1.

At the beginning of last year I saw a great film that I didn’t much like.

Inside Llewyn Davis had been hyped up by several of the film snobs I follow and I thought “Hey, another film from those guys who directed No Country for Old Men? That sounds neato!”

So I watched it. And while I was impressed by the amazing cinematography and powerful performances, the story left me feeling starkly dissatisfied. Not because it had been poorly constructed, you understand, but because it had been constructed in such a way that the goal of the story was to create stark dissatisfaction.

I’m not the kind of guy who needs every film I see to be an upbeat action thriller, but at the time I didn’t understand the complete absence of character growth and the complete lack of any kind of resolution. When the credits rolled I found myself thinking, “Why did I just waste two hours of my time watching this?”

I went to bed that night disappointed. But the next day I was still thinking about the film. And the next week. And the next month.

Part of it was just me obsessing over why anyone would make a story so utterly disheartening (and part of it was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about the songs, because by golly the music in that film is just haunting and beautiful). But another part of me kept niggling at the bits and pieces of the film stuck in my memory. I was filled with a nagging feeling that there was something that I had missed, some deeper level on which I could appreciate the film.

For those of you who haven’t seen it (and I suspect the percentage is rather high since this film never got much of a wide release) Inside Llewyn Davis is a film about a young folk musician in the early sixties, trying to make a living off of his art. If you’re like me you watch a film like this thinking that, sure he’s gonna struggle, but at the end he’ll hit it big and realize that all his hard work was worth it after all.

Because that’s the formula. That’s what we want to see: hard work paying off, struggles leading to success.

But Llewyn doesn’t find success. He doesn’t grow as a person. This incredibly talented artist experiences failure after failure after failure, and the movie ends with him in no better shape than he started, revealing the terrible truth that other musicians would find the success he has been chasing, leaving him in poverty and eternal obscurity.

You can see why maybe I didn’t enjoy this movie that much.

But like I said, I kept thinking about it. And I read what other people were thinking about it. And eventually I found this post (you’ll have to forgive me for not linking it, but for the life of me I haven’t been able to run it down all these months later) that finally helped me appreciate what the film was trying to say.

The point, this person argued, was that Llewyn had sabotaged his own artistic success. Numerous times in the film he is offered opportunities to work as a musician, but every time Llewyn shoots them down. They’re too commercial. They’re not him. He doesn’t want to “sell out”. And because of this, he never becomes successful.

He’s so obsessed with the romantic idea of “Art” (which may also be an extension of his own fragile and inflated ego) that he rejects the opportunities he’s given.

This idea, the idea you can be too committed and too idealistic about art, burrowed its way into my head, and became something of a theme in my thoughts throughout the year.

Maybe it took me off guard because it was so radically different from what we’re conditioned to think about art. We’re taught to revere the artists that fight the system, that never give in to commercial pressure, who make the art they want to make and to hell with what anyone else thinks.

And no one ever says, “Hey maybe too much of that attitude isn’t always a good thing, you know?”

Except the Cohen Brothers did. And Inside Llewyn Davis is very meta in this way. It’s a film about a man unfailingly true to his art, made by two filmmakers unfailingly true to their art. And like the subject of the piece, it never saw much success.

2.

Last year I saw a terrible film I liked quite a lot.

Transformers: Age of Extinction was pure distilled summer blockbuster stupidity, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. There is a robot who can turn into a semi truck and he rides on another robot who turns into a dinosaur, and if you cannot have fun watching that then you might not technically be a human person.

But all that said, Trans4mers is a “bad” film (if indeed we can imbue a collection of images shown in sequence to create the illusion of motion with moral significance); on an intellectual level at least I understand why some people didn’t like it.

But while disliking Trans4mers is certainly a valid opinion I think that maybe you miss something if you dismiss a film like this too easily, because it actually has some interesting things to say.

I’ll only mention it briefly here, but the film’s overarching theme is a fascinating study of the causes and consequences of the failure of authority (e.g. Walhberg’s overprotective parenting, the government’s war against the Autobots, Optimus Prime’s loss of faith in/empathy for humanity).

But what I’d like to get at here is that like Inside Llewyn Davis, Transformers: A of E is also a commentary of the often troublesome intersection between art and commercialism.

In what seems like a throwaway gag, an old man complains that movies these days are all “sequels and remakes.” But it isn’t a throwaway line. It’s a flag.

Right after this we find Optimus Prime inside a movie theatre. He’s been battered and beaten almost to death, and Walhberg drags him out of his cinematic grave.

Why? Because money.

Later on, a scientist is trying to recreate a transformer from base components. He’s frustrated because every time they try to create something in the image of Optimus Prime it comes out looking like Megatron. In my favorite and personal most-quoted line of the film he screams, “Math! Algorithms! Why can’t we make what we wanna make the way we wanna make it!?” (Imagine me screaming this at midnight in the Walmart back-room completely without context. You’re welcome).

It’s a notable line, partly because it’s hilariously over the top, but also because it’s yet another self-aware commentary on the thought process that goes into making a film like this. The scientist believes that he is working with a formula, a mathematical process. But his formula fails him because he doesn’t understand that the Transformers aren’t just robots; they’re living things.

Here the film is commenting on itself and the studio executives responsible for movies like Transformers 4. They don’t understand why they keep turning out turds. After all, they’ve got the ingredients: robots, robot dinosaurs, hot girls (who are also sometimes robots), explosions. Everyone loves that stuff, right? So why don’t more people love their movies?

And like the scientist in the movie, what they don’t understand is that they’re not just putting together a puzzle, or assembling an engine. Stories are made things, but they are also a little bit magic, a little bit alive. And if you don’t respect that, your audience won’t respect you.

And how does it all end up?

Mark Walhberg’s character is set up as a man trying to find validation for his passion. He’s an inventor trying to make something worthwhile, and the movie spends a good amount of time setting up this motivation. But in the end his craft is forgotten, his art is abandoned. He never finds fulfillment. But he does get the money.

Like Inside Llewyn Davis, Trans4mers has something to say about commercialism and art. The lesson we learn from Llewyn Davis is not to value “art” so highly that it can never be sold. The lesson we learn from the Transformers is not to value money so highly that your art becomes useless.

And like Llewyn Davis, Trans4mers is a commentary on itself. It made a lot of money. But in the end it’ll be remembered as nothing more than empty, formulaic pandering.

3.

So where does that leave us? We have two films warning about two extremes to avoid. But where is the middle ground? Where do we find that balance that joins these two ideas together?

Last year I saw a great film, that I absolutely loved.

I don’t think there was a single person who was excited when they first heard that they were making a movie about Lego. Not one. Not one in the whole wide world.

The LEGO Movie was the bad idea to end all bad ideas. It was a blatant cash-grab with no reason for existing. No one demanded its existence except for greedy businessmen on the infinitieth floor of some office building somewhere shielded from the real world by laser sharks and overbearing assistants.

And yet, and yet…

I’ve seen this movie in whole or in part more times than I can count, mostly because my toddler absolutely loves it, and it has yet to grow stale for me because there are so many layers to the ways this movie works.

There’s the top layer, the moment to moment stuff, jokes and visual gags that come at you a mile a minute, so much so that after all these viewings I’m still finding stuff I hadn’t seen before (just yesterday I finally realized how absurd it was for Vitruvius, a blind man, to say, “You’re gonna have to write that down.” Probably I am dumb).

Then there’s the story, a basic but perfectly-executed tale of an ordinary guy who learns who to become special and saves the world.

And on those merits alone The LEGO Movie would be a great piece of film-making. But then there’s that third layer, the thematic underpinning, which delivers an incredibly powerful message about the intersection of art and commercialism that I suspect most people miss.

Which is weird because it’s not exactly subtle. At the end of the movie the every-man hero looks the greedy businessman in the eye and says, “You don’t have to be the bad guy.” And sure, it’s also a line from a son to a father, but even there the ideas of where art originates are being explored.

In the movie, President Business controls all of the media production, all of the television, all of the news, all of the music. He’s a satire of huge media conglomerates putting out the same bland trash over and over again.

Except…that music? Even if you haven’t seen the movie, odds are pretty good you’ve encountered someone in real life singing “Everything is Awesome.” Because it’s a great song; catchy, fun, uplifting, quirky…and within the context of the film it was created and distributed by the “evil” businessman. For money.

And in amongst all the fun and jokes and uplifting morals peppered through The LEGO Movie, directors Miller and Lord are telling us something even more important.

(Miller and Lord are masters of this meta style of humor in storytelling. In 22 Jump Street one character asks an art major to give her impression of a sculpture of two stones leaning against each other. She makes an eloquent speech about how its an illustration of two things that can’t stand without the other, to which Jonah Hill’s character replies that he thinks they look like balls. And in this single brilliant moment is Miller and Lord’s philosophy personified: you can make a profound statement about the interdependence of humanity, say something about the plight of the characters in your film, AND tell a dick joke all at the same time.)

The LEGO Movie is a cash grab. It was created to make money and sell toys. But it is also a wonderful film. And as we’ve seen in the previous two films we examined it contains the keys to its own success. It’s a message that money and art can coexist hidden within a film that illustrates that coexistence perfectly.

So the next time you’re tempted to scoff at doing art “for the money” think again. Art and money each exist for the other’s benefit. Because great art can bring in great amounts of money. And money is a wonderful tool to have in your belt if you want to make more art.

Money can’t ruin art any more than it can redeem it.

Emmet looks President Business in the eye and says, “You don’t have to be the bad guy.” And neither do the people on the business side of the movies (or other forms of creative output).

Because the relationship between money and art isn’t a war to be fought; it’s a tango to be danced.