'Interstellar', 'Gone Girl' signal that viewers are accepting mediocrity, says culture critic

According to Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the new mediocre has become the new normal. She was referring to the global economy, which, she thought, would just "muddle along with subpar growth" for some time.

But the new mediocre reigns in other areas of our lives as well. Culture, for example, has defined excellence down to such an extent that fewer and fewer people seem capable of distinguishing between commercial success and artistic merit, surface and depth, style and substance.

Hollywood director Christopher Nolan is a case in point. About a month ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a nearly 2,000-word profile on Nolan titled "The Conjurer of Hollywood" in which he is called a visionary and a true auteur. The evidence that the article has collected to support this extravagant claim, however, is almost all about money: the eight movies Nolan made over the past 14 years have together earned more than US$3.5 billion in revenue. His last three movies count among the 100 highest-grossing films of all time. "Is it possible to think of a film that grossed more than US$1 billion and is better than Nolan's The Dark Knight?" the article asks almost smugly.

Well, the one thing you can certainly say about The Dark Knight is that it is dark, literally. That an article which appears in The New York Times Magazine can so blatantly and shamelessly confuse quantity with quality is not only disheartening, it is a sign of the times. Nolan may be a masterful technician, but he is no master. And his intellectual pretensions should not be mistaken for intellectual depth.

The jargon and name-dropping in his new movie, Interstellar, are impressive - black holes, relativity, singularity, the fifth dimension, and speculations by physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne are all mentioned in passing. But the movie's message - love is all we need even as the world around us is crumbling - is as banal and clichéd as the printed words on a Hallmark card.

Movies are a form of mass entertainment. What they provide is easy pleasure. Nolan is very good at giving easy pleasure, not so much depth as a varnished surface of cleverness and thoughtfulness. Viewers come away from his movies feeling not just satisfied but smart and therefore good about themselves.