09/01/2024
We are in Spiked again!
VIBES
Creating and working with vibes may be a spontaneous, incoherent attempt by filmmakers to work around the constraints coming from outside their immediate artistic preoccupations. As the kinds of stories deemed correct are being increasingly prescribed, story itself becomes not worth engaging with creatively and becomes sidelined. The foregrounding of vibes - the rendering of story moot - is the result.
It is worth noting that more and more films are vibey. Barbie was a vibe film that was accidentally a story about Ken. Some critics are disappointed that Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla (also starring Jacob Elordi, as Elvis) is pure Graceland vibes and not an undergraduate feminist essay on Priscilla Presley.
Vibes are neither a consciously woke nor anti-woke reaction to something. They are not a tool in a culture war. It is much more likely that vibes are an inarticulate, unconscious attempt by artists to re-assert the primacy of their art and its artistic effect. Before anything else, film makes us feel.
The most controversial film of the past year is a succession of outlandish provocations that refuses to say anything.
