When I heard that Sony was going to be rebooting Charlie’s Angels in 2015, my heart – to cite Ariana Grande, who produced the soundtrack to the film – fell out of my ass. The early 2000s films were beloved items of my childhood. Partly, I suspect, because they were some of the few times where I could see a Chinese woman on western cinema screens be cheerful, funny, and not wholly defined by her race. Lucy Liu, with Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz, played the trio of secret agents with breezy camaraderie, campy excess, and science-defying athleticism. I also loved the films because they cut against the dreary realities of adult womanhood that seemed omniscient elsewhere. Surrounded otherwise by literature that saw women embrace premature death over disappointing marriages, and spurred into action by teen magazines to become the sort of constantly self-monitoring girl that boys might like, I cherished the fictive female spy as a projection of womanhood that retained all the trappings of idealised girlhood: a world of limitless possibilities; friendships marked by angst-free joy; a body defined by what it could do in the world, rather than who it would attract. The latter seems misguided now, considering how unapologetically male gaze-y the films were, but back then to engage with popular media was to shut off one’s capacity for self-respect, lest you lose your mind. At least the Angels appeared to be having fun.
That was the early 2000s. It was the time of Cameron Diaz white girl dancing to Soul Train; Drew Barrymore as a reformed grunge rocker, battling ex-boyfriend-cum-ultra-villain Justin Theroux and his terrible Irish accent (“The worst sounds to come out of anyone’s mouth,” said Time); and Lucy Liu as a leather-clad dominatrix-type explaining workplace exploitation to a room full of nerd comrades-to-be. Barrymore, who spearheaded the 2000s reboot of the original 1970s television series (she bought the rights to Charlie’s Angels and produced it with friend Nancy Juvonen) shaped it in the image of her own sweet, punky sensibilities (I recently learned that her Angels did not use guns, which lent to the hyperreal nature of the films. Barrymore had fought to remove arms from the films entirely.) The camp sensibility has disappeared from Banks’s iteration, replaced by something slicker, much like the muted ironic humour of her Pitch Perfect films. The Angels – now played by Kirsten Stewart, Naomi Scott, and Ella Balinska – have fun together, but in a sardonic, hyperaware sort of way, joking about sublimated familial traumas and calling each other “adorable”. The villains have lost their garish accents and become grounded. In Banks’s film, they are rich tech bros who, in the pursuit of profit, push their products onto the public with a blithe disregard for their wider implications. “So long as the investors are happy,” one Angel sarcastically says, as she witnesses a trio of villains – all men – agreeing to launch a green energy device despite its dangerous side effects. The woman scientist who designed the product has her own reservations dismissed by her boorish male boss, who later tries to take credit for her work. Much energy is spent, like it is in popular liberal feminism, on magnifying and ventriloquising sexist opponents so that we may delight in them being overturned by the courageous individual fortitude of our protagonists. The film is about “corporate malfeasance” Banks told The Guardian, and is loaded with “sneaky feminist ideas”.
The new Charlie’s Angels wants to be overtly political, which seems to distance it from its noughties camp credentials. “It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical,” Susan Sontag observed in her popular 1964 essay, ‘Notes on ‘Camp’’. Camp, rather, Sontag posits, is “a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.” Earlier this year, celebrities ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate camp, specifically Sontag’s piece. Much like when the Met Gala decided to pay homage to punk in 2013, the arrival of the concept on the beautiful bodies of the sartorial elite of the day signalled the death of it as a coherent one elsewhere (at least in major cinemas).[i] Or, in other words, I don’t know what it means to pay homage to ‘camp’ in the same year that saw the release of Detective Pikachu, public hysteria around the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog’s ‘vaguely sinister’ animation style (which was repeated with Cats ), and a sequence of middling superhero films. If many of these works contain the trappings of camp – a hyperreal playfulness; a persistent reminder for the audience to Not Take Them Too Seriously – there is also something more cynical about them, a revved up desperation for commercial viability that betrays the exuberance of the original concept. (“Would a REAL acolyte of camp,” I shriek with the naked conviction of a fundamentalist, “commit to a $5 million-dollar redesign to become less weird for its braying detractors?!”). Facing plummeting audience attendance rates and an increasingly fragmented streaming-heavy entertainment landscape, these films relentlessly play up their hyperreal phantasmal turns, knowing full well that the ecology of the internet amplifies that which can be memed, which also means that which can be considered ridiculous. This internet-heavy marketing cycle can be fun, but it can also induce joyless, tiresome fatigue. By the time Cats had finally come out in cinemas, I already felt like I had experienced it five thousand times over. In the case of mass market films that cannot rely on the billion-dollar revenues of Disney, a high-octane bid for relevance is particularly necessary: they face a much more difficult market today. 2019’s Charlie’s Angels was made on half the budget of its predecessor. That did not stop it from failing to show a return on investment at the box office, like other franchise reboots this year.
But unless these blockbusters are explicitly for children, or, like Cats, singularly deranged, they want to be about something. (Even if they are still watched by children, the point is to produce a plot that can both interesting to and appropriate for all ages.) This is arguably better than being unapologetically about nothing, but it is also a sign of the times. The naked nihilistic exuberance of the 2000s feels unsuitable for a time that has noticed that the world is on fire. In spite of their self-avowed frivolity, today’s films simultaneously scramble for relevance by flattering our social sensibilities, and aim to be put earnestly through the ringer of popular criticism, a discourse machine dedicated to pulling apart the political implications of a cultural product that does not deserve it. The distinction that Sontag outlined in her essay, between a lamp and a “lamp” – its playing-a-role counterpart – feels all but obliterated today, as we drown in an oversaturated discursive sphere that takes for granted the idea that things in the culture industry exist to be deconstructed. Such films lose the joyful unseriousness of camp, but keep its hyperaware sense of playing-a-role. But in service of what? The new Charlie’s Angels, more a “film” than a film, opens to an undercover Kristen Stewart wearing a wavy blonde wig and looking like the self-aware instantiation of a male fantasy, telling a bad guy about the pitfalls of underestimating women. Stewart – playing the snarky operative Sabina – then uses some conveniently placed silk curtains and aerial gymnastics to encase her clueless mark. She unleashes a series of jibes against the patriarchy: beautiful women are underestimated; she actually is very good at her job; it takes men seven more seconds to perceive a woman competitor as a threat. All the quiet parts have been said out loud.
I have yet to meet someone who enjoys these high-note public service announcements in any film – a common refrain is “I enjoyed it in spite of its obvious pandering.” These films are the unsurprising results of a media culture that mines works of art for obvious signs of illiberal backwardness, or praiseworthy liberal virtues, and then turns them into content. The resultant articles – often written by people in extremely precarious work – get more clicks, which is critically important in a dying industry. The effect on the public, however, is a widespread exhaustion about this painfully obvious yet relentless marketisation and its degradation of social ideals that previously served things beyond ourselves. Many of us know that consuming media is not activism, even if there are politics behind who shows up to watch a film and what stories make it to the silver screen. But market imperatives drive media headlines towards hyperbole, and films towards widespread palatability, which are then decorated with the occasional zeitgeist-y flourish to be interesting. Charlie’s Angels is a sequence of action scenes punctuated by serious reminders that A Point Has Been Made. It’s the sort of storytelling produced by an industry whose major players desperately want people to watch their films, but also hold them in deep contempt. There is no room for complexity, ambiguity, or thought: no space, in effect, for any interpretation that has not already been carefully spoon-fed to its audience. The irony is that the very thing we’ve lost – a capacity for critical, unguided reverie – can help facilitate a better politics, to the extent which politics can be mediated through art – which is a relationship that itself feels grossly overestimated today. In the future I hope that Elizabeth Banks makes another film about the social evils of corporate culture – but just one that looks at an industry a bit closer to home.
[i] Television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Riverdale, and You, among others, suggests that camp rolls on in other mediums, albeit in ones that do not have the major financing of blockbusters.
