Dazzled or frazzled?

William McDonald

Thursday, May 28, 1998 | 9:32 a.m.

It seems like a movie now, that day in March when mankind was forced to drop its puny temporal concerns for a moment and contemplate the unthinkable: a reliable report that the end might be nigh. And like a movie, this brush with destiny had a happy ending.

Within 24 hours of hearing the dark news that an approaching asteroid as wide as the Mississippi had an outside chance of hitting Earth in 2028, the world got word that the initial projections on the big rock's path had been off by, oh, 500,000 miles. In short, never mind.

But the scare was real while it lasted, and if it wasn't quite the day the Earth stood still, it was a moment imaginations ran wild.

Suddenly people were discussing, in earnest, extinction. They were fearing for the children, asking searching existential questions, falling back lamely on gallows humor about cashing out their IRAs. The refrain of the day came with a slow shake of the head: "Can you imagine?"

The answer, of course, was of course. Given a scenario, even a doomsday one, ordinary humans can be relied on somehow to be able to picture themselves in it. What images they come up with would naturally be as varied as the minds that conjure them, but they'd be vivid, and in the case of Armageddon, nightmarish; we're good at thinking the worst.

Not that any of this does Hollywood any good. Hollywood exists to imagine for us. And given the proper tool, it will do all it can to be as graphic as mechanically possible, leaving no gaps that may tax the audience to fill.

CGI mania

Today, the tool handed Hollywood is easily the most extraordinary one introduced there since the camera: CGI. That's studio talk for computer-generated imaging, known to the rest of us as the latest in special effects. And, well, we know them. Too well, perhaps.

The wizards who produce the magic have been awing or amusing us for years, each time out with ever more amazing tricks. There were stampeding dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park." There was a bottomless city in "The Fifth Element." There were armies of insects in "Starship Troopers." The cosmos light up in the "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" movies, and the current "Lost in Space." And who can be allowed to forget a certain sinking ship? The computer is king, and if there is one mantra in the houses that create the effects, it is this: If you can think it, we can make it.

The products of such ingenuity unfailingly fill the screens in summer, when Earth and the sun and supply and demand move into a kind of congenial alignment. Movies heavy in special effects are made mostly for the kids, after all, and come June, kids in the millions are in restless need of diversion.

Then there is the general torpor of the season. As the theory goes, people just want to get out of the heat, sink back in one of those pleasantly springy multiplex seats, plunk a jumbo Pepsi in the cup holder, log off the brain and watch some action, any action.

Now we're on the brink of another supposed season of sloth, and the movie moguls couldn't have asked for a more timely one. If planetary existence is a crapshoot, the appearance of the asteroid, from a Hollywood standpoint, came up a seven. In not one but two strokes of blind luck, the studios are rolling out a pair of cinematic imaginings of galactic collision, movies in the works long before the March headlines broke.

Competing comets

One is "Deep Impact," which opened recently; the other, "Armageddon," waiting in the wings for July. Together they arrive as if to assure us that if we somehow failed to absorb the potential gravity, as it were, of the asteroid scare, Sister Hollywood will explain it all to us -- and show us exactly, through special effects, what might have happened.

Indeed, the films' depictions of an "extinction-level event," as "Deep Impact" terms it, promise to be so convincing that they could well enter the collective imagination as definitive visions of how the world might end. And for those in the audience who have recurring nightmares about tidal waves, a truly awe-inspiring wall of water that curls over the peaks of New York City (moviedom's favorite concentration of sitting ducks) and swamps the Eastern Seaboard in "Deep Impact" may provide an indelible nocturnal leitmotif.

If that's not enough digital spectacle to occupy the masses this summer, there will be more. A 20-story-tall reptile will make New York its stomping ground in a remake of "Godzilla." Toy soldiers will wage war on a front lawn in "Small Soldiers." A comic-book hero will draw blood from vampires in "Blade."

Then comes fall, and still more; the pipeline has a waiting list. Special effects have even spread to television, from prime time to commercials: see Merlin the magician converse with a mountain; see Wall Street become a rolling surf of asphalt.

Will it ever end? Of course not. But that's no reason not to ask, Have we had enough yet? Which is to say, Are we not becoming bored with all this computer-generated excitement?

As to the first question, the box office numbers would seem to argue no. As to the second, there you get opinions.

Ay, Caruba!

To hear Alan Caruba tell it, he speaks for the thinking filmgoer when he says the riot of special effects now dominating so many movies -- especially of the flesh-ripping, metal-crunching kind -- have become a bore.

As the founder and sole member of The Boring Institute, a spoof of an enterprise with a serious intent based in suitably uneventful Maplewood, N.J., Caruba, a publicity agent by trade, monitors pop culture for the tedious, the trite and the shallow and skewers it in a newsletter that Hollywood reporters love to quote, especially around Academy Awards time. This year he singled out special effects for a yawn. "I've done call-in radio shows all over the world, and I can tell you I haven't heard a dissent," he says.

"Nobody disputes that the effects are extraordinary," Caruba allows, "but we seem to have a generation of filmmakers dependent on special effects as opposed to the basic staple of a good film, which is a good story. I can appreciate a good special effect if it's integral to the film. But this is an era of Hollywood that assumes the audience has the attention span of fungus."

It may not be a stretch to say that the movies that peddle the digital pyrotechnics engage in a kind of technological pornography. That is, not only do the effects leave little to the imagination; they also never really satisfy, even though people may keep going back for more. And they often wind up repeating themselves from movie to movie (think of all those spaceships suggestive of engine blocks with wings), creating a whole new field of visual cliches.

This isn't to say that all the effects are alike. Aesthetically they run from cheesy and noisy to plain beautiful to behold. The best of them may even leave an imprint on the imagination: the biblically wrathful storms in "Twister," the magnificent mother ship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." But a barrage of even the most technically brilliant sights can leave you feeling only fatigued.

Life: The Movie

"I think special effects do become numbing," says the cultural observer and author Neal Gabler, who is completing a book titled "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "But the analogy I would use is drug addiction. There's always a new drug that comes along because the old high isn't enough anymore. You want to ratchet up the experience somehow, going from marijuana to cocaine to heroin to PCP, saying, 'This is more intense, this is better.' Special effects work the same way. We're constantly climbing the ladder of 'Can you top this, we've seen this, what can you do for me now?' "

In Gabler's view, then, it's the audience's need that drives the technology rather than the other way around. "It's not so much a case of 'We can do this, therefore we'll do it' as 'This is what the audience wants, therefore we'll do it,' " he says.

And all the audience has to do is sit back and be a receptor. "The audience doesn't have to do anything," Gabler says. "In this sense films have colonized the imagination."

The complaint is a longstanding one, coming into currency about the time film was invented. Movies, early critics said, would erode our wondrous ability, in communion with a writer, to piece together entire imaginary worlds from nothing but words on a printed page. The introduction of sound chiseled away even further at our imaginative powers, or so the skeptics said. Then came color, and on it went.

The issue was alive in 1947 when the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg wrote: "To most Hollywood executives, the safest stories still seem to be those which do the people's dreaming for them. ... Away from your troubles, away from your responsibilities and your punch-in-punch-out monotony, you sit there in the enveloping darkness and let DeMille or some other genius of mediocrity spin out for you a million-dollar dream."

Movies were just one pop-culture product that the art critic Clement Greenberg had in mind 60 years ago when he drew a seminal distinction between art and kitsch, borrowing a German epithet for tacky excess. To Greenberg, movies, as examples of kitsch, gratified demands for pleasure without making demands of their own, and by doing all the work on behalf of the public, they betrayed art's duty to make people think.

That may be an overly harsh judgment on the entire film industry. But it certainly may apply to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," which added "morphing" to the national lexicon in 1991, or even the hyped-to-the-heavens "Independence Day." Here were movies in which special effects overwhelmed what story there was.

A liquid alien in one film or an exploding White House in the other may have been fun to watch, but they supported narratives with about as much staying power as comic books, or video games. Should anyone care? Gabler does, as do others who believe that telling a story visually doesn't mean you have to show everything.

What about stories?

"The danger I see is to narrative storytelling itself," he says. "If you don't have to worry about character, about plot development -- everything that has traditionally helped to elicit a response from us -- then we lose one of the great joys and values of artistic achievement, the narrative pleasure."

Special effects also tend to loosen the joints of our willing suspension of disbelief, another staple of stage and screen, leaving the audience oddly alienated from the very drama, or comedy, to which it is asked to respond emotionally.

As Caruba says: "One part of our brain is simply admiring how they achieved this or that effect. You're always aware that this is coming out of a computer."

The big-budget movie-makers who showcase the effects say they agree that technology should never supplant story; they insist, though, that the "visual enhancements" are indispensable to the stories they're trying to tell.

"We couldn't make this movie without these effects," says Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of "Armageddon." "But it's ultimately about characters. The special effects will just lure you in. Look at 'Independence Day': if it didn't have the Will Smith character, I don't think it would have been as successful."

To Mimi Leder, the director of "Deep Impact," the digital effects serve her story, not the other way around. "This is about people facing the end of the world, facing awesome choices, and it forces you to ask, what would you do?"

Could she have done the movie without special effects? "Not a movie about a tidal wave," she says. "You need the effects to support this kind of story."

Even a producer and screenwriter with impressive art-house credentials such as James Schamus tends to support Leder's position. "Creating filmic worlds in which there are monsters and explosions and extraordinary weather is no more a deterrent to good storytelling than having to hire an actor for $20 million," he says.

Literary effects

He points out that although audiences may not have noticed, special effects were used in two recent literary films on which he worked, "Sense and Sensibility" and "The Ice Storm." "We filmed the actual ice storm in August," he says. And in a stranded-buggy scene in "Sense and Sensibility," a veil of mist upon an English pond was created digitally in a New York studio.

"I think we're talking about two kinds of films here," Schamus says. "There are special effects that are used to enhance the image or the story line, to fix things or underscore some emotional aspect of the film, and there is the other side, when special effects are, in fact, the stars of the movie."

"In 'Titanic,' " he says, "you were seeing a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet and Digital Domain," one of the big special effects houses that the studios hire.

The digital factories have heard the complaints before, of course. Jim Morris, president of Lucas Digital, the corporate parent of another powerhouse special-effects studio, Industrial Light and Magic, both of which were brainchildren of the modern guru of the field, George Lucas, concedes that Hollywood may be thinking digitally too much.

"Any time there's been a new technology introduced to cinema," he says, "there's been perhaps an overuse of it before it settles into a tool that serves story and character well."

And that's to be expected of any medium "in its infancy," Morris says. He likens many of Hollywood's special-effects extravaganzas to a roller-coaster ride -- an example of what he calls "effects for effects' sake." Movies like these will doubtless be around as long as there are 14-year-old boys to watch them, but Morris believes that a more mature use of the technology is as inevitable as a child's growing up.

His analogy reminds me of a day years ago when, swept along by the rush of teen-age hormones, a friend and I rode a roller coaster at a beachside amusement park at least a half-dozen consecutive times. The experience was harrowing at first, to be sure, but once we got used to it, the ride became simply hysterical fun, and we became commensurately fearless; we even stopped holding on. By the last time, though, even the laughter had ebbed and, having had enough, we went on to more serious pursuits, in the direction of girls on the boardwalk.

I mention this story not because it's intrinsically interesting but because it finally isn't. I could try to describe those rides in thrilling detail, employing every pyrotechnic word I could think of, but in the end I would be offering just an account of bodies and contraptions in dizzying motion.

On the other hand, had I found, let's say, impetuous love in the seat behind me on that roller coaster and embarked from there on an adventure of the heart -- now, that might have been a story.

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