Double Double Feature Feature

My latest at Modern Age, on Sinners, Hamnet and their cinematic forebears

I have a new piece up at Modern Age which, while out of date, is considerably less out-of-date than my last piece there, which was about three stage productions that had been closed for months by the time the piece came out. This one, by contrast, is by two of last year’s Academy Award-winning films, Sinners and Hamnet, and two films from a generation ago that, if put side by side with the newer films, would enable one to read the latter as a kind of commentary on the films that came before.

Pairing films in this way to think about their relationship, whether genealogical or otherwise, is something I used to do a bunch, and I self-indulgently spent the first few paragraphs of the new piece taking a walk down that particular memory lane:

More than a decade ago, when I was a senior editor at The American Conservative, I occasionally wrote a piece that paired two films and discussed their relationship, something I called my Double Feature Feature. I didn’t pair them to demonstrate the influence of one film upon the other; in most cases, there was no plausible influence. Rather, I was interested in how the pairing might illuminate the way a common theme may develop differently in films by different directors, or how it might reveal the extent of cultural change between an older film and a newer one.

So, for example, when I paired the Richard Loncraine film adaptation of Richard III with Tom Hooper’s film The King’s Speech, I was interested in how each film approached the relationship between the House of Windsor and the rise of fascism in the 1930s: The latter suppressed the sympathy that did obtain to tell a heroic story of the crown rallying the nation to resistance; the former used Shakespeare to fantasize about a full blown British fascism. When I paired the classic George Cukor comedy of remarriage among the upper crust The Philadelphia Story with Derek Cianfrance’s tragedy of a dissolving marriage among the economically precarious Blue Valentine, I was interested in how these two wildly different films evinced surprisingly similar views on the forces that shape relations between the sexes. And when I paired Terrence Malick’s haunting film Tree of Life with the Coen brothers’ sardonic film A Serious Man, I wanted to explore the radically opposed interpretations the films advanced of the book of Job and its relevance to life in the leafy American suburbs of the mid-twentieth century.

I haven’t continued the series since leaving The American Conservative, but two of last year’s most celebrated films so clearly called for a revival that I have decided to pair them with their cinematic mates here. Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster horror film starring Michael B. Jordan, and Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s arthouse tearjerker starring Jessie Buckley, both revisit settings and themes explored in celebrated films made a generation ago. Both films revolve around the power of art to transform life and to open avenues of communion across space and time. Yet the profound tonal differences between these recent films and their forebears—the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, respectively—chart a transformation in our expectations for film and in our relationship to our cultural inheritance.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing there.