United States

Lee, AngFilm director Ang Lee on the set of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).Chan Kam Chuen/Sony Pictures ClassicThe new appreciation of the individual vision of the Hollywood film was to inspire a whole generation of young American filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, to attempt to use the commercial film as at once a form of personal expression and a means of empire building, with predictably mixed results. By the turn of the century, new waves of filmmakers (notably Spike Lee, Stephen Soderbergh, John Sayles, Ang Lee, and later Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, and J.J. Abrams), like the previous generation mostly trained in film schools, had graduated from independent filmmaking to the mainstream, and the American tradition of film comedy stretching from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, and Woody Allen had come to include the quirky sensibilities of Joel and Ethan Coen and Wes Anderson. In mixing a kind of eccentric, off-focus comedy with a private, screw-loose vision, they came close to defining another kind of postmodernism, one that was as antiheroic as the more academic sort but cheerfully self-possessed in tone.

As the gap between big studio-made entertainment—produced for vast international audiences—and the small “art” or independent film widened, the best of the independents came to have the tone and idiosyncratic charm of good small novels: films such as Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing (2001), Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me (2000), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Jason Reitman’s Juno (2007), Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010), and Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) reached audiences that felt bereft by the steady run of Batman, Lethal Weapon, and Iron Man films. But with that achievement came a sense too that the audience for such serious work as Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films and Chinatown (1974), which had been intact as late as the 1970s, had fragmented beyond recomposition.

Iron ManRobert Downey, Jr., appearing as Iron Man/Tony Stark in a scene from the film Iron Man (2008). Paramount Pictures/Marvel Entertainment

Television

If the Martian visitor beloved of anthropological storytelling were to visit the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, all of the art forms listed and enumerated here—painting and sculpture and literature, perhaps even motion pictures and popular music—would seem like tiny minority activities compared with the great gaping eye of American life: “the box,” television. Since the mid-1950s, television has been more than just the common language of American culture; it has been a common atmosphere. For many Americans television is not the chief manner of interpreting reality but a substitute for it, a wraparound simulated experience that has come to be more real than reality itself. Indeed, beginning in the 1990s, American television was inundated with a spate of “reality” programs, a wildly popular format that employed documentary techniques to examine “ordinary” people placed in unlikely situations, from the game-show structure of Survivor (marooned contestants struggling for supremacy) to legal dramas such as The People’s Court and Cops, to American Idol, the often caustically judged talent show that made instant stars of some of its contestants. Certainly, no medium—not even motion pictures at the height of their popular appeal in the 1930s—has created so much hostility, fear, and disdain in some “right-thinking” people. Television is chewing gum for the eyes, famously characterized as a vast wasteland in 1961 by Newton Minow, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. When someone in the movies is meant to be shown living a life of meaningless alienation, he is usually shown watching television.