Movie Enthusiast Issue 21: Selling Good Movies with Bad Writing
Back in June I caught the microbudget indie The Fits during its brief stint in theaters. (Evidently, my arthouse of choice in downtown DC was one of only 20?! nationwide to host its theatrical run.) I recall being impressed with the movie's technical qualities at the time, though I was disappointed with it both narratively and thematically. Keeping in mind that, yes, this movie was shot on a shoestring budget on a rapid production schedule, The Fits still felt underwhelmingly half-baked, unsure of whether it was trying to be a soufflé or a pound cake, if you'll allow me to stretch that metaphor to its limits.
I've since had some time to mull it over some more, and I think I've come around to considering it a much better movie than I first gave it credit for. Why the change of mind? For one, I discovered writers who went to bat for it and beautifully. Reviews that championed The Fits for digging into concepts like the fragility of the body or adolescence as a distinctly embodied phenomenon made immediate, intuitive sense to me at the same time that they caught me off guard in their originality.
Curious as to where n element of surprise came from, I rewatched the trailer. Aha! Here was the nexus. Take a minute and a half to watch it, even with the sound off, so we can all be on the same page.
For thirty seconds, the trailer for The Fits is all music and movement; in other words, it's a fairly representative slice of the movie as a whole. Now, because movies don't just sell themselves—the industry needs to keep marketers employed, after all—the trailer then proceeds to drop a bunch of quotes on us. Note the language used: "The Fits is—'Dreamy,' 'Visually Lush,' 'Absolutely Riveting and Powerful.' Anytime you see a word as nebulously defined as dreamy (or, later in the trailer, mesmerizing) pop up to define what it is you're being told to go watch, you're just asking for trouble. Yes, The Fits is all of these above descriptors—but that's not the whole story.
A slightly longer pullquote in the trailer tries to make a particular case for what that story is: we're told, in the way that 99pt Futura is wont to capital-t Tell us, that The Fits is "A Transfixing Meditation on Gender and Self-Discovery." That's certainly one way of reading the movie, but it's not the only way, and, given the two reviews I cited above, I'd wager it's far from the most compelling way of making sense of this elusive indie.
There are explanations for why this film so easily evades capture in writing, and that's because it's a movie that relies overwhelmingly on image, sound, and the relation of the two to express the ideas its makers have on the mind. There's dialogue to guide the story, yes, but it's at all times secondary to the way that bodies in motion and ominous clarinets in the soundtrack direct our attention and curiosity. Put it another, inescapably redundant way, The Fits is an act of cinema.
Thinking through all this, I'm reminded of something I once heard the critic Matt Zoller Seitz say on a podcast. Talking about some issues he takes with certain kinds of writing about film and TV, he observes that our culture is largely an audiovisually illiterate one; tough, but, I think, fair. In the context of his conversation, Seitz makes this point to explain how it is that so many movie reviews can end up reading more like book reviews. I believe his point also extends to the phenomenon of marketing teams smearing purplish prose all over movie trailers in an attempt to spell out difficult-to-grasp works of art for potential audiences, rather than let the movie speak for itself and pique viewers' curiosity in its own way.
If The Fits didn't quite do it for me on a first go-round, perhaps it's because the words I had been taught, subconsciously, to associate with it had prepared me for a different movie than the one that actually presented itself to me in the theater. I won't pass the blame quite so far in that direction—I felt wholly in control of my experience of watching and analyzing The Fits in the moment, so I'm as much to blame for my reading of the film as anyone else—though I'm left at the end of all this with a more acute sense of how the vocabulary we use to talk about movies—or books, or TV, or I guess even weird people you met on Twitter whom you have to try to explain to the rest of your friends—has a powerfully limiting effect on how we're able to respond to and talk about them. Particularly, in this case, how we're able to discuss movies as works of art that can move us in unexpected ways. The pool of words we've been used to using, to describe movies in attention-grabbing terms for trailers or tweets, is just the kiddie pool. I think it's time we all try dipping our toes into the deep end so we can really learn to swim.
I made a magazine last week! Which, consequently, means I didn't have time to curate links for you this week. Just know that the New York Film Festival finished up over the weekend and has left me positively BUZZING with anticipation for all the movies opening in the next two months.