A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword’s tip on the guard’s throat. He drives it in as one might hammer a post, a coarse and grisly death. Then, for some reason, swaying back and forth, the warrior yells down at the corpse, “Wood or steel, a point is still a point!”
An ailing magnate lies in an opulent bedroom. His young, gold-digging wife enters with her lover, with whom she chats cynically about the old man’s condition. “What do you think of this boner I got?” the invalid drools defiantly, gesturing at a pointy peaky in his lap. He pulls aside his clothes to reveal a golden bow and arrow, with which he shoots his wife. Then, for some reason, as the phallic arrow pierces her in the chest, he says, “You Wall Street slut, this is your closing bell.”
A blond, blue-eyed real-estate mogul goes to the mayor’s office to propose a new project. He plunks a model down on the desk: a little black tower with all-caps gold letters at its base reading “TRUMP TOWER.” He gives his spiel, with a stilted swagger. His lawyer offers a few words to soften the deal. Then, for some reason, the mayor asks, “And what are you gonna call it?” The mogul leans back and tells us what we already know: “Trump Tower.”
These scenes, from the recent movies “Gladiator II,” “Megalopolis,” and “The Apprentice,” respectively, are examples among many—so many!—of what I’ve started calling the New Literalism. This isn’t a new genre but a new style. Each of these films belongs to its own genre—action/adventure, sci-fi/drama, and drama/history, respectively—and none of them seems interested in the filmic tradition of documentary realism, not even the bio-pic.
When I say literalism, I don’t mean realistic or plainly literal. I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art. “A point is still a point!”
There is a meme going around from a “Family Guy” episode in which Peter, the animated comedy’s paterfamilias, confesses to his family that he never cared for “The Godfather.” Why not? “It insists upon itself,” he says with a shrug. A lot of recent productions deserve this scorn—literally. It’s gotten so bad that, lately, the highest compliment I can muster for even the best of them is: “Well, at least it’s a movie.”
The pervasiveness of this trend was evident in the films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year. Several of them reflect phenomena we’ve been bemoaning for some time. We got a science-fiction sequel, “Dune: Part Two,” and a fan-fiction prequel, “Wicked,” both of which use C.G.I. more to operatic ends than to imaginative ones. And we got yet another bio-pic, “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, the latest entry for the social-media rolls of comparing old celebrities with the new celebrities that play them in the movies.
Even the originals of the season, if we can call them that, felt thunkingly literalist. Sean Baker’s “Anora,” the Best Picture winner, is a self-described “Cinderella story” about a sex worker who falls for the oldest trick in the book: the rich trick who wants to marry her. After their hasty Vegas nuptials, the heroine says that she wants a Disneyland princess suite for the honeymoon, to which her bestie helpfully cries, “Cinderella!”
Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” less an homage to than a recapitulation of body-horror classics, dramatizes older celebrities’ fear of being displaced by casting Demi Moore as a fifty-year-old star who births a genetically generated younger self—literally, through her back.
Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” features a collection of ad-libbed scenarios (what if a Mexican cartel leader had gender-reassignment surgery? What if she reunited with her kids in a “Mrs. Doubtfire” kind of way?) and droning musical numbers that recite events as they occur: “I’d like to know about sex-change operation.” “I see, I see, I see. Man to woman, or woman to man?” “Man to woman.” “From penis to vagina.”
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