Avatar 2, Top Gun: Maverick, and a year of violent denial

The final season The Good FightUnrest is always there. One side is the protestors. Police are on the other. Across all 10 episodes, it’s never said what the assembled crowd is angry about. The only thing clear is it’s growing: steadily, constantly, exponentially. Yet inside the office building where the Paramount Plus legal drama largely takes place, it’s business as usual. There are many cases that can be won. There are cases to win.

This is the 2022 highest-grossing film. Maverick is the Top GunA film that has a huge void at its core is called “The Big Gap”. The film was critically praised for its verisimilitude and craft in an age where blockbusters are dominated by unreality. Tom Cruise reprises his role of the pilot Maverick, who trains a new group of hotshots to complete a vital mission. It is a horrible weapon of mass destruction that must be destroyed. These weapons are owned by who? It doesn’t matter. The film doesn’t say. Naming them would be worse than the film’s heroes failing in their mission. The audience would lose something positive.

Taking in 2022’s popular culture often felt like an exercise in denial. Similar to our everyday lives, when institutions of government and health were under attack by an authoritarian conspiradolescent minority, and an ongoing pandemic of epidemics, entertainment’s already unstable structures began to fail, even while the top executives tried their best to keep the lights on.

Photo: Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures

The film industry is still recovering from the pandemic, as well as a shareholder-driven focus on streaming. It tried to get back to a world in which people would go to movies in theatres. However, real-life circumstances made this unrealistic and there were a number of Covid-era changes in strategy that left audiences uncertain of what to expect. Disney was the box-office champion but its best animated films, like “The Lion King”, failed to impress. The Turning of the Redwere sent to streaming because they failed in the theaters as poorly-marketed or mediocre films. When combined with the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase, which felt aimless, as well as Star Wars’s departure from theaters in favor of documenting its history on television, it made even mega-franchises seem less trustworthy than they were before.

As streaming TV began to collapse, Netflix was forced into a period of desperateness and had to pay the huge Warner Bros. bill. Discovery merger came due. Both of these monumental upsets manifested in alarmingly similar ways: Sudden, drastic, and barely-justified cuts to animated programming, a bastion of shows that both featured diverse characters and employed diverse creators, and in WBD’s case, entire streaming films and shows being yanked from HBO Max servers, both undermining the mission statement of the streamer and calling into question the value of its one and only product: Streaming television.

In response, audiences turned elsewhere: Among this year’s biggest stories in cinema is the runaway success of the Telugu blockbuster RRR. Franchise TV’s greatest success was in revolutionary technology House of the DragonAnd AndorThese stories were inspired by familiar imagery and transformed them into tales of rebellion. In acclaimed dramas, such as “The Labor Revolution”, labor was at the center of national unrest. SeveranceComedies such as Abbot Elementary. Hating on the wealthy might be cool again. SuccessionIt was the beginning of The White LotusOr films such as Menu, Glass OnionAnd Triangle of Sadness.

Image courtesy of Netflix

The disconcerting thing about being a passive observer in all this — either as a casual viewer of entertainment, or as a critic — is the resolute insistence on carrying on as if things were normal. Fretting over box office numbers feels odd when the reason said numbers were depressed in the first place — a pandemic — is still an ongoing concern. Films that did not connect with audiences, such as Maverick is the Top GunThe sleeper horror hit SmileThe year-ender, also known as. The Way of Water: Avatar, the reason cited is often the very thing Jordan Peele’s NopeAn all-consuming maw full of spectacle is something we were warned about earlier this summer. One critic may be complaining about franchise dominance being old-hat. But in 2022, franchise dominance had begun to fracture the core of the business. It made it difficult to recover from.

A challenge of marking time in the digital era is a form of temporal inflation — an hour just won’t get you as far as it used to these days, with the multiplicity of things competing for your attention, and a creeping expectation that you are supposed to do more with said hour than you did in years prior. There’s an argument to be made this reached an inflection point in 2022, as franchise bloat reached a peak, producing insular stories that required all manner of extracurricular work, from the exorbitant largesse of The Rings of Power to the dodgy cynicism of “the multiverse” as explored in the MCU post-Spider-Man, There’s No Way Home, a film that’s built on stolen franchise valor. Taken concurrently with the shrinking animation field and fewer venues for stories not based on massive IP, and it’s hard to feel good about what’s in store for 2023. Looking back, all that’s clear is chaos, as art is gutted in favor of machinery built to extract time from audiences, if it can’t have money.

Finale of the series The Good Fight, ominously titled “The End of Everything,” builds to a dark metatextual joke. One of the striking things about the show is its lengthy opening credits sequence, in which office furnishings — phones, desks, coffee thermoses — all blow up in a studio environment. “The End of Everything” makes this figurative imagery literal, as the episode depicts the season-long crowd swelling into a full on riot, one that’s then exploited by white supremacists as an opportunity to open fire into the offices of the show’s predominantly Black law firm, Reddick Boseman. Show’s opening scene is recreated by the gunfire. Phones shatter and decanters are broken, vases are broken, and laptops are destroyed. No one dies, but the show is over after this — closing the loop on a tongue-in-cheek credits sequence by recasting it as a warning unheeded for five years.

It is often disserviceful to distill a year of art into simple takeaways. It’s absurd to do this in 2022, when art was considered frivolous by its stewards and stripped of all commerce. It’s hard to feel as if the bright spots are footholds for optimism, as much as they are the bittersweet tune the band plays while the doomed ship sinks.