There Are No Good People in LA
Digging for Fire (2015)
Here’s a bad, maybe even prejudiced opinion: there’s a class of movies like “Digging for Fire”, or “The Overnight”, or “While We’re Young” that typically follow a young-ish couple in LA who are at some crossroads or minor crisis of identity or relationship or family. The movie typically takes place over the span of a couple days or sometimes just one night, the couples typically reconcile their differences without discarding them, and return to their relationships with a greater understanding. These movies are typically critically lauded, and also typically suck.
The problem, and this is where the first bad part of this opinion comes in, is that none of the characters are actually good people. Worse than that, we’re told that they are good people, or at least as good as most people are. The psychological milieu that these characters inhabit is one of naked self-interest. This is the background, the base-reality of these worlds, which means it is never questioned; any character’s crisis is actually just a need to discover what he really wants. There is not a single character, either central or peripheral, whose goals extend beyond self-expression, self-exploration, and ambition. In the world these movies inhabit, there is no deeper meaning to life beyond self-actualization, and there’s no hint of worry about this fact, there aren’t even characters who hint at imagining any world of meaning beyond this.
Now here is where the actually bad, and maybe even bigoted part of the opinion comes in: the reason for this psychological shallowness is that the writers and directors of these movies have maybe never met an actually good person. This is probably not literally true, and I don’t mean to claim that I am a better person than any of these writers or directors, however, it may be figuratively true of the world these writers and directors inhabit.
Here a better writer might make some larger point about how showbusiness, or any place the arts are a marketplace, atomizes its inhabitants, and can be an environment in which anyone’s survival ends up being dependent on their ability to sublimate naked ambition and desire to be seen into a belief that the ultimate good in life is self-expression and self-actualization, and to use this belief to protect themselves against any sense of futility or meaninglessness that their toiling suggests. But I don’t really want to argue this point. It seems very difficult. I would rather take the less ambitious one that it is tiring to watch these movies in which no character even seems aware that there are ways to structure meaning in his life that are based around duty or community or service or anything beyond the self!
I’m also aware that this kind of makes me sound like a republican radio host, complaining about coastal elites that have no sense of midwestern values. I don’t really have a defense against this, that might be essentially what I’m saying (but I hope not). My disappointment lies mostly in the fact that in these movies, the characters are supposedly concerned with how to live their lives. However, that question is never asked outside the confines of “what would really make me happy?” The question of what they owe others never extends beyond “do I owe it to my wife not to cheat on her?” Which is, I mean, fine, that probably is a question that should be asked if you’re considering cheating on your wife, but it would be interesting to see a character consider less obvious or less self-serving obligations. The problem is that these movies, while attempting to tell stories of growth and realization, unintentionally paint a hollow and small picture of the lives of their creators.
