavily advertised myth of Las Vegas as a place where sins can be expurgated: what happens in Vegas stays<\/em> in Vegas. No harm, no foul. <\/p>\n The main trickster in the movie \u2013\u00a0the white rabbit we follow down a Rohypnol hole \u2013\u00a0is written as a hapless dimwit. At every turn, the movie offers nervous laughs that indulge the most disingenuous strains in American society.<\/p>\n It’s a different story altogether after pretty boy Robert Redford steps into a golden, sunlit frame at the start of Jeremiah Johnson<\/em> to an uptempo country score that welcomes us to the great American frontier. <\/p>\n Within 10 minutes, the titular hero (a returning war vet, no less), has lost his nerve and is on the verge of starving to death. After awkwardly prying a rifle out of a dead hunter’s frozen hands, Johnson exclaims with joy at the quality of the weapon he has come to possess. The grim moment is played for laughs. <\/p>\n It’s only the first of many scenes that prompt a sympathetic audience to become complicit in transgression \u2013\u00a0without the relief of a happy ending. (The movie’s denouement is a slow, maddening and relentless killing spree that begins when Johnson desecrates a Crow burial ground in order to save a group of stranded pilgrims.) <\/p>\n Along the way, Johnson “befriends” two fellow loners (sociopaths, really) who speak almost entirely in nasty jokes. In an alternate dimension, the three of them visit Vegas for a weekend of mayhem. <\/p>\n I contrast the two movies because they were both made with the same goal: to sell as many tickets as possible. One makes a show of being in bad taste\u00a0while, in fact, being entirely decorous. The other, despite its formal polish, almost certainly intends to shock. <\/p>\n I’m not sure if the movie industry will follow in the steps of the record industry (off a cliff) but I suspect if it does it will be guided by a fear of its audiences’ tastes, especially their taboos and forbidden pleasures. For as much as audiences wish to be cajoled, they also enjoy being disturbed. <\/p>\n postscript<\/strong> Also of note: members of the cast of The Hangover 2<\/em> reportedly<\/a> refused to work with Mel Gibson who was ultimately dropped from the picture. Gibson is apparently<\/a> a horrible person. However, as far as I know, he does not have a tattoo<\/a> of a genocidal<\/a> killer<\/a> on his arm. Nor has he been convicted of rape, yet. De gustibus non est disputandum.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember exactly where I was when I read the obituary for the music industry on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: it was a gray and cold morning in March of 2002 and I was standing in line to get a coffee at the Atlas Cafe in San Francisco. While the report…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIt’s not by chance that The Hangover<\/em> is framed around a collective “blackout”, such is the desire to avoid direct confrontation with the debauchery it supposedly abets. By contrast, Jeremiah Johnson<\/em> deliberately revisits moments in the conquest of the American West largely repressed in mid-20th century myth-making. (I suspect the team developing “Blood Meridian” have it as a reference.)<\/p>\n