Nick loves "Rango" and hates Disney's MCU

    In some of my favorite genre films, I've found that the elements that I love the most are often criticized by others for being "cliche." This can be a valid criticism at times, but other times I find myself confused because those cliche moments being criticized are my favorite scenes in the movie! So how is it that something can be "played out" while sticking to the established rules of a given genre? 

    Here's an example of what I'm talking about: I'm a huge fan of the animated film, Rango. The way the film uses tropes from iconic Westerns is super fun and creative. I think the reason I enjoy it so much is because it takes something I've seen before and presents it to me in a new way. However, the line between paying homage and recycling old material is important to distinguish. 

     Adorno and Horkheimer's theorize in "The Culture Industry" that most pop culture is comprised of interchangeable elements, and that we see a lot of repetition in popular media. In the above clip, there are certain "Western" elements that we've seen a million times before: one last bullet in the chamber, rich businessmen trying to take the town away from the humble residents (Marxism spotted), and resolving the overarching conflict with a duel at high noon in the town square. We've clearly already seen this in High Noon, so why are we satisfied with what we're seeing? 

Let's set the obvious answer aside for a moment. Obviously Rango is unique in many ways, and doesn't survive solely on the merit of its generic predecessors. That being said, it's interesting to me how certain messages are so timeless while others are easily identified as a paint-by-numbers cash-grab. Adorno and Horkheimer would say that because there are so many fans of the Western genre, and not as many movies, the tropes get replicated out of necessity. In business terms, it actually makes sense. A good example of the negative side of this phenomenon is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

    I'm a big fan of the superhero genre, having grown up watching Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and the 2008 movie that started the MCU, Iron Man. While the movies were formulaic, they had enough individuality for me to excuse the predictable structure. However, audiences are starting to voice their boredom with the same old story, and the studio can't do anything to resolve this without giving the control back to "the people." 

    The "secret ingredient" was always the creativity of individual filmmakers, and can't be recreated through a color-by-numbers pattern. Adorno and Horkheimer express this vehemently: "The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art."