Where did the challenge go?

Why has “art” become a dirty word -- at least when it comes to American movies? The question first started to nag me last fall around the time David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” failed to set the world on fire. This hypnotic, heartbreaking work was among the best American films of the last decade and certainly its dystopic visionary’s greatest movie in years. If the world were sane or at least more interesting, Lynch’s film would have restored him to the Valhalla of our acknowledged masters or at least onto the covers of a few glossy magazines, where he’d once perched for “Twin Peaks.”

As it turned out, “Mulholland Drive” wasn’t even nominated for any major awards at that year’s alternative Oscars, the Independent Spirit Awards. The director, who with his 1986 film “Blue Velvet” had helped to define contemporary independent cinema, had been kicked to the indie curb.

Movies have always been caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of art and entertainment, between their aesthetic promise and hard bottom line. Lately, though, the word “art” is scarcely mentioned in discussions about films in this country, even where you might most expect it, namely independent cinema. The reasons are complex but would have to include the decline of fine art in middle-class life and our love affair with the most trivial aspects of entertainment culture. Grosses and gossip dominate the popular discourse, as does the media’s endless shilling for the hottest, sexiest stars and scads of new movies that look an awful lot like the old ones, only worse. Meanwhile, in more rarefied cinematic forums, the faithful risk the public’s indifference by writing about foreign-language movies most Americans will never see -- because distributors won’t release them, because exhibitors won’t show them, because critics won’t look at them.

In a 1956 essay called “Movies, the Desperate Art,” Pauline Kael set her sights on Hollywood and avant-garde film, putting forth an argument that is as relevant now as it was then. “From the beginning,” she wrote, “American filmmakers have been crippled by business financing and the ideology it imposed: They were told that they had an obligation to entertain the general public, that this was a democratic function and a higher obligation than to give their best to a few hundred or a few million people.” For Kael, this flight from the medium and its possibilities embarked on by Hollywood could now be avoided because it had become clear that “there is more than one audience, and that artists must judge their own obligations.”

It’s a simple idea, really, the notion that there are different audiences and that the artist must decide his or her own obligations. Indeed, the recognition of different audiences and the belief that filmmakers are artists cut to the heart and soul of the independent film movement that took off in the mid-1980s. Yet we live in a moment when fear of the mass audience and, perhaps more important, the corporate fear of that audience, means that most filmmakers are no longer allowed to decide their own obligations, even in the putative independent film world. It is one of the ironies of contemporary American cinema that although the studios have been revitalized by independent film, from which they siphoned off ideas and talent, the indies have become, more and more, as captive to the tyranny of public taste as Hollywood.

Perplexingly poetic

Awash in triviality, largely absent the aesthetic and political urgency that once made it so exciting, independent film is suffering from an identity crisis. Which isn’t to say that good movies aren’t being made. Writer-director Richard Kelly’s “Donnie Darko” was the most auspicious debut by a young American director since Paul Thomas Anderson showed us his stuff with “Hard Eight” some five years earlier. Released in October 2001, “Donnie Darko,” with its poetic melancholy and ill-timed plot device of a wayward airplane engine, didn’t stand a chance. It didn’t help that audiences, including critics, seemed as perplexed by its narrative curves as by what it all meant, including the engine and the raggedy bunny with the evil metal grin. More than one critic complained that Kelly was overly ambitious, suffering from the unusual affliction of having too many ideas.

It has been a decade since Quentin Tarantino hit with his gangster film “Reservoir Dogs.” As much as I admire that film and its follow-up, “Pulp Fiction,” I have started to wonder if American cinema’s reliance on genre is yielding increasingly diminished returns for the medium as an art. After “Pulp Fiction” in particular, the independent film world that had recently seemed so alive with possibility began to seem, with each passing Sundance, in thrall to a limited repertoire of stories and a crass commercial imperative.

The expansive, often genre-transcending vision of filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch and Charles Burnett, who at their best made us believe that the medium’s possibilities were without limit, were replaced by an indistinguishable parade of young (mostly) men who had their eyes on the Hollywood prize. Genre for these young Turks didn’t seem like a means to personal expression but to a deal with Harvey Weinstein. But who cared about art when there was so much fast, fun entertainment to imbibe? Certainly not the media or the industry, both of which were only too happy to embrace the easier (and easier-selling) pop kicks of retread genre stories, leaving behind the harder-earned returns of a Jarmusch.

There have been worthy genre films made in the last decade, of course, but too often even the best ones have had the feel of a room with no windows. American film has gone through cycles of creative fertility and drought; today, we look at the 1970s, in particular, with nostalgia as well as amnesia. The decade is often lauded as a period of aesthetic daring and independence. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that no matter how deep the influence of the European art movie, many of the best American films of the 1970s were made within the confines of genre. In certain circles, it is common to blame “Star Wars” and the dawn of the blockbuster on the decline of American film creativity. But shouldn’t part of the blame rest on our inability or unwillingness to escape genre? Even Coppola could only squeeze two masterpieces out of the gangster film.

That said, there is a world of difference between “The Godfather” and its brilliant sequel -- gangster films that look at the immigrant experience against the backdrop of capitalism -- and a movie like Sam Mendes’ “Road to Perdition.” The first two “Godfather” films are epics not only in narrative scale but also of aesthetic and imaginative ambition. They are about something. But what is “Road to Perdition” about, save for its own gleaming surface? Postmodernism’s double-edged sword means that while critics rightly take American movies and pop culture seriously, and give genre film the same consideration as any other artistic expression, too many of those same gatekeepers no longer feel obliged to bestow the same attention on work that doesn’t fit inside familiar parameters. They’re uninterested in movies that don’t subscribe to formula; at times, they’re resentful.

The reaction to “Mulholland Drive” was instructive, especially in light of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” a film that was greeted in some critical quarters with the sort of weighty attention once bestowed on the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. For all its storytelling razzle-dazzle, “Memento” is more of a clever puzzle than a metaphysical rebus; its delights primarily involve the effort it takes to un-kink its narrative. Distributors nonetheless believed the film was too difficult for viewers, and eventually a company that had helped finance the film ended up releasing it as well.

“Memento” was a hit but not so “Donnie Darko.” Although critics had thrilled to the narrative zigzags of “Memento,” they seemed perplexed by those in “Donnie Darko,” perhaps because the film didn’t seem to fit into any particular template. Was it a horror film or a teen movie, Lynch-lite or the dark side of John Hughes? Most critics didn’t know and weren’t interested in finding out. It was around the time that “Donnie Darko” fell into an abyss of critical apathy that I started to hear that “Mulholland Drive,” which had opened a month earlier, was making people angry. One friend actually admitted that she had gotten into a fight with her husband because he had liked the Lynch movie and she hadn’t. The film made her feel stupid because she hadn’t understood the finale; by saying he liked the film, her husband had made her feel the same way.

Two viewings are required

I didn’t understand “Mulholland Drive” completely after one viewing, either. It was only when I returned to it a second time that I realized (or thought I did) the significance of an early shot of a pillow. The pillow was the last thing that Naomi Watts’ character saw before sinking into her death and this moment was the start of a narrative loop that would only close at the film’s conclusion when her character commits suicide. Was I right? I have no idea. In the end, a more precise accounting of what happens seems beside the point of what makes it a remarkable work of art. I felt the same way about Jean-Luc Godard’s recent “In Praise of Love,” which I happily watched twice before I grasped its meaning. One of the great pleasures of art, after all, is ambiguity -- that place where you and the work come together, and from which transcendence emanates even when an instruction manual doesn’t.

If the critical hostility to “In Praise of Love” was surprising, it wasn’t shocking. A few months earlier, Steven Soderbergh’s bagatelle “Full Frontal” had worked numerous critics into a lather mostly, it seems, because it didn’t look like the director’s last three features, the social issue pictures “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic” and the heist film “Ocean’s Eleven.” Defying categorization, Soderbergh is a cinematic chameleon who embraces the polar extremes of expressionism, from his 1996 experimental freak-out “Schizopolis” to 1998’s “Out of Sight,” a caper film as pleasurable as anything from Hollywood’s golden age. The irony is that his talent for winning over audiences with his more mainstream features may have made it more difficult for him to play with form and meaning as he did in “Full Frontal.” But playing with form these days, much less aspiring to art, is a perilous enterprise for an American filmmaker. Step out of the box these days and you might just get squashed.