How Adam Sandler, the Gallagher Brothers, and Quentin Tarantino Destroyed Movies and Music

Crisis creates art and prosperity leads to tastelessness. This has recurred throughout history. The most recent example was how mortgage fraud of the late 1990s/early 2000s and the United States housing bubble of 2001-2005 coincided with the rising popularity of reality TV. Reality TV features people whose own privileged lives share little to no resemblance to the lives of ordinary people. The Apprentice, starring real estate mogul Donald Trump, with its catch phrase “You’re fired”, premiered in 2004. During this same time period (late 1990s – early 2000s) ‘dance pop’ teenage boy bands and girl groups became best-sellers in the music industry and comic book superhero movies dominated the box office in the movie industry. The recession of 2008 resulted in a return to serious themes again in a few films and many music releases in the 2010s.

A previous decline in the quality of films and music coincided with another period of prosperity, the Dot-com bubble that began around 1994 – 1995. I would pick 1994 – 1995 as some of the worst years in 20th century cinema history and music history. There are four men, in particular, who absolutely destroyed movies and music in the 1990s.

Adam Sandler did sketches on Saturday Night Live for a few years. Unfortunately, in 1995, he began his career in movies with Billy Madison. Charlie Chaplin once perceptively said that “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” Chaplin directed and starred in the greatest film of the 1930s, Modern Times, a chronicle of the lives of people struggling during the Great Depression, one of the best comedies of all time. In 1995, Adam Sandler starred in Billy Madison – Billy Madison is an obnoxious, privileged son of wealth in his late 20s who will inherit a lucrative hotel chain but has to repeat all the grades of elementary and secondary school. Billy Madison is a gigantic insult to movie viewers. Why should any audience care about such a crass, crude character? Adam Sandler makes Billy Madison truly unbearable through his temper tantrums and whining voice.

Unfortunately, this became a trademark of his characters in his ensuing comedies – Happy Gilmore (1996), The Waterboy (1998), The Wedding Singer (1998), Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), Mr. Deeds (2002), Anger Management (2003), etc. Critics, of course, did not praise these movies. Adam Sandler has the most Golden Raspberry nominations for worst actor and worst movies of anyone besides Sylvester Stallone. What is confusing and disturbing, though, is how popular these Adam Sandler movies were and still are, and how popular he remains among his fans. I was ten years old when his first movie was released and a teenager when the rest were released. I did not find them funny then. I do not find them funny now. Even an adolescent has a more complex, developed sense of humor than Adam Sandler. Case in point, observe sixteen year old Christina Ricci’s dark wit during her Thanksgiving dinner conversation in The Ice Storm (1997).

Adam Sandler is an egregious example of the dumbing down of United States culture in the mid-to-late 1990s (his verbal diarrhea and his pampered, privileged characters like Billy Madison) that continued with the popularity of reality TV in the 2000s and culminated in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Donald Trump’s cult (“he tells it like it is”) has led to a culture of divisive hatred – the most political and racial violence, right wing terrorism, white nationalism/white supremacism, and xenophobia in recent U.S. history. Trump’s bat-shit craziness led to the first of the 2020 presidential debates being deemed the most unpresidential and worst in U.S. history.

Across the pond in England, another dumbing down, this time of British culture, occurred when the Gallagher brothers (Noel and Liam) released Definitely Maybe (1994) and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995). Oasis assaulted audiences with eleven (!) singles – “Supersonic”, “Shakermaker”, “Live Forever”, “Cigarettes & Alcohol”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”, “Some Might Say”, “Roll with It”, “Morning Glory”, “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, “Champagne Supernova”, and, worst of all, “Wonderwall”, that all featured Beatles-imitating, inane, insipid lyrics and music by Noel Gallagher and whining vocals by Liam Gallagher. “Wonderwall” is the epitome of ridiculous repetition, its basic chords and sing-along worshiped worldwide by tasteless music listeners at bars and pubs, whether on acoustic guitar or karaoke. Despite the Gallagher brothers’ own disavowal and repudiation of the track (Noel: “It was fucking awful”, Liam: “I can’t fucking stand that fucking song! Every time I have to sing it I want to gag”), it made them boastful, bombastic, and famous.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory was bafflingly awarded Best British album since 1980 at the Brit Awards and was the best-selling record of the 1990s in the UK. Actually, its award is not bewildering. It was about money. (For the actual best albums of the 1990s, read these reviews about A Storm in Heaven, Lazer Guided Melodies, and Vanishing Point.) An Oasis track, in definition, is this- taking a Beatles chorus and refrain (for example, plenty of Paul McCartney’s disastrous dance-hall tunes or all together now anthems like “Hey Jude”) and then hammering it repeatedly into your skull like a drunken fan shouting and spitting at a soccer match. And that, of course, became Oasis’ core constituency- the aggressive, boozy, homophobic, sexist lad culture of football games and Union Jack patriotism. You can draw a line directly from Oasis’ popularity in the mid-to-late 1990s all the way to the current Brexit fiasco. Noel Gallagher criticized Corbyn (“fuck Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a communist”) and called voters who wanted to remain in the EU “cunts” and was praised by Nigel Farage (“I called Noel Gallagher a lad. Now it’s time to call him a legend.”) The Gallagher brothers are still today having their annoying bickering, aggravating fights, and embarrassingly hurling insults at each other. It’s irritating. Donald Trump predictably praised the Brexit disaster. Donald Trump and the Gallagher brothers both built their “careers” as bullies.

Just as the Brit Awards bestowed plaudits on Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? not because of any artistic merit but because of its sales, the Cannes Film Festival made the biggest mistake in its history when it awarded Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction with the Palme d’Or (the most prestigious award for films, the equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Picture) in 1994. The Academy Awards has almost always awarded Best Picture to the wrong movie. This is because the Academy Awards has always been less about artistic merit and more about the big studio Hollywood money and popularity. Cannes had always distinguished itself in this regard by actually choosing films of complexity. The Palme d’Or was awarded to: Luchino Visconti’s best film, the epic historical portrait of Italy The Leopard (1963); Martin Scorsese’s intense investigation of modern malaise Taxi Driver (1976); Francis Ford Coppola’s best film, the hallucinatory madness of the Vietnam War Apocalypse Now (1979); Wim Wenders’ best film and by far the best in the cultural wasteland of the 1980s, Paris Texas. Cannes awarding the Palme d’Or to Pulp Fiction presented a sham- it awarded critical acclaim to a movie that did not in any way deserve it.

Pulp Fiction was at the time and still is both acclaimed and popular. Pulp Fiction (and Tarantino’s entire over-hyped, overrated career) is nothing but pastiche. Pulp Fiction is praised for its dialogue (conversations about American vs. European cheeseburgers, Elvis vs. Beatles, etc.) but its dialogue is nothing but pastiche. Pulp Fiction is praised for the structure of its script (nonlinear) but its script is nothing but pastiche (plenty of films in the past have been nonlinear- Citizen Kane is the most obvious example). The plot of Pulp Fiction is pointless- Samuel L. Jackson shouts a biblical quote before he shoots a guy, Uma Thurman accidentally snorts heroin instead of cocaine so John Travolta has to plunge a syringe in her heart to prevent death by overdose, Bruce Willis saves Ving Rhames from his anal rape torture by S&M freaks in a basement, Samuel L. Jackson once again gets biblical (but doesn’t shoot this time) with a couple robbing a restaurant.

Unfortunately, once Cannes awarded Pulp Fiction the Palme d’Or and the Oscars awarded it Best Screenplay, the Tarantino train took off and has been running over cinephiles stranded on the tracks in two terrible ways. First, Tarantino’s emphasis on style over substance and rampant violence in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had a bad influence on other movies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. David Fincher’s Fight Club is one of the most extreme examples- one of the worst movies of the 1990s and of all time. Fight Club is, like Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, an exploitation flick masquerading as high art, a glorification of macho violence, shot like a glossy, overproduced MTV music video, while supposedly a consumerist critique, with the physique of Brad Pitt on display as he recites lines like “You’re not your fucking khakis” even as he dresses in 90s fashion throughout Fight Club and in real life is a poster boy for Hollywood privilege. Fight Club, like Pulp Fiction, is all style and no substance. (Thankfully, David Fincher later directed one of the best films of the first decade of the 2000s- the cerebral, nuanced, and subtle Zodiac.)

Secondly, Tarantino rips off characters, storylines, and titles (Kill Bill is his pastiche of kung fu flicks, Inglorious Basterds is originally an Italian war movie of the 1970s, Django Unchained is a riff on the story/title of Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Tarantino asked the maestro Ennio Morricone to score Hateful Eight and shot it in the snow just like Sergio Corbucci’s Great Silence, etc.) Tarantino is consistently nominated and praised by critics and fans even though his movies are blatantly stealing and do not contain characters of any depth and emotion. Why should audiences care about these characters? Tarantino keeps pretending to be a director of high art, but he’s merely a practitioner of pastiche.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was nominated for Best Picture at the most recent Academy Awards, but it’s just a bad exploitation flick with much more expensive production values. Brad Pitt plays a bland, blond, pretty boy stunt double Cliff Booth (a character that is not that different from any number of roles he’s played in his career but he was awarded Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), Leonardo DiCaprio is over-the-top as a burnt-out actor Rick Dalton (he was also over-the-top in Martin Scorsese’s movies), and Margot Robbie is dull, empty, and pretty as the doomed actress Sharon Tate. The flick’s finale, Tarantino’s wishful fantasy of the Manson family being murdered before they get to the Tate residence is ridiculous (Brad Pitt smashes a woman’s face and head repeatedly and Leonardo DiCaprio burns another woman with a flamethrower). The Academy Awards actually thought this deserved nominations?

Crisis creates art and prosperity leads to tastelessness. 1968 was a year of multiple crises- assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, student protests worldwide (including a shutdown of Paris in May 1968, a police riot and beating of protesters in Chicago in August 1968, a massacre of protesters in Mexico in October 1968). 1968 contained films like Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut addressing the epidemic of gun violence (Targets), George Romero’s directorial debut addressing the violence against the civil rights movement (Night of the Living Dead), and Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence addressing the violence of governments against citizens. Compare Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence with Tarantino’s Hateful Eight and you see the work of a contemplative, reflective director versus a hyper, overindulgent amateur. Both are westerns and both take place in the isolated mountains during the winter. The difference is that the audience cares about the characters of Jean-Louis Trintigant’s mute gunslinger and Vonetta McGee’s grieving widow. Corbucci makes a political statement with the bounty hunters being sponsored by the government to murder citizens. There is no deeper meaning in Hateful Eight. The characters are crowded in a cabin. They turn on each other. They kill each other.

Postmodernism has destroyed culture. That is my opinion. Postmodernism prizes irony and pastiche above questions about the meaning of life. Postmodernism is nihilistic. Adam Sandler’s atrocious “adolescent boy comedies” and Oasis’ obnoxious “lad culture” music only speak to pampered, privileged white men who demean and harass other people- these are the white men who voted for Trump and for Brexit. Tarantino’s flicks do not address philosophical problems like Tree of Life or economic/social crises like I, Daniel Blake (both films actually deservedly won the Palme d’Or). Audiences for movies and music should always demand deeper meanings.

by Mark Lager