A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword’s tip on the guard’s throat. He drives it in as one might hammer a post, a coarse and grisly death. Then, for some reason, swaying back and forth, the warrior yells down at the corpse, “Wood or steel, a point is still a point!”
An ailing magnate lies in an opulent bedroom. His young, gold-digging wife enters with her lover, with whom she chats cynically about the old man’s condition. “What do you think of this boner I got?” the invalid drools defiantly, gesturing at a pointy peaky in his lap. He pulls aside his clothes to reveal a golden bow and arrow, with which he shoots his wife. Then, for some reason, as the phallic arrow pierces her in the chest, he says, “You Wall Street slut, this is your closing bell.”
A blond, blue-eyed real-estate mogul goes to the mayor’s office to propose a new project. He plunks a model down on the desk: a little black tower with all-caps gold letters at its base reading “TRUMP TOWER.” He gives his spiel, with a stilted swagger. His lawyer offers a few words to soften the deal. Then, for some reason, the mayor asks, “And what are you gonna call it?” The mogul leans back and tells us what we already know: “Trump Tower.”
These scenes, from the recent movies “Gladiator II,” “Megalopolis,” and “The Apprentice,” respectively, are examples among many—so many!—of what I’ve started calling the New Literalism. This isn’t a new genre but a new style. Each of these films belongs to its own genre—action/adventure, sci-fi/drama, and drama/history, respectively—and none of them seems interested in the filmic tradition of documentary realism, not even the bio-pic.
When I say literalism, I don’t mean realistic or plainly literal. 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. “A point is still a point!”
There is a meme going around from a “Family Guy” episode in which Peter, the animated comedy’s paterfamilias, confesses to his family that he never cared for “The Godfather.” Why not? “It insists upon itself,” he says with a shrug. A lot of recent productions deserve this scorn—literally. It’s gotten so bad that, lately, the highest compliment I can muster for even the best of them is: “Well, at least it’s a movie.”
The pervasiveness of this trend was evident in the films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year. Several of them reflect phenomena we’ve been bemoaning for some time. We got a science-fiction sequel, “Dune: Part Two,” and a fan-fiction prequel, “Wicked,” both of which use C.G.I. more to operatic ends than to imaginative ones. And we got yet another bio-pic about Bob Dylan, “A Complete Unknown,” which ends with clips of the real Dylan so that we can see just how well Timothée Chalamet inhabited him, another entry for the social-media rolls of comparing old celebrities with the new celebrities that play them in the movies.
Even the originals of the season, if we can call them that, felt thunkingly literalist. Sean Baker’s “Anora,” the Best Picture winner, 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. After their hasty Vegas nuptials, the heroine says that she wants a Disneyland princess suite for the honeymoon, to which her bestie helpfully cries, “Cinderella!”
Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” less an homage to than a recapitulation of body-horror classics, dramatizes older celebrities’ fear of being displaced by casting Demi Moore as a fifty-year-old star who births a genetically generated younger self—literally, through her back.
Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” features a collection of ad-libbed scenarios (what if a Mexican cartel leader had gender-reassignment surgery? What if she reunited with her kids in a “Mrs. Doubtfire” kind of way?) and 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.”
The artsiest entries fell prey to this telling showiness, too. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys” is based on Colson Whitehead’s unflinching novel about the horrific, sometimes fatal, abuse of Black boys in reform school. Ross splices the action with historical footage, clips from the nineteen-fifties race film “The Defiant Ones,” and the skewed sunlight of sentimentality, smothering the story with a clutter of pointing arrows. His experiments with first-person-P.O.V. camera feel like a strained effort to literalize a plot twist that Whitehead manages with far more subtlety and poignance—and in the third person, by the way.
The theme of Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” artistic ambition, looms over the movie, as if given concrete form by the buildings designed by the title character. Other portentous allegories ensue. We get an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty to inform us that immigration turns your life topsy-turvy. In fact, if you’re an artist and an immigrant, the American Dream will literally fuck you in the ass. (Who’s the brutalist now?)
Corbet has come under fire for using A.I. to enhance his actors’ Hungarian accents. His other production techniques reveal an even deeper commitment to the New Literalism. For most of the film, he uses VistaVision, a widescreen format from the fifties, which I’ll admit makes for a wondrous shot of an Italian marble quarry, but which otherwise feels gratuitous. The epilogue, set at a Venice Biennale in the eighties, then switches to a touristy video format that drives home a point about the kitschy co-optation of art.
The Best International Feature winner, Walter Salles’s “I’m Still Here,” incorporates that faddish filmic grammar of nostalgia—Super-8 footage—in an analogous way. The film, which is based on the memoir of the novelist and screenwriter Marcelo Rubens Paiva, follows a Brazilian middle-class family as its members grapple with the aftermath of the military dictatorship that disappeared the father in the seventies. As Salles put it, “The idea to integrate the Super 8 was to bring back the immediacy and the vividness of that family and the imperfections, as well, of the medium.” In other words, it isn’t enough for your movie to show how life was back then. It has to look like the movies looked, too.
The French theorist Roland Barthes coined the term studium for photographs that seemed to him to represent “a classical body of information”: human-interest stories, “political testimony or . . . good historical scenes” that produce in us “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment.” This is useful, in its way, but it’s not art. Why do these recent movies insist on rehashing this studium, these familiar source materials, this aura of pastness? Are they trying to compete with the new popularity of documentary forms by absorbing them?
I think something else is going on. The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable. Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.
Saying the quiet part out loud has given way to a general loudness. This is as true in our cultural life as it is in our political life, which feels like a badly written finale, so in your face are the Ponzi schemes, Nazi salutes, and tech-bro cant of our latest overlords. That sense of unmistakable catastrophe may be why we keep returning to predigested cultural comfort food.
The critic Anna Kornbluh, author of the 2024 book “Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism,” suggests that our era of “experiential intensity and crisis” has led to an aesthetics of “realness without representation,” which excises “anything that would require time to interpret instead of rapid uptake . . . any confusion or ambiguity.” Kornbluh’s examples from art and pop culture, such as the film “Uncut Gems” and auto-fictional novels, all betray this removal of mediation.
But the artifacts of the New Literalism seem to embrace mediation, even to double down on it with their supplementary signposts, historical snapshots, and expository tics. Many works insist precisely on the value of ambiguity—that liberal shibboleth “It’s complicated”—just in a ham-fisted, didactic way. And while Kornbluh finds immediacy narcissistic, I’m inclined to diagnose us instead with what Freud called repetition compulsion, a phenomenon that he linked to the death drive.
Rather than allowing us to reëxamine history, this obsessive reënactment in fact severs us from it. As Freud writes, we “repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past.” This will to copy and paste the images of history in effect occludes its alien beauty and force—the simulacrum devours its source.
Repetition is the basis for all art, and, when pushed to the extreme, for some of the very best art. But there’s repetition and there’s repetition. Freud’s notion of remembering, the inexact reiteration of what came before, is where creativity emerges—that slight drift from the original that lets something unlikely slip in. It is the warped note in a Nina Simone song, the uncanny stutter of Samuel Beckett’s prose, the trippy trail of Andy Warhol’s prints, the eerie flatness of David Lynch’s films, that we love.
The dullard cousin of the repetition family is redundancy, that almost onomatopoeic term for needless recapitulation. This is the averaging out, the displacement of the human being in time and at work, that A.I. tools impose. Perhaps because, as they keep telling us, the age of A.I. is here (get used to it!), its derivative ethos seems to have permeated all forms of media. Everything must be easy to follow and to understand, simple enough to recognize and categorize.
Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content. Fashion capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks: we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth. Image generators churn out ersatz versions of da Vinci and van Gogh. And, in every case, banal commentary is slowly occluding the art, seeping into it in boldface titles or explainers that speak over the sound or cover the image.
