Wilderness Exile: Last Year at the Movies
Roy Anker, Professor of English
Perspectives

For a long time in 2005, movie studios and theater owners were fearing the worst box office year ever. By early fall, studio heads were confessing that there was something, well, defective with their product, or at least with the timing of the product being put out there. Audiences simply seemed less credulous than usual, less susceptible to swallowing the typical Hollywood happy ending. Maybe it was the sober realities of a war that would not go away, or middle-class frustration with health care, or an economic non-boom, the toll of aging parents, renegade kids-whatever, audiences did not seem pabulum-susceptible.

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