Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, and the new anti-CGI snobbery
|
Version 0 of 1. Tom Cruise is at it again, churning the stomachs of the insurance underwriters for Mission Impossible 5 by performing an outrageously batty stunt: hanging out the side of a giant plane 5000 feet above the English countryside. This follows his other bits of derring-do as permanently rogue agent Ethan Hunt, be it swinging around the red rocks of Colorado, running from a giant exploding fishtank, or, most impressively, running down the side of the world’s tallest building in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Cruise is 52, and for the cynical viewer these antics will be taking on a tinge of mid-life crisis, a blockbuster version of the ageing exec hanging off a zipline on a corporate awayday. “Pain is temporary, film is forever,” said Ghost Protocol director Brad Bird, enobling Cruise’s exertions – as if CGI couldn’t give a near simulacrum of his beautifully straining cheeks. Digital visuals can create a stunning artificiality: think of the pitch and yaw of Gravity, or the glossy vibrancy of Peter Jackson’s armies. But these effects are often treated with sniffy disdain by directors like Christopher Nolan, who has said “I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography,” as if the latter, “authentic” medium has inherently more storytelling power. There’s an analogous tension in music: vocal autotune is often criticised, despite its potential for jawdroppingly strange beauty. Why this obsession with the “real”, in media that is as intangible as sound, or light on a screen? Well, as Anne Hathaway amusingly outlined on Graham Norton last week, not using CGI is first of all cost-effective: she floated about on one leg for some of her scenes in Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar to mimic the effects of weightlessness. But of course it’s more than that: there’s still that unique clank in your gut at the sight of something incontrovertibly real, like Nolan’s pulling apart of a plane in midair for The Dark Knight Rises, or his upturning of an 18-wheeler in front of the Joker. It goes deeper still though, into the weird contract we draw up with ourselves when we watch film. “Tom Cruise is doing that for real!” we exclaim to ourselves as we see Tom Cruise doing some casual rappelling. “Whoa!” We never truly watch blockbusters as pure narratives, but instead are constantly aware in their place in a wider ecosystem of celebrity, in which Cruise also has divorces and jumps on sofas and twinkles next to fans. We’re in awe of Cruise-as-Hunt rather than Hunt himself. So as well as bringing us closer to the action, rejecting CGI actually distances us from the story, by trading on the anti-fiction of star power. It’s a paradox, and a fun one: their artifice destroyed, starry blockbusters like this can actually drift towards “pure cinema”, the avant-garde impulse to emphasise the formal techniques of film – editing, sound, photography – above narrative. Or, done badly, they become boring explosion-vessels. The internet’s ongoing obsession with leaked set pics and constant teased updates further erodes the artifice (with this blog as guilty as anything). But the unexpected success of everything from World War Z to Nightcrawler shows that the public wants stars to anchor films. We want to see our projected version of a person projecting their version of a character, projected. You could argue that advances in CGI has meant that the arguments about authenticity will dwindle, and doing things for real is just a macho pose. But our desire for stars doing extraordinary things will likely never be sated – and a big-budget film will remain the best place to see them. |