Folks seem to point to the 70's as the most recent example of a "golden age" in Hollywood, when the studio was cranking out films that "mattered."

The parallels to that decade and current times are pretty stark. An un-winnable quagmire war (and we get two for the price of one on that here in good ol' 2011), total lack of faith in American institutions, specifically politics (er, double down on that one as well for 2011), and crippling financial duress (gas pump woes with the added pain of our real estate infrastructure in total collapse).

This would lead one to wonder - is another "golden age" at hand?

Very interesting topic. I once read something about how films like SAW, Hostel and company reflected a whole new way of apprehending violence after the 11/09.

How about Melancholia, Blade Runner's prequel/sequel, I Am Legend Sequel, the apocaliptical-toned Another Earth and so on ? Are we distressed about a symbolical 12/12/12 ?

Interesting.....Did not think about all these mental illness movies. But I can say that mental illness is in my script that I am working on. It is a taboo that is opening up I guess. The notion of mental illness is liberating itself. It is getting the spotlight.

Can we follow it up with a post on movies that include "For What It's Worth" on their soundtracks?

People want what they are not being spoonfed. The initial movie of any movement is usually the stand-out picture, i.e the most popular. Then its sequel which is even bigger. By this time copycats are beginning to flood the market. The third film usually a let down. I believe it is our nature to go against what everyone is telling us we want. For example, no one wanted to give hard rock bands in the 80s a chance. Behemoths emerged, Metallica, GnR, and copy cats ensued. Fast forward twenty years and those classic albums are still selling. Movies are the same way... Human Nature. Don't fight it, embrace it. Write something different. Similar but different.

I think there's a trend of why not instead of why.

I can definitely see that as a reflection of the fear, and reality, of recent events. Global collapse and devastation both by nature and by man.

But I disagree with why not as a mentality for making film. Even for brain slug meets hypnotoad popcorn movies like Summer Blockbusters.

Typo alert--I think you meant "Shutter Island."

I loved "A Beautiful Mind." I think that "Shutter Island" has some similarities in that I found myself rooting for the protagonist's grip on consensus reality even as the reveals of the mental illness increased.

I think that movies that show a larger context of abuse of power that follow some of the themes of "Three Days of the Condor" tend to come out with some regularity. One I especially liked for its cross-cultural context was "Traitor." Another is "The Constant Gardener."

Another trend is the Hollywood movie that uses an international context, like "Blood Diamond," "Babel," and your study movie of the week, "Inception."

Not-so-nice trends might be mentioned as well, including the tailoring of some movies for use on mobile devices.

There's also been a higher number of "what is real?" movies recently, which are often offshoots of the movies mentioned (Shutter Island fits, as well as The Killer Inside Me and even Inception or Catfish).

As I mentioned in the post about Take Shelter - the incidence of mental illness (or at least the diagnosed incidence) has more than doubled in this country in the last two decades. Among children, it's tripled.

Some feel this is a conspiracy of the drug companies, others that it's a kind of middle-class laziness or sense of entitlement.

I do think there's a general malaise, and a sense that things have gotten cock-eyed and crazy.

So we use the films to help us process this. (Notice, too, that while there is a preponderance of superheroes as well, the most successful of these are the flawed and dark ones.)

Oh, an afterthought.

One factor may be technology. As it gets easier to do more surreal effects, and change the face of the film's reality, it becomes possible to put stories on film that would not have been - many of them stories where reality is broken

@Laura, interesting post.

I have a background in city planning. I was fascinated with the history of human habitations. If you look at how many people actually live in our cities in the U.S., we have a lot of built-in isolation.

When traditional societies get broken up, some people just can't take the isolation created by how we design our living spaces. In terms of human habitation the structures we have come to accept as normal, are in fact quite out-of-the-ordinary.

You can find this kind of thing documented by a woman who studied a geographic area called Ladakh in the Himalayas;
Helena Norberg Hodge.

Written with a tip-of-the-hat to anthropologists everywhere who might have contributed to that memorable character, Indiana Jones, for whom a love letter appears elsewhere in this blog. :-)

http://www.science20.com/fish_feet/would_the_real_indiana_jones_please_stand_up

@Laura: I had no idea the incidences of mental illness had increased so much. Is that in part due to a broadening of what therapists mean by 'mental illness'?

@ascribe: That's really interesting, too. I'm all for the move back to cities and away from suburbs. Where we live now is terrific, although it's tough to call it a city. We can walk to our movie theater, organic grocer, our pediatrician, where we get our hair cut, restaurants, our eco-friendly dry cleaner, concerts and outdoor movies on the green on weekends. And people outside walking, talking, meeting all the time. It's such a human environment and lends itself to community. Similar but different to the experience we had in LA where we lived smack in the belly of the beast, albeit the westside.

As a person with a writer's soul, I like to joke that I like the concept of people better than actual people. But even with that predisposition, I love living in places where there is an active sense of community. Helps keep me tethered to reality.