Why Modern Movies Feel So Empty

Contemporary cinema no longer believes in Goodness, Beauty, or Truth

The following article contains spoilers for Bugonia, Marty Supreme, and Citizen Kane.

One Battle After Another took home the award for best picture at last night’s Oscars, and no one was surprised. I haven’t seen the film, nor do I intend to—from what I understand of the plot and its political message, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is unbelievably asinine, and I’d prefer not to waste hours of my life on a film that stands so firmly against my personal values.¹

But I have seen two of the other films that were up for nominations—Bugonia and Marty Supreme—and I am sorry to report that both of these films are absolute trash.

In fact, they reminded me why I rarely watch movies these days.²

It’s not that I don’t think film is a legitimate art form—far from it. In fact, I will die on a hill for older films like Citizen Kane, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

But the majority of films made today are downright atrocious.³

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve devoted the past year of my life to dissecting the ills of the publishing industry. After (passively) watching the Oscars last night, I had the sudden realization that Hollywood has fallen prey to the same plague that’s taken over mainstream publishing: real art is getting pushed to the wayside in favor of soulless slop.

I’m not talking about the fact that Hollywood keeps making the same superhero movie 400 times. If anything, I’m all for that because no one is out there claiming that “Superman Remake 47” is true art. Rather, what bothers me is that the sorts of films that win Oscars—supposedly the highest cinematic achievement in our culture—are not much better than formulaic action flicks made for pure entertainment.

In fact, for the past several years, most Oscar-winning films have been really, really bad.

But why?

To answer that question, we must first understand what constitutes a good film.

Let’s take one of my favorite films, Citizen Kane, as an example.

I am not alone in believing that Citizen Kane might be one of the greatest movies of all time, but why is Citizen Kane so widely revered? Sure, it was ahead of its time, and, sure, it provides social commentary on a particular historical phenomenon, but before I rewatched the film the other day to write this essay, I’d only ever watched it once in high school—and after all of those years, what stuck with me wasn’t the critique of newspaper industry or the political subplot but Rosebud, Kane’s childhood sleigh.

You might think that’s natural—the entire plot of the film, after all, revolves around the quest to unearth the meaning behind “Rosebud,” Kane’s dying words, but the reason I’ll always be touched by the burning of that sleigh is far more rudimentary: Rosebud is tied to childhood happiness.

In other words, Kane’s love for Rosebud doesn’t tell us something particular about a specific moment in history but delivers a universal message about the human condition, warning us all against frittering our lives away meaninglessly.

In fact, as a Russian-Jewish first-generation American woman, I have very little in common with Charles Foster Kane. Nevertheless, I was ineffably touched by Kane’s attachment to Rosebud because I, too, am a human being who experienced childhood, and I, too, am a human being preoccupied with the fear of looking back on life with regret. Citizen Kane is a great film precisely because it contains a clear universal message about the human condition—and, perhaps even more fundamentally, because it tells us something about the things that lend meaning to our lives.

In other words, great art incites us to think about the big questions that we all share in common as a human race. That’s not to say that a film can’t have commentary about specifics—of course it can—but great art attains its renown precisely because it uses the particular as a vehicle to comment on the universal.

Early cinema knew how to do this well. Breakfast at Tiffany’s comments on the universal nature of love. Stalker tells us something about the lengths we all take to attain our greatest desires.

But what about contemporary cinema?

The reason that these movies are so lackluster in comparison is that they don’t attempt to tell us anything about the universal human condition or how to lead a meaningful life. Instead, they are either bogged down in particulars or reject meaning entirely, becoming not only nihilistic but downright repulsive. Instead of touching on the human condition, these films feature either a) hyper-specific, in-your-face social commentary (Bugonia) or b) indulgent moral chaos with zero attempt to define what constitutes a virtuous life. (Marty Supreme).

Let’s get into why, despite overwhelming critical acclaim, Bugonia and Marty Supreme are terrible movies—and why they function as proxies for a larger decay in contemporary filmmaking and art as a whole.

In my view, Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most overrated artists of our time.⁴ His supposed appeal lies in his weirdness, but I can only describe his movies with the Russian word “противный,” which is something like the aggregate of nasty, revolting, disturbing, cringey, vile, disgusting, and blood-curdling. In other words, Lanthimos has a disgusting view of human beings, and that comes through clearly in his ugly art.

Wait, you’ll say, but didn’t Dostoyevsky have a similar view of humanity, and isn’t he your favorite author?

Sure, to some extent Dostoyevsky did hold similar views, but there’s one major difference: Dostoyevsky believed that human beings could be redeemed. Lanthimos just thinks we’re ugly—and doesn’t want to comment further.

Not only is such an outlook detrimental to one’s general well-being, but it also lends a certain ugliness to one’s art—such as in the case of Bugonia.⁵ I’ll grant you that the film is unique to a certain extent, but I walked away from it having learned nothing about the human condition other than, apparently, that human beings are evil, ugly creatures with zero hope for redemption.⁶

Bugonia follows two nutty conspiracy theorists who abduct a young female CEO—whom they believe to be an alien sent down from another planet to destroy the human race. There was a great opportunity here for Lanthimos to use this setup of particulars (contemporary conspiracy theorists) to make a universal statement about human nature (e.g. the propensity of the human mind to cook up all sorts of voodoo magic as a defense mechanism against pain). Instead, Lanthimos decides that, actually, the corporate lady really is an alien, that corporate people really are out to get us, and that human beings really are doomed because we didn’t listen to the crazy conspiracy people.⁷

By the end of the film, the evil aliens destroy all of humanity, and only animals are left to roam our planet.

I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from this film other than a) human beings are ugly and irredeemable (which is false) and b) that corporations are evil (which is not only false but also stupid).

In the film’s defense, the acting was stellar, but no amount of great acting can save a movie with no moral backbone—and nothing to contribute to the eternal search for meaning in our lives.

But while Bugonia was a bad film, it didn’t anger me as much as Marty Supreme, which had the potential to be a phenomenal movie but failed drastically on all counts.

Most people I’ve spoken to who also disliked Josh Safdie’s latest flick took issue with the unfolding of the plot, much of which was loosely tied together through a series of non-sequiturs. My fiancé was particularly annoyed by the grandiose setup of the orange ping pong balls, which led absolutely nowhere, and repeatedly referenced Chekhov’s gun—the narrative premise that every element in a story must serve a distinct purpose—as we walked out of the theater. I didn’t adore the randomness of the story, but I have to admit, I wasn’t too annoyed by that in itself.⁸ After all, Marty Supreme is something of a picaresque, and, if done right, the picaresque form can yield a phenomenal film like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The difference, however, is that every scene in Barry Lyndon—though arguably unrelated—advances Barry’s character in a meaningful way. Barry Lyndon, furthermore, carries a deeper message precisely because Barry gets fucked in the end—and Kubrick, like Thackeray before him, does not attempt to excuse bad people.

The issue, then, with Marty Supreme, is not the structure of the film but its messaging.

Throughout the entire movie, Marty runs around being an asshole to everyone in his life: his friends, his girlfriend, his other girlfriend, his mother, and the other arbitrary people he meets throughout his odyssey towards table tennis stardom. He impregnates his girlfriend and attempts to claim that the child isn’t his. He cheats on said girlfriend with an older actress, whom he also treats quite poorly. He is categorically ungrateful to his friends and his mother—and all in the name of “greatness.”

You’d think that a two-and-a-half hour movie would contain some sort of backstory about why Marty ended up so depraved or at least some nuance about the conflict between his goals and his values, but nope—it turns out that Marty is just an asshole.

In fact, the film gives us so little to work with that the only feasible explanation for Marty’s behavior is his Jewishness.

At its core, Marty Supreme is an antisemitic film, which tells us a lot about the double standards in our culture when it comes to “the Jews” versus any other minority group. In fact, it is unimaginable that Hollywood would ever create a film containing such a negative portrayal of any other race.

And while the Jew haters over at The New York Times have attempted to spin the film’s depiction of Jewishness in a positive light, the fact is that if one is to believe that Marty is an asshole (he is), there is no other way to understand Safdie’s message other than “Jews are entitled assholes who use the Holocaust as an excuse for their poor behavior”—a fantastic example of Holocaust inversion and an extension of notorious antisemite Norman Finkelstein’s argument in The Holocaust Industry.

I see no other reason that Safdie would choose to emphasize Marty’s Jewishness so blatantly and repeatedly throughout the film. Marty wears a giant Star of David around his neck. He brings back a piece of the Egyptian pyramids to his mother, bragging about how “we built that” (the implication being, of course, that Marty has permission to act badly because it’s in his blood to do “great things” as a Jew). We get a completely random Auschwitz scene from one of Marty’s completely random friends that serves no purpose other than to bring attention to the fact that the movie takes place in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust, thereby reinforcing the film’s “Jews are entitled assholes who use the Holocaust as an excuse for their poor behavior” thesis.

But antisemitism aside, the primary reason that Marty Supreme is a terrible movie is that it never attempts to shame Marty for his behavior (other than through a completely out-of-the-blue, gratuitous BDSM scene with another irredeemable asshole). Worse, even, it shies away from punishing Marty in any meaningful way, allowing him to achieve all of his dreams and even come home to a fantastic rest of his life.

Towards the end of the film, Marty defeats the standing table tennis world champion and attains the “greatness” he has always desired. He flies home and rushes to the hospital, where his girlfriend (on whom he has now cheated a million times) is giving birth to their child. At this stage of the film, I was expecting something terrible to happen to him: maybe his girlfriend dies in childbirth, or maybe the infant comes out stillborn. In such a case, the film would leave us with the message that the pursuit of greatness comes at a cost—and that bad people cannot get away entirely with their actions, even if they reap partial rewards from them. Instead, however, we see Marty tearing up at the birth of his child, and the film ends.

As I told a friend the other day in a text message, “You cannot make a film about a guy who’s a complete moron and conclude that his life is actually great.”

Well, you can, and Safdie did. Marty faces no real obstacles, and everything ends up going his way despite his vast assholery. Hell, he’s even rewarded for his bad behavior—both in his personal and his professional life.

The reason that Citizen Kane is a great film is that in the end, Kane’s actions catch up to him: we realize that Kane is empty and lonely and everything in his life is actually meaningless—and thus we understand a universal human truth: human goodness always beats out the pursuit of so-called “greatness.” In Marty Supreme, on the other hand, Safdie seems to be implying that a) greatness excuses you from acting like a decent human being, b) society allows assholes to get away with everything and, c) “great” people tend to be assholes.

Anyone who has lived on this planet for more than three seconds knows that none of those things are actually true on a grand scale. Our actions as human beings always carry consequences—albeit sometimes unexpected ones. To suggest that terrible people suffer no consequences for their actions is not only a disservice to an entire generation of moviegoers, but also a shameful departure from art’s traditional role of helping us live meaningful lives.

But all of that aside, what’s most appalling about both Bugonia and Marty Supreme is that not once throughout these films did I feel touched.

By the end of Citizen Kane, I felt tears well up in my eyes. By the end of Bugonia, however, I felt repulsed, and by the end of Marty Supreme, I felt absolutely nothing—even though the final scene of the film is the literal birth of an infant, one of the most profoundly moving moments of the human experience. But I felt nothing for Marty because throughout the entire film, Safdie did not once attempt to humanize his protagonist. Like Lanthimos, he seems to believe that all human beings are just fundamentally ugly—and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

And therein lies the problem with our culture.

The reason that contemporary films are so terrible is that they lack a belief in humanity. Today, we are scared of making movies that show human beings in a positive light because, thanks to the advent of moral relativism, we have become terrified of taking a stance on the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. As a result, art becomes ironic and ugly; movies no longer feel “wholesome,” but alienating. We don’t care for contemporary film characters because we no longer see ourselves in them; like the aliens in Bugonia, we seem to be observing a completely different race at a sizable distance. Contemporary films lack substance because they’ve swapped out universals for particulars, replacing Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, with irony, alienation, and nihilism.

And that is why contemporary cinema feels fundamentally unwatchable—because it is profoundly anti-human.

I hope you enjoyed the Oscars more than I did. I’m off to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s to restore my faith in humanity.

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1. Nor do I have any desire to support Leonardo DiCaprio, a garbage human being who actually hates women. (I also continue to be appalled that the same Hollywood “activists” who are outraged over “genocide” in Gaza or “stolen land” from the Native Americans are nowhere in sight when it comes to calling out DiCaprio’s appalling treatment of women.)

2. The only reason I went to the movie theater several times this year is because I am now engaged to a self-proclaimed film buff and am routinely dragged to sit on Wall-E style armchairs. These days, I never go to the movies of my own accord (unless it’s an indie theater in Lower Manhattan showing an old movie).

3. The same can be said for contemporary books, and I’ve written constantly about the decline of reading culture. I imagine that many people don’t like reading because they don’t have the attention spans to sit through 300 pages of mediocre slop. I also imagine that if I consistently read anything published within the last 20 years, I’d feel the same way about reading. There’s something uniquely bad about contemporary art, and we’re about to dive right into it.

4. Which is really saying something given that Taylor Swift exists.

5. Bugonia is not Lanthimos’s only “ugly” film. The majority of his other creations are equally revolting.

6. Bugonia is probably the worst film of his that I’ve seen after Dogtooth, and unfortunately, I’ve seen five of Lanthimos’s strange brainchildren because my aforementioned fiancé is a big fan of his. We tend to disagree on most things in life, but our approach to art differs drastically (which, I suppose, is not the worst life disagreement to have, all things considered).

7. I’m sure that this was Candace Owens’ favorite movie of the year.

8. It would be somewhat hypocritical of me, a lover of classic literature, to be vexed by random tangents and unrelated subplots, which feature heavily in 19th-century fiction.