IT’S A SUMMER FLING
From summer blockbusters to beach reads and the annual ‘song of the summer,’ why do we prefer lighter fare when the heat gets turned up
At my local multiplex this weekend stretches a banquet of mediocrity. The weather calls for clear skies, 34 degrees, park-and-marina weather; but instead one could retreat indoors and idle in the temperature-controlled cultural oblivion of the 12-screen commercial theatre, frittering away 147-minutes on a blockbuster that hardly even respects a child’s intelligence, let alone an adult who ought to know better.
Do you want to wallow mechanically in the $ 200 million sequel to the 15th instalment in the relentless comic- book Universe? Or maybe indulge in the second prequel to the sciencefiction horror franchise that hasn’t produced a rewarding film since 1986? You could gaze demoralized at Tom Cruise as he feigns interest in a remake of a forgotten Brendan Fraser vehicle. You could glance at your watch through a winking postmodern revival of early90s trash TV. Perhaps you prefer your boredom domestic: you could vegetate your way through Bon Cop Bad Cop 2.
This deluge of idiocy is not confined to the cinema. Online and in the last remaining brick and mortar book chains one will find reams of recommended “beach reads” ideal for the season – ideal meaning not long, not demanding and especially not serious. These tend be inane paperback comedies and clichébeleaguered thrillers long- since optioned and poised to become prime-time television programs or mainstream feature films, all the better for their shelflife and conversational cache: everybody likes to be seen reading something that everybody else has heard is irresistible and is soon to star Reese Witherspoon on HBO. You may have been mustering the resolve to at last attempt Finnegans Wake, but that, surely, can wait until the winter. This time of year you’d better sprawl supine by the water clutching the latest Paula Hawkins aloft against the sun. ‘ Tis the season not for Crime and Punishment but for Big Little Lies.
There are other pop-cultural realms infected by this seasonal inclination toward vapidity. Our cocktails tend toward the light and delicate when it’s sunny – mojitos, spritzers, gimlets and margaritas in lieu of manhattans and old-fashioneds abound – and so does our wine, as reds are exchanged for whites and whites, on very hots days, are exchanged for rosés and sangrias. Our clothes find themselves brighter and less ample, for obvious reasons. Our pastimes, similarly, find us taking advantage of the weather and heading outdoors.
And, of course, all of us keep an ear to the ground as we await the arrival of the Song of the Summer. This niche subject has been amplified in recent years by the concerted will of eager culture writers and ambitious public relations people to monumental proportions, compelling every pop artist in the world to aspire to a once- disreputable title held comfortably in decades past by the likes of Lou Bega and Ricky Martin.
Interestingly, these three now-ubiquitous phenomena – the summer blockbuster, the beach read and the Song of the Summer – developed almost entirely independent of one another, despite how much they seem to share in common.
A potted history of the summer blockbuster begins with the “event pictures” of the Old Hollywood era – grand, sweeping historical epics, such as The Birth of a Nation, Doctor Zhivago, The Ten Commandments, The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind, whose prodigious budgets, enormous scales and extravagant marketing campaigns made them successful to a degree irreplicable by even their most popular contemporaries. But a number of changes converged in the late 1960s and early 1970s that would radically transform the ways that movies were both made and seen.
The elimination in 1968 of the Hays Code – the Motion Picture Production Code that had strictly enforced censor- ship of the movies since the early 1930s – ushered in a torrent of newly provocative films whose outrageous content, such as the violent demise of Bonnie and Clyde, seemed wildly novel and appealing, in particular to the Baby Boomers who by now had aged into their late teens and early 20s and wanted badly to diverge from the tastes and whims of old.
The standalone success of certain low-budget pictures, such as The Graduate in 1967, suggested to studios that movies could be distributed lucratively to many cinemas across the country in a short period of time, which they began to favour over the old touring roadshow model that had made the epics enduring hits. Finally, in 1975 and 1977, there were Jaws and Star Wars: massive nationwide releases that had audiences lining up two hundred deep down the block.
We take it for granted today that a movie will open on the same day to cataracts of publicity and press in hundreds, if not thousands, of theatres nation- wide, just as we take it for granted that science-fiction, fantasy and horror – the three most profitable movie genres of the last 40 years – have always been synonymous in Hollywood with bleedingedge effects, high production values and all kinds of budgetary excess.
But for decades it was the norm for a new motion picture to premiere in only one or two metropolitan movie palaces before playing in smaller cities slowly over the course of many months – as it was the norm for movies in the style of Star Wars to be whipped together hastily for as little money as possible. Sci-fi and horror were the long-standing domains of cheap effects and vacuousness. The huge, exorbitant, CGI-laden spectacles we think of as summer blockbusters are relatively recent affairs.
In its contemporary incarnation, the summer blockbuster is a promotional concept more than a coherent style or genre – which is why The Mummy, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Bay-
each uniquely qualify. What distinguishes them as such, other than a release date, is precisely what they share in common with the Song of the Summer and beach reads: the promised ease that differentiates them from work.
After all, it isn’t difficult to imagine the origin of the “beach read” as a framework for Barnes & Noble advertising campaigns and seasonal efforts to pitch new-release paperbacks to the crest of the bestseller list.
The literary critic Michelle Dean, in an article for the Guardian last June, traces the history of the term to the summer of 1990, at which point it seemed to emerge from the trademagazine ether as accepted coinage and gained currency soon after among broadsheet writers in apparent desperation for a catch- all. Though Dean also suggests that there remains some ambiguity around the exact definition, despite the idiom’s common use: “Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are,” she says, having polled some friends. “Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards. Still, the essence of the beach read, most could agree, was more of a mood than anything else.”
The essential mood is, in short, trivial. The beach read ought to be fundamentally frivolous, of no major import or serious consequence. This accounts for why the beach read seems to span such a wide and, in a sense, irreconcilable range of genres, from the espionage thrillers of James Patterson to the frothy shopping comedies of Sophie Kinsella. What does and does not qualify as a beach read often seems, as they say of pornography, a matter of knowing it when you see it.
A beach read is nothing more and nothing less than a trifling, diverting fantasy – a plain-sailing piece of catchy fiction that doesn’t challenge, confront, tax or offend. It’s just like a summer blockbuster in that way. Or a charttopping pop song whose anthemic bliss permeates the season.
“The Song of the Summer” differs from beach-reads and blockbusters in that it has a dimension of officiality: that title is bestowed formally by Billboard according to chart performance between Memorial Day and Labour Day weekend. But much like the United Kingdom’s long- time fascination with its annual “Christmas Number One” – the track that crests the country’s radio charts the week of Christmas Day, typically a novelty single or flash-in-the-pan holiday tune – there seems to be a kind of pop-cultural X- factor that distinguishes the glorydestined Song of the Summer from a popular song that merely happens to find chart triumph at the right time.
A true Song of the Summer ought to somehow embody the feelings and sensations of the season – not unlike the beach- read and blockbuster after all. What matters in all cases is simplicity.
What any definition fails to account for is why – why the summer strikes us a period for this kind of ease across mediums. Certainly we all know and appreciate the sensation of being reduced by the heat to a kind of weather-related stupidity, and of wanting, so sluggish in the pressure-cooker of the sun, to be liberated of all rational thought. And we will be aware too of some powerful historical associations at play. The summer inevitably connotes for us a time of holidays and vacations, of time away from the job or from school, and a holiday does tend to lack seriousness.
Maybe there’s no compelling reason why it should seem more appealing to watch a multi-million-dollar action extravaganza in the middle of June than it is to watch a four- hour black- andwhite Filipino tragedy. (As one can: Lav Diaz’s 338-minute From What is Before is one of the movies of the month on boutique VOD service MUBI.) But the fact does remain: we associate certain kinds of art with labour, and the summer with leisure.
But there is, I think, an element of danger in this mentality and a risk of conceding something in our ongoing war against apathy and laziness. One can hardly deny that the dire state of the multiplex this weekend is a symptom of lowered standards; a bid to please with the simple and familiar – not to mention the fear Hollywood obviously has of unknown quantities and precarious investments is the reason we’re resigned to endure three humid months of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Pirates of the Caribbean 5. We let it happen. The only relief lately has been how many of these utterly worthless entertainments have proven failures at the box office, which might at least suggest to the studios that audiences want more even in the dog days of summer from their blockbusters than the absolute lowest common denominator.
Or is that we’ve elected to stay away from the multiplex after all and slump instead into the couches of our air-conditioned living rooms, content to while the sidewalk-sizzling hours away before the incandescent HD glow of a Netflix binge? There we can return again happily to another seven hours among the steel and snow of Game of Thrones, or see if Preacher is any better in its second season, or sigh as we inevitably trudge through a fifth round of Orange is the New Black. Mercifully, Showtime has been kind enough to furnish us with serious art in the form of the Twin Peaks revival: its 18 monumental hours will continue through until the beginning of September. There’s much to see at home even if are other summer pop realms are designed to let us down.
We haven’t quite given up altogether yet, one would like to think. We just have to hold on to our hope and stay a little bit discerning.