Grunge martial arts cinema is a thing. No… it’s more than a thing. It’s actually the only f*cking thing. And I’m tired of it.
In music it wiped out the old order, with the high-budget feel and expensive recording tech in Tears for Fears and Information Society, and brought in Nirvana and the new “close” mixing style. Around the same time in film it coincided with the digital editing station and killed the 80s movie aesthetic. More coverage, faster editing. Spielberg still clings to the old way, but otherwise the heroes and villains become more “complex”.
Grunge is a similar trend to the gothic novel (Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde), which questioned the old ideals of religion and humanity. It questioned what made humans human, whether we were special, whether there was a god. It played in the liminal space between human and not. This gave the authors freedom to express emotions which had previously been suppressed through the old kinship lines. The industrial revolution broke the old kinship lines and awakened the hidden emotions.
Grunge upheld the ugly as more emotionally “real” than the beautiful.
The 80s had its share of grunge (Batman, Robocop) but its villains were still caricatures of evil, which were an easy sell in 90 minutes. The trend of action cinema grunge probably began with Speed and The Crow in 1994. The Goldeneye fight was grunge; Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator were definitely grunge. I believe Blade is peak grunge: great filmmaking and action, with all the sentiments of grunge, the trench coats, the bloody vampires, the sunglasses-wearing hero. If the villains remained simple, the heroes became complex.
There were some countervailing currents against grunge in the 90s. Tom Cruise always seemed to reject grunge. In my readings of Scientology, the cult does seem to be anti-grunge. The e-meter will be interpreted as your channeling ancient alien ancestors, but at least you’re working through your emotions with your auditor. It seems this is cleared up by some degree before Cruise gets on camera; now it’s time to just be beautiful. Beck was associated with Scientology early in his life but not while making his grunge music. Chuck Norris was a stalwart opponent of grunge. Clean kicking shapes and evangelical Christianity are repulsed by the stuff. But we still remember the era as grungy.
In kids entertainment, the 90s were very grunge. Invader Zimm, Ren & Stimpy, Beavis & Buddhead, Rugrats, Aeon Fluxx, Real Monsters, Gargoyles, Spawn. I watched Liquid Television religiously every saturday in the mid-90s. It was exactly what I wanted as a kid, and I think all of us felt similarly at the time. Before the big 3D wave, arcades were going grunge with Mortal Kombat, Time Killers, NBA Jam… Videogames at home were grunge too, especially as gaming turned 3D, and 3D was grunge as hell. The broken, warped textures on blocky 3D models and fog hiding bad draw-in distance made PS1 and N64 visuals an “aesthetic” that fit perfectly with the era. Arcades remained less-than-grungy at this time, though. 3D visuals were perfected by the late 90s. Sega’s visuals were the best, but even then Crazy Taxi and House of the Dead were signs that even Sega of Japan were trying to tap into this trend. But because of Nvidia chips, home PCs were achieving arcade performance levels, bringing the arcades to their knees.
90s comedy grunge was epitomized by The Kids in the Hall. In One Dumb Guy, Seth Myers noted that Lorne Michaels didn’t like the idea of the Kids using a punk rock band for the soundtrack, wanting something more like the brass band from SNL, but the Kids unanimously stuck with Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, which gave the show a needed grunge feel. A brass band would have been very 80s.
Grunge was also briefly counteracted in the west by the Hong Kong spillover, thanks to the impending Handover of Hong Kong in 1997. A few brave souls migrated west before this like Corey Yuen and Tony Leung Siu Hung and made some goofy yet “beautiful” American co-productions, but the big wave hits around 1997 with Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Michelle Yeoh exploding in America. Yuen Wo Ping might have been the most infectuous. We remember The Matrix as a beautiful kung fu movie, but we forget that the movie begins with 45 minutes of green-tinted body horror. I wonder how much of The Matrix was supposed to be grunge, but got co-opted by the beauty of Yuen Wo Ping’s infectuous style. It works in the context of the story: grunge is reality but beauty is the simulation. Jackie Chan’s sentiments are beautiful too. For all intents and purposes, Shanghai Noon should have been a grungy underdog tale with the Chinese overtaking and slaying their racist white overlords, but Jackie Chan made it beautiful. Rush Hour managed to be more beautiful version of 48 Hours. Sammo’s Martial Law is gritty but hardly grunge. He always had a kind of GI Joe personality, like something you’d see in Walker. Crouching Tiger, one of the most beautiful things we ever saw. Michelle Yeoh is simply the most beautiful woman in the world.
Grunge hit its peak (or nadir, depending on your perspective) in Bourne in 2002, then got a kung fu makeover in Kill Bill. If Michelle Yeoh was peak beauty, then Uma Thurman was the new black beauty.
Personally, by the early-2000s, grunge had been a thing for a decade, and I had had enough. Shenmue had come out in 1999 which was such a thing of beauty after 5 years of grungy home and arcade games, and I was ready for a change. I refused to watch Kill Bill for years because I was just sick of it. When I watched it, I enjoyed it, and never watched it again.
But then international cinema went grunge too. Korean cinema exploded with Shiri (1999) and Old Boy (2005), grunge at its finest. Tony Jaa was super grunge in 2003. Donnie Yen was also hella grunge 2005-2008 (and always was… I would say Ip Man rode the line a bit, though). The Raid (2012) was grunge meets video gaming. Dredd and Hardcore Henry were among the best grunge I’d ever seen: super dark and not afraid of humor.
In the west, despite a few more Matrix films and some aesthetically nice Star Wars fights, this era had more death, more killing, more “gray” characters, and less humor. Grunge Wick, grunge Mad Max, grunge Bourne, grunge Bond, grunge Batman, grunge Taken. Not a single joke, unless it was unintentional.
I feel like Marvel was one of a few holdouts during this time, but the action was still mostly grunge: more impact, less beauty. My theory is that all the comedy and beauty in Marvel action came from higher ups who wanted to get kids in seats. They overshot the mark sometimes, but I think it at least kept things a bit lighter. Correct me if I’m wrong, guys.
I don’t think I’m reading the tea leaves incorrectly here. Social media and the news cycle, which report on events in a purely grunge fashion, confirm everything I’m saying. Not that this reflects the outside reality; they’ve simply become the cheapest, most popular narrative of reality, one which I don’t follow. I find that the less news I watch, the more good I see in the people around me, even in a place like Las Vegas. I focus less on inflation, more on the good deals I can score in the corners of Natural Grocers and Winco. I’m less bothered by issues in the middle east and more fascinated by the different views of the world.
Today, after 30+ years of the stuff, I’m so done with action grunge. I’m 100% with the kids now, who are thriving on Minions, Despicable Me, Inside Out, Mario, Frozen, Toy Story, Spider-Verse, Wall-E, Ice Age, and Kung Fu Panda. The last Cars film was the grungiest of them all. Otherwise, no grunge in sight (except some one-offs like TMNT, which still tries to get some laughs). Adult films, by contrast, are all grunge. The colors are ugly, all blue and brown, or even just brown like in The Digger. How much uglier can you get? I can’t watch action entertainment for my age demo anymore. I think they’re trying to keep luring us in by upping the shock factor. They murder and r*pe children in their stories, often on-screen. It’s inexcusable. There are far better ways to get adults to do action scenes. If you can’t think of any, I question whether you’re an adult.
Our youth seem to gravitate towards lighter fare. What is that telling us?
Today’s action grunge can’t seem to find lightness and humor in dark moments, which is immature and sad. I dunno what’s going on, but I want no part of it.
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