Let me tell you about my favorite movie that came out this year: a big budget, IMAX experience, surreal auteur masterpiece, and a legendary box office trainwreck, all rolled into one. This movie was Beau is Afraid.
Just a quick plot summary for you: This is the story of the chronically anxious Beau, a middle-aged man living in a city that is like a parody of our most conservative fantasies of anarchy and the purge. Upon hearing that his mother has passed away horribly, he must get back to his childhood home in time for her funeral. This movie is funny, scary, dark, and thought-provoking. It keeps one-upping itself for how messed-up it can get, and you laugh, but then you wince, or gasp, because with every layer there is more blood and more horrific ramifications that only you, and not the movie, have the time to parse through. It’s like you saw the most incoherently babbling person on the subway and ask them about the world but everything they tell you is exactly correct. It out David Lynches David Lynch at some points with just how ridiculously surreal it gets, and with fantastic performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Patti Lupone and beautiful cinematography throughout, every aspect comes together to make one of the most challenging yet rewarding films of the year.
But we have a problem with how we view art today. In any conversation about the topic, art and entertainment get tangled up in a late-stage capitalist mess. This is an opinion piece, so here is my opinion: Art should not exist to make money. Art should simply be allowed to exist. The existence of any genuine cult classic is proof enough that quality of art does not go hand in hand with its success. I’ll admit it took me longer than most to grow that cynical blockbuster fatigue typical of most modern-day critics, but these billion dollar, hollow, design-by-committee amalgamations sure are fatiguing. What irks me at the end of the day is that movies with budgets that are about the size of a mid-sized country’s GDP have no voice behind them. We get bogged down in this idea of “entertainment” or “content” to the point that we tend to forget that films are art. Because I am the most devoted reporter that the US news has on their staff, I am about to commit a sin so evil that it will send me straight to hell: defining art. It’s hard, as anything from a bookshelf to a video game could count as art. I think if I had to define it, though, I would say a piece of art is a craft of some kind which someone channels their thoughts, emotions, and experiences into with the intended result being the creation of thoughts, emotions, and experiences in its audience. But watching any number of Star Wars or Superhero films, I don’t find myself with any new emotions or experiences. Sadly, I don’t feel anything at all, it’s just empty. When movies like this are so expensive to make, the studio of course takes over to protect the 40+ millions of dollars behind it; it has to appeal to the biggest audience possible!
In addition to the profit-forward viewing of films that has been much harped on in film criticism, I’d also like to touch on another problematic view of film, just as entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with movies that are entertaining, all of my favorites I would consider extremely entertaining, I just take issue with this viewing of humanity as Tomogachis that have little bars that we need to keep full. There’s the food bar and the sleep bar and the “entertainment” bar, whatever that is. This is one of the many reasons I will never be okay with AI created stuff, because even if its pictures get pretty and its writing gets funny, I don’t want something that was scientifically put together to provide entertainment by drawing from some formula or something. I want something that was made by a human, not a formula. If I’m watching comedy, I want to laugh at a person, if I’m watching horror, I want a person to be behind the scares. It will always be more authentic no matter how close we get to approximating the human touch.
But where we’re going is just immensely profitable little dopamine cubes with all of the franchising and toy and Halloween costume potential in the world, because if movies are going to have hundreds of millions of dollars behind them, they’ve gotta make a profit!
That is what amazes me about the mere existence of Beau is Afraid.
A24 deserves to be commended for its commitment to artistic integrity. It keeps making brilliant films, and some of them are smash hits like Everything Everywhere, and some of them are legendary flops like Beau. Some we have yet to see, like Nicholas Cage’s Dream Scenario. I encourage you, next time you’re hankering for an eighty-dollar box of Mike-and-Ikes, to take a risk when you’re picking out what movie you go see. It might be awful, but who knows, it might be the best thing you’ve ever seen.
