A month ago Licorice Pizza‘s Paul Thomas Anderson told N.Y. Times Hollywood columnist Kyle Buchanan (aka “The Projectionist”) that he doesn’t believe in presentism, or the current industry-wide aesthetic that requires all films set in the past to reflect 2021 values and culture, especially concerning racial matters.
Anderson to Buchanan: “I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball…you have to be honest to that time.”
And of course, he and the film have taken hits from wokester fanatics about “casual racism” blah blah, etc.
How many other name-brand directors would even consider saying “you have to be honest to the time period in question, which means not necessarily integrating your film with current wokester sensibilities”? Answer: Very few — Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Roman Polanski, Oliver Stone and you tell me how many others**.
Over the last four or five years the vast majority of helmers (The Tender Bar‘s George Clooney, The Green Knight‘s David Lowery and Cyrano‘s Joe Wright are three recent examples) have become fools for presentism, if for no other reason than to simply keep out of control.
99% of film critics and essayists won’t even mention presentism. Jordan Ruimy: “Except for Armond White and damn few others, today’s film critics would never dare tackle woke casting in any review they write. It’s blatantly obvious in many movies today, but it’s an unwritten rule to never talk about it.”
I’ve said this 67 times so far, and here comes the sixty-eighth: Intimate relationships between older persons and teenagers are totally verboten, of course. The law is the law. But the in-and-out romantic current between Licorize Pizza‘s Alana Haim and Connor Hoffman, which never involves any kind of sexual activity, is totally fine.
I was once 15, and if a 20something girl I’d been daydreaming about had winked at me and left the door ajar for some possible forthcoming action down the road…are you kidding? That would have been wondrous, glorious, etc. Older males who say or do the wrong thing in the presence of a minor deserve everything that comes from that…different rule book. But a 20something Valley girl and a precocious dude in his mid teens? Fine…don’t sweat it.
** Joel Coen was a non-believer in presentism until he made The Tragedy of Macbeth. The idea, of course, was to not have Denzel Washington be the only Scotsman of color (SOC) in the film.