Greta Gerwig, Baghead and Barbie ("do you remember mumblecore?")

You don't hear the term mumblecore much these days. 

Wikipedia lists a continued stream of films identified with this, uh, "movement." Was it ever a movement, though? There were definitely commonalities to some of the films: low budgets, hand-held digital video cameras, an improvisatory, tender feeling to the dialogue, and a somewhat Cassavetean approach to character and emotion, which were vastly more important to the stories than plot. It was kind of an exciting phenomenon in film, between about 2002 and 2012, and there really did seem to be similarities between the films of Andrew Bujalski, Aaron Katz, Jay and Mark Duplass, and Joe Swanberg, who were the main names associated with it. By around 2010, it seemed kind of forgotten about, however, and I would imagine that the vast majority of Barbie enthusiasts associate no meaning with the term at all. 

Before I get to Greta Gerwig and at least one film recommendation, I'd like to speculate a bit about what happened to mumblecore. I think there are a few reasons that the term has disappeared from view; I'm going to speculate a bit, based on the assumptions that it really was a "thing" -- that it was fair at one point to classify these filmmakers together; and that the term is pretty much meaningless now. 

For one thing, I think cinema consumption changed considerably when video rental stores started dying. With the rise of streaming, a new generation of movie consumers came up who were less inclined towards categorization and less interested in "authors" or genre. In the age of the video rental store, you had physical objects that you had to find and locate SOMEWHERE, that you could pick up and examine, which lent to the question, "What kind of thing is this?" Eventually the stores had to put the boxes in some labelled category or other, but the all-important "new arrivals wall" was where you could really see the difference between the one-off rental items, the independent movies that stood alone on the shelf, and the bigger-budgeted Hollywood films that the rental store had gotten fifty copies of. Maybe around 2008, with a movie like Baghead, there would be as many as three copies on the shelf -- maybe the Duplass brothers were hitting it big enough that even Blockbuster was getting multiple copies -- but there was still an awareness that that lonely little one-to-three off was something different, something special, that it "belonged" somewhere special. I recall that some video rental stores would even group their one-to-three copy movies together, for awhile; I forget what they called it, but Blockbuster used to have a special area set aside for them in the New Arrivals, when they figured out that some people came in specifically to seek out those sorts of films. 

Now, when you look at films suggested by Netflix, it's much harder to "see" that difference. There are no physical copies visible, just a bunch of separate titles and images, not that visibly different from each other. They might still be grouped in broad categories - horror, comedy, action; but there is no way of gauging a film's popularity in terms of physical space, anymore: if the films on Netflix or Prime or AMC+ or what-have-you were given a physical embodiment and placed on a new arrivals wall, would there be fifty copies, all rented; ten copies, nine of which were rented, or would there be one copy, alone, waiting for a viewer who understood it? 

Those mumblecore movies were often of that last variety, of course. Very beguiling, for a certain type of movie lover (elitists, say, or at least people looking for something outside the mainstream). They promised something special, films that were significant enough that the chain store had to have them, but insignificant enough that they never got more than a small handful of copies.

Another thing that's changed is the way people search for films. You couldn't go to a video store and type "quirky, emotional and independent movies" into the resident video store geek, but you can do that quite easily with Google. You'll get, from those words, a host of IMDB lists ("Best Quirky indie Movies," with weirdly irregular capitalization; is the "i" in "indie" lowercase for a reason?) or feature articles with titles like "The 30 Best (Truly) Independent Films of the 21st Century," which contain several movies by filmmakers once described as "mumblecore" and also several films that were not, like Donnie Darko. If I could find my phone -- the fuckin' cat knocked it off the dresser this morning and my wife is still trying to sleep, which means I can only grope around on the floor for so long - I would type "Baghead" into it to see the adjectives that it provides (my desktop doesn't seem to do it but my Chrome app on my phone has actually started providing adjectives, like "tense, funny, and emotional," when I type in a movie title). And a lot of people simply didn't even BOTHER trying to classify films by genre, having moved beyond language at all to a point of trusting Netflix or whatever streaming service they used to put movies in a "recommended for you" queue, "If you liked ____ then you might like ____" kind of functions. Who needs words? That's how Erika does things, for the most part: she goes straight to the "recommended for you" queue and looks at the trailer to see if it looks interesting. Is there a genre or subgenre of movement of film associated with it? Is the filmmaker considered an auteur, grouped with other like filmmakers? Is the film a tiny independent movie or a relaitvely big-budgeted affair? The technology just doesn't lend itself to caring all that much. If it looks good, she watches it. Who needs to categorize it, or even describe it?

Clearly the cat agrees, he just typed:

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A third thing happened with mumblecore: the filmmakers associated with it circa 2002-2008 became successful and started making more "mainstream" films which incorporated more elements of genre and had much higher production values. The last films I saw by Andrew Bujalski (Beeswax, 2009), Aaron Katz (Cold Weather, 2010) and the Duplass brothers (Jeff, Who Lives at Home, 2012, also the year of their last film as director) were all independent comedy-dramas that looked quite different from the films they had previously made; budget information isn't leaping to my fingers for a couple of those titles, but the Duplasses were working with $7.5 million on Jeff. And with the similarly-budgeted Cyrus, the Duplass' previous hit, their cast included John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill and Cathleen Keener. Is the term "mumblecore" meaningful or useful in describing a movie like that, such that differentiates it from any other indy comedy of its time? I liked both of those Duplass movies -- more than I liked Cold Weather or Beeswax, in fact -- but I remember thinking, particularly with the later-phase Duplass brothers movies, that mumblecore was dead. It had simply been a springboard to bigger, but more conventional, moviemaking. 

No one told Wikipedia, which lists 26 mumblecore films as being made since 2012. I haven't heard of a single one of them. They also have a sub-subgenre the name for which is new to me, mumblegore, which groups together films by Ti West and Adam Wingard and Joe Swanberg and such. Some of the films listed as "mumblegore" movies, like The Night House, I have seen, but the connection between that film and mumblecore seems... well, non-existent. It's an independent horror film, period. It's not cheap enough, not raw enough, not defiantly unpolished, and simply not fresh enough to be a mumblecore movie. There are more similarities between mumblecore and a film like You're Next, maybe, with its squabbling family members (including Joe Swanberg), but again, with a budget of a million dollars, relatively slick production values, and a mostly scripted feel to the dialogue -- only some of which was improvised -- it just seems like an independent horror film to me.   

Which brings me to Greta Gerwig and Baghead (that's the Wikipedia entry, but note that you can see the film for free on Tubi). With a production budget of a mere $60,000, it definitely does look and feel like a mumblecore movie, and is actually the third movie of the form that Gerwig was involved in, having previously worked with Joe Swanberg on LOL and Hannah Takes the Stairs, which she co-wrote. Around the same time as Baghead was released, she also co-directed, co-wrote, and co-starred with Swanberg in Nights and Weekends, her directorial debut. But I've seen none of those Swanberg films, and can't speak to them. I think you could make a pretty good case that Baghead is a film that straddles both the mumblecore and mumblegore movements, a low-budget, improvisatory-feeling horror comedy about a group of friends who set out to make a microbudgeted movie at a cabin in the woods and end up being menaced by a knife-wielding creep with a bag over his head -- who is scary, to be sure, but considerably less terrifying than the loneliness, embarrassment, miscommunication and mutual mis-perceptions of one another one finds among the characters. 

It is, obviously, fairly meta-level -- one might argue that that very self-consciousness, which sees the film having some fun at the expense of festival-circuit independent filmmaking, was in fact a sign that mumblecore was ending, with scenes of a filmmaker being asked only questions related to his film's tiny budget -- but there's also kind of painfully awkward portrait of millennials, savvy in some ways (able to make a movie with a camera they can carry in their pocket!) and utterly clueless in others. I wrote about the film when I first saw it, back in 2009, viewing the same former Rogers Video rental copy that I showed Erika last night, saying that if I had to describe it thematically, 

I'd say it was about how horror movies assist human communication, mediate complex emotions, and give voice to repressed and often incommunicable hostilities, fears, doubts, and worries on behalf of their audience members, strengthening social bonds and ironing out tensions. Like the best mumblecore films (Aaron Katz's Quiet City, say) there is an exquisite tenderness to its treatment of human emotion; there is also quite a bit of humour and a couple of effectively creepy passages.

Anyhow, for those people who are enthusing about Greta Gerwig's Barbie (or Little Women or Lady Bird, Gerwig's previous two solo ventures as director, none of which are identified as "mumblecore" movies), you might have fun with Baghead (you might also be startled that Gerwig has a nude scene, just past the 32 minute mark; if I wanted to be cynical -- having gotten my highest-ever count on a blog article on that fucking Quentin Tarantino foot festish thing I did, continuing to grow, now having passed 11,000 reads -- I would entitle this piece "Greta Gerwig nude scene" and watch the counter rise). 

Not entirely sure that that scene was necessary, actually (though Gerwig is actually exposing herself to the bag-headed stalker, thinking it is one of the two filmmakers in disguise, so it becomes quite scary). But she's great in the movie, agreeably dorky, both charming and awkward, bringing a bit of a Chloë Sevigny quality to her role. I liked her enough in this film that I was very keen to see Lady Bird, but confess that my single viewing of that didn't really make much of an impression, maybe because I was hoping it would BE a mumblecore movie.    

It wasn't, and in fact, I think we might as well just give up on that term now, unless we're talking about movies made in that window between 2002 and 2012. Maybe some of those Wikipedia movies I've never heard of would convince me that I'm wrong. But Gerwig was in a few of those "classic mumblecore" films, and one of them -- Baghead -- you can see for free. Barbie fans might take note? It's a really fun movie; Erika thought so too! 

I guess I'm going to see Barbie this weekend, but I wonder where I can see the movies Gerwig made with Joe Swanberg? They're not on Tubi. Hm...