Many of today’s biggest movies are plagued by a style that Namwali Serpell has started calling the New Literalism. “When I say literalism, I don’t mean realistic or plainly literal,” she writes. “I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art.”
The pervasiveness of this trend was evident in the films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year. Sean Baker’s “Anora” is a self-described “Cinderella story” about a sex worker who falls for the oldest trick in the book: the rich trick who wants to marry her. When the heroine says that she wants a Disneyland princess suite for her honeymoon, her bestie helpfully cries, “Cinderella!” Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” dramatizes older celebrities’ fear of being displaced by casting Demi Moore as a 50-year-old star who births a genetically generated younger self—literally, through her back. Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” features droning musical numbers that recite events as they occur: “I’d like to know about sex-change operation.” “I see, I see, I see. Man to woman, or woman to man?” “Man to woman.” “From penis to vagina.”
“It’s hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media,” Serpell continues. “Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically. This strikes me as a blatant redefinition of art itself.” Read about why movies have become so ham-fisted and didactic: