American Cinema of the 2010s: Themes and Variations

American Cinema of the 2010s

AMERICAN CULTURE / AMERICAN CINEMA

Each volume in the Screen Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series presents a group of original essays analyzing the impact of cultural issues on the cinema and the impact of the cinema in American society. Because every chapter explores a spectrum of particularly significant motion pictures and the broad range of historical events in one year, readers will gain a continuing sense of the decade as it came to be depicted on movie screens across the continent. The integration of historical and cultural events with the sprawling progression of American cinema illuminates the pervasive themes and the essential movies that define an era. Our series represents one among many possible ways of confronting the past; we hope that these books will offer a better understanding of the connections between American culture and film history.

LESTER D. FRIEDMAN AND MURRAY POMERANCE

SERIES EDITORS

André Gaudreault, editor, American Cinema 1890–1909: Themes and Variations

Charlie Keil and Ben Singer, editors, American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations

Lucy Fischer, editor, American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations

Ina Rae Hark, editor, American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations

Wheeler Winston Dixon, editor, American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations

Murray Pomerance, editor, American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations

Barry Keith Grant, editor, American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations

Lester D. Friedman, editor, American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations

Stephen Prince, editor, American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations

Chris Holmlund, editor, American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations

Timothy Corrigan, editor, American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations

Dennis Bingham, editor, American Cinema of the 2010s: Themes and Variations

American Cinema of the

2010s

Themes and Variations

EDITED BY

DENNIS BINGHAM

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Bingham, Dennis, 1954– editor.

Title: American cinema of the 2010s : themes and variations / edited by Dennis Bingham.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: Screen decades : American culture/American cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021009097 | ISBN 9781978814837 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978814820 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814844 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814851 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814868 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—United States—History—21st century. | Motion pictures—United States—Plots, themes, etc.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U6 A857955 2022 | DDC 791.430973/09051—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009097

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2022 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Timeline: 2010s

Introduction: Movies and the 2010s

DENNIS BINGHAM

2010 Movies and Recessionary Gender Politics

MICHELE SCHREIBER

2011 Movies and Masculinity at a Crossroads

DAVID GREVEN

2012 Movies and Myths, Heroes, and History

RAYMOND HABERSKI JR.

2013 Movies and Personhood

ALEXANDRA KELLER

2014 Movies and the Unexpected Virtue of How the Sausage Gets Made

DANIEL SMITH-ROWSEY

2015 Movies and Female Agency

LISA BODE

2016 Movies and the Solace of Progressive Narratives

CYNTHIA BARON

2017 Movies and the Right to Be Heard

JULIE LEVINSON

2018 Movies and Revolution

MIKAL J. GAINES

2019 Movies, Anniversaries, and the Limits of Looking Back

DENNIS BINGHAM

Select Academy Awards, 2010–2019

Acknowledgments

Works Cited and Consulted

Contributors

Index

TIMELINE

2010s

American Cinema of the 2010s

INTRODUCTION

Movies and the 2010s

DENNIS BINGHAM

Although the 2010s were perhaps the most tumultuous decade since the 1960s, I predict that, over time, the 2010s will be seen as a decade without a strong identity of its own. The effects of the Great Recession of 2007–2009 lingered in many parts of the country for much of the following decade. Mass shootings, school murders, and apparently racially motivated killings of Blacks by police officers split the nation apart. Unabated global climate change continued, but with 17 percent of the American population, the most in the Western world according to a 2019 poll, continuing to deny and even rebuff international attempts to address it (Brackett).

In contrast, the 2000s evoke memories of the long-anticipated turn of the millennium. These were overtaken by the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror, and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Waiting at the end was the Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, beginning in December 2007 and ending, according to economists, in July 2009. The 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, remained enormously consequential throughout the 2010s. Obama was re-elected in 2012, and presided over the Recession and recovery, directed the successful attack on Osama bin Laden (the architect of the 9/11 attacks), and governed amid painful schisms that rocked the country.

Through much of the 2010s, the person on the street would tell you that the Recession hadn’t ended at all. Walking through average middle-class neighborhoods in many American cities until midway through the decade, one passed abandoned or foreclosed houses. Collateral evidence, such as pets gone astray or let loose by their owners, was everywhere in these years. Such experiential evidence, borne out in statistics, shows unemployment not shrinking to pre-Recession levels until 2015; real median household income did not surpass the pre-2007 mark until 2016 (Chappelow). Property values in many parts of the country—especially the Northeast and Midwest—took until past the middle of the decade to recover. For example, in February 2006, my wife and I took out a new mortgage on our house in the neighborhood where we had lived since 1993 and where we expected 6 percent growth in property value annually. We were stunned, therefore, to learn in May 2009 that our home value had collapsed and our mortgage was underwater. It took years for a reappraisal to show that we finally owed less on the house than what it was worth. And we were not alone. The month of that positive reappraisal—November 2016—was more than coincidental. The election of Donald Trump was unquestionably the cataclysmic event of the second half of the 2010s, and, like the Great Recession, it set countless mini-effects rumbling in its wake. Many of these, years overdue, came about as a result of the decline of many sectors of society and the failure of millions to feel the recovery that economists, politicians, and other experts kept saying was underway.

Get Out (Jordan Peele, Blumhouse, Universal, 2017). A month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, comedian Peele’s writing-directing debut opens. A horror satire reminiscent of earlier eras of cinephilia, it establishes twin waves of new Black American film and horror art cinema. Digital frame enlargement.

The enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by the new Obama Administration and Congress in February 2009 reversed the failure of the economy in the Recession (Chappelow). A 2019 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) explains that the Recession put the economy in a deep hole. This is because the Great Recession created an unusually large and long-lasting gap between actual and potential GDP [Gross Domestic Product]. This output gap was manifested in substantial excess unemployment and underemployment and idle productive capacity among businesses (Chart Book). Huge numbers of jobs were lost in the Recession; the economy took until mid-2014 to recreate the 8.7 million jobs lost between 2007 and 2010 (Chart Book). As late as the end of 2017, more people were unemployed than there were job openings. The impacts of the Recession, together with the longer-lasting effects of globalization, beginning with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and the normalization of trade with China, resulted in millions of manufacturing jobs being lost and blue-collar union voters feeling bereft and betrayed (Stockman SR 4). Few facets of the culture were not shaken and changed—perhaps permanently—by the Great Recession, although it feels too early to pronounce such historical insight; indeed, the aftershocks of the Great Recession may ultimately seem like nothing compared to the devastating economic avalanche generated by the novel coronavirus.

The Great Recession significantly affected, perhaps permanently, two industries relevant to this book: higher education, specifically the liberal arts, and the entertainment business. The change from film to digital, the most significant event of the first half of the decade, was on its way regardless. However, home video sales, which had Hollywood riding high since the introduction of video cassette recorders and tapes in the early 1980s, followed by DVDs in the late 1990s, had begun its irreversible descent by the start of the 2010s. The foreseeable end of the video disc is found in Guardian reporter Adam Sherwin’s comparison of DVDs and Blu-rays in 2010 to the long-dead LP record—and this in a story about a mere 12.6 percent sales decline in 2009 and 2010 combined. Flash forward to a CNBC story nine years later pronouncing the demise of the physical video format, with an 86 percent fall in sales since 2008. Pictures tell the story. Sherwin’s report is accompanied by a shot of video store shelves stocked with product. Sarah Whitten’s 2019 story, devastatingly, has a photo of DVDs dumped into a Walmart cut-out bin, selling for the low, low price of $3.74. Streaming, like digital cinema, had been on its way and probably would have surged anyway, as all new technologies do when it’s their time. But the section of the entertainment economy that mourned the loss of revenue from DVDs desperately needed replacement income, and streaming, it seems, was that new entertainment form.

Much more worrying was the downturn in higher education in the 2010s. Again, figures tell the story. Total undergraduate enrollment in the United States increased by 37 percent (from 13.2 million to 18.1 million students) between 2000 and 2010, but fell by 8 percent (from 18.1 million to 16.6 million students) between 2010 and 2018 (Condition of Education). Part of the decline was due, paradoxically, to the revived employment economy after 2010. This is a familiar pattern: lower employment sends people back to school to work on degrees to make themselves more employable. However, declines in enrollment in the liberal arts, especially the humanities, persisted throughout the decade, even after other disciplines, especially the vaunted STEM fields, rebounded. Small liberal arts colleges around the country merged or closed. While state colleges and universities may have taken up the slack, the unrelenting fall in allotments of state budgets to public colleges, the inability of students and families to pay tuition without going into levels of debt unimagined by their professors a few decades before, and the increasingly essential nature of a college education created a multifaceted bind from which there must be some release—but what?

The Politics of the 2010s

A decade that began with the second year of the administration of Barack Obama, the first African American president, ended with the third year of the presidential term of Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate developer and reality TV celebrity, the first president lacking any governmental or military experience. That Obama was succeeded by Trump, an authoritarian wannabe and admirer of autocrats, who spouted—or more precisely, tweeted—racial bigotry, sexism, misstatements (the New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record, resolved to call them lies), and xenophobia, demonstrated divisions beyond what many Americans had been willing to admit. The country split along lines of race, gender and sexual identity, economic inequality, and educational background. How one felt about the nation, moreover, probably depended on whether one was a city dweller or a rural resident and whether one lived in the vast American heartland, from Pennsylvania to Nevada, of whose electoral votes Trump in 2016 won all but fifty, or in one of the northern states on or near the two coasts, of whose 178 electoral votes Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, took all but one (the last being in Maine, which apportions its electoral votes by Congressional district).

Politically, the decade saw the polarization that had been increasing since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s widen to a chasm that many felt threatened America’s constitutional democracy in fundamental ways. The coalition that supported Barack Obama in the election of 2008 evaporated in the midterm Congressional election of 2010, returned in force to re-elect Obama in 2012, and then vanished again in 2014, while conservatives poured out. The result was an obstinate Republican Tea Party majority in the House of Representatives in 2011 and a matching Senate GOP majority in 2015. Obama’s inability to legislate with an uncooperative Congress that was uninterested in democratic compromise (and uninterested, many thought, in government itself) resulted in events such as the 2011 cliff-hanger, breathlessly covered by the political media, over whether or not the Congress would vote to lift the debt ceiling, enabling Congress to fund the government.

From Obama to Trump

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency seemed destined since his breakout on the national stage as the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, the then state senator running for U.S. senator proclaimed, there is the United States of America. From that time on, Obama represented unity, and by the time he was the Democratic presidential nominee four years later, the War on Terror–fatigued country embraced the hope and change of a postpartisan, postracial era. But it was not to be. While Obama hoped for bipartisan cooperation, the strategy of the Republicans, said Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, was to make him a polarizing figure, to try to separate him from the American people who elected him, to try to make him the problem as opposed to the solution (Breslow).

The victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election of November 2016 was unexpected—and that is an understatement. It echoed, however, that June’s Brexit vote in favor of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union; it also crystallized the cultural divisions in America that grew more obvious as the decade wore on. Trump, a fixture of reality TV, first entered the political arena in 2011 with the birther conspiracy theory, a media campaign alleging that the first African American president was born not in the United States but in Kenya. Trump did not create the ugliness, Matt Bai of the Washington Post said to Frontline. He did not create the Twitter social media universe. He did not create the xenophobia, the nationalism, the backlash against globalism and global crusades. He did not create entertainment politics, politics as a form of reality show television. He created none of this. He is its pure manifestation. The absolute, logical endpoint of a bunch of trends in American life. (Breslow).

The election of Trump, who was alleged to have abused women, and whose victory itself was aided by Russian hackers, drew furious reactions. Trump won only by a fluke, wrote David Frum, the most prolific of the Never Trump Republicans. He won without a popular mandate. He won with clandestine assistance from the Russian intelligence services. He won only after a six-year effort to block African Americans from voting. But win he did—and Republicans for a long time to come will have to reckon with the odium of his presidency (Trumpocalypse 182).

Trump’s election, furthermore, launched social activism, such as the Women’s Marches on the day after Trump’s inauguration and on its anniversary each subsequent year in the decade. These demonstrations led to an influx of women, minorities, and millennials (those born between 1980 and 1996) into politics. The upsurge made itself felt in the Blue Wave of 2018, the strong showing of Democrats in that year’s midterm Congressional and state elections. Voter turnout rose dramatically in that year, from 39 percent in the 2010 midterms and 36.4 percent in the midterms of 2014 (the lowest since 1942) to 49.3 percent in 2018. Forty-one House seats flipped from the Republicans to the Democrats, putting Democrats in control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years. Nancy Pelosi, who had served from 2007 to 2011 as the first female speaker of the house, was once again elected to take up the gavel.

Media: Falling off an Analog

The 2010s may be remembered as the decade in which the change from analog to digital—from a culture of physical media to an entirely virtual, streaming one—was realized and nearly completed in ways that touched most people’s lives. Many magazines, including Newsweek, Redbook, Jet, and Glamour, ceased print publication and came out only in digital form. Entertainment Weekly cut back from a weekly to a monthly (but kept its name). Time Inc, founded by Henry Luce in 1924, spun off from Time Warner, a merger that broke apart in 2014 after twenty-three uneasy years. The Time magazines, including Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune, and Money, were bought by Meredith in 2017. Time Warner, including Warner Bros., DC Comics, CNN, TNT, and TBS, was purchased by AT&T in a sale concluded in June 2018. Also in 2018, Marc Benioff, owner and CEO of Salesforce, a cloud-based software firm, bought, with his wife Lynne, Time magazine, stating a year later that he had hoped to address a crisis of trust (Duffy, Stetler). Five years before, in 2013, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, purchased the Washington Post from the Graham family, its longtime owners. By the end of the decade, Bezos had turned the Post, its Watergate glory days far behind it, from a local print-focused publication to a globally recognized digital brand (Giuliani-Hoffman).

In technology, the most influential innovation was the Apple iPad, introduced in 2010, the year before the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs at age fifty-six. The iPad combined the portability of a cell phone with the storage and speed of a personal computer, but was lighter and less cumbersome than a laptop. In 2014, Amazon brought out the Alexa, the science fiction–like personal assistant that brought all our desires a voice command away (and is parodied as Olivia in Jordan Peele’s Us, in which she mishears Call the police as F*** tha Police by N.W.A. and proceeds to play the song). Other new tech of the decade included the photo apps Instagram and Snapchat, the ultrapopular game Minecraft, the e-sports platform Twitch, the ride-hailing apps and services Uber and Lyft, the company chat platform Slack, the electric car Tesla Model S, the Apple Watch, the Oculus VR headset, the streaming services Chromecast, Roku, and Apple Firestick (any one of which allows former cable TV subscribers to cut the cord and stream channels individually instead of paying for costly cable packages), and the Xbox Adaptive Controller for players with disabilities (Marvin; Turakhia).

The quickening decline of newspapers, which began in the 2000s amid the popularity of the internet and was hastened by the Great Recession, continued throughout the 2010s as advertising and subscriptions slumped. Americans consumed their news mostly from politically and culturally inclined websites, such as Politico, Salon, Slate, The Huffington Post, and Vox, and traditional newspaper websites, such as those for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the aforementioned Post, as well as social media and television. The Village Voice, the nation’s first alternative newspaper, ceased publication in 2017. For decades, the Voice functioned as a crucial source for investigative journalism and, significantly, cutting-edge film criticism—the pulpit from which Andrew Sarris propounded auteurism. J. Hoberman’s reviews of less heralded avant-garde and experimental films also emanated from a perch at the Voice. The internet completed its takeover of centuries of traditions in other ways too. Except in a few fortunate locations, the bookstore ceased to be a place where a reader could browse through books, no matter how obscure, with the closure in 2011 of the Borders bookstore chain in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Scenes from Wonderstruck (2017) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) of bookstores packed from ceiling to floor with books, which would have been unremarkable even a decade earlier, were achingly nostalgic toward the end of the 2010s. (But New York City’s Strand Book Store still survives and, we hope, prospers!)

Broadway: The Hamilton Decade

Without question, the most significant theatrical event of the decade—perhaps even of the past few decades—was Hamilton, the entirely rapped- and sung-through musicalization of Ron Chernow’s 2003 biography of founding father Alexander Hamilton. The show bleeds the spirit of the Obama era in terms of its tolerance and multiculturalism, said Chernow in 2017, pronouncing himself flabbergasted at what Lin-Manuel Miranda made of his book (Butter). Multihyphenate Miranda, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics and starred as Hamilton, conceived of the play as a showcase for actors of color, who play the founding fathers. The only white performers play King George III and his courtiers. Opening first at the Public Theater in Greenwich Village in February 2015, and moving six months later to the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Hamilton became a phenomenon, an instant sold-out smash, with the Broadway production commanding $500 (for the cheap seats) to $3,000 a ticket. Nick Hanson in 2018 attributed the high price to the need to counteract resellers/scalpers who charge five times the face value of the tickets. For Hamilton’s creators, reported Amanda Harding in 2019, the last thing they want is for their show to only be attended by the rich and elite. Thus they invented Ham4Ham, a daily lottery for ten-dollar tickets.

The show was credited with bringing young people to live theater, with spillover effects that benefited the theater world in general. The two-CD Original Broadway Cast (OBC) album was certified eight times Multi-Platinum, having sold over eight million copies as of May 2021 (Recording Industry Association). This makes the Hamilton OBC by far the highest-selling Broadway cast album of all time, having more than doubled the sales of decades-old albums like My Fair Lady (its second OBC, in stereo, 1959), The Phantom of the Opera, and Les Misérables (both 1987) in a matter of a few years. As of the end of 2019, the Angelica, Philip, and Peggy tours, named after characters in the show, played concurrently across the United States, in addition to a production in Chicago that ran from October 2016 to January 2020 and the continuing Broadway run. A production toured in Canada, and one debuted on the West End in London in December 2017, which continues to run. The show’s director, Thomas Kail, made a film of the Broadway production in June 2016, months after Miranda was announced the winner of the year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama (only the seventh time the prize went to a musical), weeks after the show won eleven Tonys, and before the original cast, including Leslie Odom Jr., Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Phillipa Soo, began to depart. The film was sold to Disney and was scheduled for theatrical release in October 2021. Instead, it premiered on the Disney+ streaming service on the Fourth of July weekend in 2020 and became a rare pandemic blockbuster, with 37 percent of all streaming video downloads in the month of July attributed to Hamilton (the second place–holder had 13 percent) (Tran).

Other significant Broadway shows of the decade included: The Addams Family (2010); An American in Paris (2015); Anastasia (2017); Beetlejuice (2019); Be More Chill (2019); The Book of Mormon (2011); Come from Away (2017); Dear Evan Hansen (2016); Fun Home (2015); Hadestown (2019); Violet (2014); Matilda the Musical (2013); Mean Girls (2018); Moulin Rouge! The Musical (2019); Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (2016); The Prom (2018); Something Rotten! (2015); Waitress (2016); American Idiot (2010); The Scottsboro Boys (2010); A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (2013); and The Band’s Visit (2017).

Sports in the Decade

Lance Armstrong, once the most celebrated cyclist of all time, who came back from Stage III testicular cancer in 1997 to win seven Tours de France, was found guilty in a 2012 investigation by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency of having used illegal substances. The Union Cycliste Internationale stripped him of all his post–August 1998 titles. Armstrong confessed publicly in January 2013 in a two-part, prime-time ABC interview with Oprah Winfrey. Other star athletes who fell into disgrace in the 2010s were Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots, who was convicted of murder in 2015 and hanged himself in his prison cell in 2017, and South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, who was convicted in 2015 of murdering his girlfriend. Legendary Major League Baseball players Manny Ramirez and Roger Clemens ended their careers in doping scandals. A notorious Olympic athlete, figure skater Tonya Harding, became the subject of a biopic, I, Tonya (see the chapter on 2017).

In the National Basketball Association, Kobe Bryant won the last of his five championships with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2010, when the Lakers defeated their most iconic rival, the Boston Celtics, four games to three. The Miami Heat, with its newly assembled Big Three of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh, went to the finals in four straight years, 2011–2014. It won two of those, against the Oklahoma City Thunder in five games in 2012, and against the San Antonio Spurs in seven games in 2013. After the Heat’s six-game loss to the Spurs in 2014, James returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers. In 2015, the Golden State Warriors, led by Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, commenced a dynastic run, progressing to the finals every year for the rest of the decade. From 2015 to 2018, they met James’s Cavs, who managed to defeat the Warriors just once, in 2016, when the Cavs became the first team in the then sixty-nine-year history of the finals to win after trailing one game to three. They became the first team in thirty-eight years to win Game Seven on the road, and the first professional team in fifty-two years from Cleveland to win a championship. This story becomes even more outlandish when paired with the performance of the Chicago Cubs later the same year, who became only