What was it about that era, 20-30 years ago, that produced such vapid American movies? While watching Light Sleeper, an offering from 1992, I’m struck by its colorlessness. Willem Dafoe and Susan Sarandon, fine actors both, play-act at being a drug dealer and supplier. Uh-huh. Sarandon wears pants suits and Dafoe presents as a moderately successful accountant. Everyone in their circle speaks well (no shouting, God forbid) and observes the social graces.
The movie’s world, as for so many films of the period, seems to exist in a bubble, uninformed by the existential threats of our current age (e.g., climate change, terrorism), and deliberately innocent even by the standards of earlier movies. There is no socially-conscious agenda, no concerns outside the tightly-defined worries dictated by plot.
Of course there’s nothing that says a film has to engage with the issues of the day. Plenty of my favorite films assiduously avoid such engagement, yet still manage to construct a world of gravitas and heft. Their characters find moments of insight amid an environment that feels real, because it manages to capture hints of the broken, flawed world that we know and inhabit.
Films like Light Sleeper seem to inhabit a parallel universe, a world that has only a limited number of worries, and that promises to tie up any of its loose ends by film’s end.