Flop Era
Michael Sun on Jason Reitman
An era used to be interminably long—some protozoic, geological span of history where entire species and generations lived and died—but now it is the length of time it takes a pop star to release her next album. An era, generally, lasts anywhere between one and five years. If you are Taylor Swift, you have cycled through ten eras in the past decade and a half, which means people will launch lawsuits for the opportunity to pay $1200 in the hopes of seeing all ten eras live. I am not imparting any moral value to this because I do not wish to court death or, worse, cancellation.
I do, however, know a thing or two about how eras work, having lived through my own flop era. For those who do not spend every waking second online (i.e. the irrelevant), the flop era denotes a period of critical—though not necessarily creative—failure. If hell is other people then the flop era is no-one. You speak in melodramatic provocations to an impervious audience. You ululate into the void and the void ignores you. Soon you grow clownish, destitute. You stare at the sun, slack-jawed and wide-eyed. The ground beneath you quakes. The flop era, to its victim, feels earth-shattering. Geological.
Haters will say my flop era is ceaseless; I like to say my flop era occurred between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. This was the three-year stretch where I thought I was incredibly chic. It was the early 2010s and the world was large and excitable. Sometimes things thrummed so loudly I suspected I had tinnitus. I thought I was chic because I owned several Tumblr accounts, on one of which I wrote vaguely offensive screeds against people I thought of as narcissistic or, worse, bland. On another I posted snapshots I had blasted through an editing software that became popular, I later learnt, for simulating the grain and ambience of film photography. I didn’t know what film photography was when I was fifteen; I just liked the blown-out exposure, the oily miasma haunting the images. By the end of my flop era the app had become passé.
On Tumblr—and, much to the chagrin of all around me, also in life—I started going by the name Art Spencer. This was a name that had no relation to any part of my real name. Many people, rightfully, ignored my request. Even at the time I knew Art Spencer was a deeply insufferable alias: the artificial peculiarity of the first name sproinging into the Waspiness of the second. And yet I couldn’t stop repeating the words like a vocal tic. It was a terrible plight: Art Spencer, Art Spencer, Art Spencer. If you said it three times into a mirror a doltish fifteen-year-old would appear to write a vaguely offensive screed about you. Art Spencer, the name, offered some insight into my predilections, phoney as they were. I proselytised Bret Easton Ellis to anybody who was around (which was nobody) and I listened exclusively to Vampire Weekend. It was the early 2010s.
I had learned how to pirate movies and I was growing increasingly vampiric. I would set alarms for 3AM and tiptoe to the kitchen, where the household’s single computer rested. It was a precarious balancing act between letting the alarm jolt me awake and silencing it swiftly enough before it roused anyone else. In the kitchen, I shivered through entire films with one earbud in. I left the other ear uncovered to detect any sliver of motion in the house, though none ever eventuated. The whole affair was needlessly covert and often gruelling, but I justified it by saying I was suffering for my art. What Art? Mostly what I was doing was putting on a Jason Reitman movie then traipsing around the schoolyard like a corpse the next day. A chic corpse, at least. A corpse that owned multiple Tumblr accounts.
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During my three-year flop era in the early 2010s, Jason Reitman was not yet in his—though it was certainly imminent. In the decade since his debut feature, he had achieved the kind of attention that could only ever befall a nepo baby; his dad, Ivan Reitman, was a Hollywood mainstay who had helmed Ghostbusters and its sequel in the eighties, as well as the movie Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as said twins. All of these entries became blockbusters because it was the eighties and people were insane. Reitman Jr., who was six when the first Ghostbusters was released, spent his childhood on film sets. Presumably he did not have to set 3AM alarms to further his cinematic education.
In recent times, Jason Reitman has associated himself with a single property: his middlingly reviewed but commercially successful Ghostbusters sequel—the 2021 version, not the 2014 reboot which caused a minor fracas for turning in an all-female mod squad. Ghostbusters, in a way, was a left turn for a filmmaker who had made his name on life-sized tales of the human world’s foibles and follies. The spectral realm was something else entirely. Still, you could hardly call it shocking for Reitman to follow in his father’s footsteps. At last, he had figured out his daddy issues. 'I wouldn’t do Ghostbusters 3, that’s kind of his territory,' he told an interviewer in 2010. Then, presciently: 'Not right now anyway. Maybe in ten years.'
My Reitman fixation was long over by the time Ghostbusters rolled around. By then, I was obsessed with other things, like overpriced candles shaped like objects that weren’t candles and why I couldn’t stay asleep for more than three hours at a time. But of course teenaged Art Spencer had a hard-on for Reitman. Art Spencer was a loser who thought he was chic. Reitman made chic films about losers.
The films of Jason Reitman are populated with schmucks. Deadbeat dads and sycophantic sons; nebbish little freaks in five-inch gym shorts; mealy-mouthed senators who reach for polemics only to be pole-axed by their own blinkered vexations. Reitman is the pickup artist’s worst nightmare: his characters assay romantic success with woefully undercooked methods. An overgrown hipster namedrops giallo directors to a teenage love interest; a pair of suits arrange their next hook-up by comparing calendars on clunky laptops, trading pillow talk for pedantry. People are always trying in Reitman movies. Few triumph.
Failure is Reitman’s predominant mood; he simmers and stews in failure until it curdles into something that reeks of style. Reitman’s debut was released in 2005 and it was called Thank You for Smoking, based on the novel of the same name. If not quite incendiary, it was at least enough to spark a round of critical attention. 'Like cigarettes,' Manohla Dargis writes in her New York Times review, 'this wisp of a film … won’t do much for your brain cells but it may provide some transitory pleasure.' It is a fine showreel for Aaron Eckhart’s suave, smooth-talking wiles; further proof to never trust a grown man with blonde hair. Eckhart plays the tobacco svengali Nick Naylor, a spin doctor for the cigarette business armed with a Colgate smile, a ready retort for each scientific claim, and a jaw so square it resembles furniture. 'Did you study to do that?' asks his precocious young son (Cameron Bright). 'No,' he deflects. 'It requires a moral flexibility that goes beyond most people.'
Naylor’s employer—the Academy of Tobacco Studies—is under siege from family groups and health scientists; Naylor, ever the entertainer, proposes a stunningly sly manoeuvre. Cigarettes have fallen out of favour on the silver screen. He will simply inveigle the studio execs into restoring their cultural cachet with a spot of Hollywood product placement, banishing any tobacco naysayer to that most dastardly of categories: killjoys. And so our salesman jet-sets to Los Angeles for a rendezvous with 'super-producer' Jeff (Rob Lowe). Jeff’s office is a little too well-oiled. There is a sheen to each surface, like it has been Windexed mere moments prior; look too long and it becomes a glare. In the corner is a samurai effigy. On the walls hang Japanese scrolls. Koi fish float in a zen garden outside. Jeff telegraphs his far-flung tastes as garishly as Naylor cosplays the American everyman. They are equal and opposite forces: with little hesitation, they ink an agreement to sneak a pair of cigarettes into a tawdry romance set in outer space—physics be damned—starring Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Because this is Reitman, the scheme dissolves; Naylor, later, gets his come-uppance from a cadre of masked bandits punishing him for his public profile. Woebegone and out of a job, he retreats to his bachelor pad, spending days gazing at the ceiling in increasingly dishevelled sweatpants. Beneath the showboating, he is, after all, a schmuck. A sheep in wolf’s clothing. He is a broken man, despite what a final-act deus ex machina may have you believe. Naylor’s son visits. 'You’re the sultan of spin!' he enthuses. It rouses Naylor towards some former version of his slimy glory. In an instant, he conjures dozens of other professions serving some nebulous evil, clicking through a slide projector in his mind. Via Reitman’s shrewd visual flair, we see tableaus of each worker: a forest logger, a sweatshop foreman, a baby seal poacher. Confrères in corruption. All work is equally bad.
This remains one of Reitman’s preoccupations: if all work is bad, then what’s the point? Labour is merely a rehearsal for death. It’s a canny manifesto from a director who—to the best of my knowledge—has never worked an office job, has never needed to work a job of any kind. And it worked! Up in the Air (2009), his third feature, would capitalise on a growing collective ennui to become an awards magnet, nabbing six Oscar nominations—though zero wins. Released in 2009, in the midst of the global financial crisis, the film bottles the tedium of corporate life, its ruthless efficiency and its rejection of diversions. The American office—the globalised office—looks a lot like purgatory; God is an HR manager. If hell is other people, then the office is its torture chamber: abuzz with trifling, chunnering conversations; ruled by workaday drones who can’t bear the emotional heft of delivering bad news. This is where we find Up in the Air’s satiny protagonist: Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), an HR mercenary flown from city to city to facilitate mass layoffs in place of lily-livered managers. Each worker, even as they’re severed from their stifling workplaces, grieves the separation as they would a lover. Call it mass delusion.
Like Naylor, Bingham—sharply suited though he may be—is still a bit of a loser. He has few earthly ties, a failure he shrouds in a fog of vaguely inspirational sentences. 'This is where I live,' he narrates, over the hum of an airport; 'I’m from here,' he tells a plane companion later in the film, gesturing to his airless surroundings. He all but teleports from city to city, axing workers with a kind of rote compassion—until, of course, a love interest, a fellow corporate type (Vera Farmiga), sullies his pristine order and throws his practised routine into turmoil. Up in the Air was—is—beloved because of its base allure: a man learns to have feelings. A loser finds love.
Perhaps it’s too crude to call Reitman’s characters losers. More generously, they are floaters, buoyed and buffeted by the tides of the world. They lack the directional focus to resist inertia. They are transient. Driftwood. Like Bingham, who spends time among the firmament to evade his mortal attachments. Or Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), the thirtysomething divorcee of Reitman’s scabrous 2011 character study Young Adult, who ignores her editor at a ghostwriting job to embark on a cross-country trip in a mad quest to woo her high school flame. Mavis, with her acidic mien and Y2K cosplay—Paris Hilton sweatsuit and all—is almost the anti-Bingham. Bingham’s life is itemised to a fault: it fits into a compact carry-on. Mavis is serially filthy, each of her living spaces a bricolage of liquor bottles, Coke cans, and take-out boxes strewn in haphazard piles. Bingham speaks with the canny charm of a late-night host; Mavis speaks in eye-rolls. If they had a conversation, both would instantly self-combust. And yet they share something of a nomadic bent: a willingness to renounce a grounded existence and, with it, any lingering responsibilities.
Both Bingham and Mavis hail from small towns; Reitman weaponises their cosmopolitan dreams to craft a tension between the provincialism of the suburbs and the desire for something greater—the same tension which snakes through 2007’s Juno. This is a film which, by now, requires no explanation, so deeply embedded into the consciousness are its hallmarks: its teen pregnancy overtures; its aureate dialogue (almost Shakespearean, if Shakespeare had the bravado to write 'your Eggo is preggo'); the running gear, amber sweatbands and all, made famous by Michael Cera’s Paulie Bleeker, who remains the Halloween get-up du jour for lanky white boyfriends everywhere.
Juno MacGuff (Elliot Page)—teen mom-to-be—is carrying the results of an impromptu experiment with Bleeker in her stomach; following a series of antics, she has decided on the ideal adoptive pair, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman). Vanessa is slightly overbearing but pleasant enough; Mark is another of Reitman’s famous losers—sorry, drifters—who works from home and dresses like an overgrown skater. Prior to his features, Reitman dabbled in advertisement work, and it shows: he subjects his characters to outsized desires and irksome insecurities which leave them constantly seeking more. More what? Just more—the classic trick of the advertisement. Mark, the boyish husband, had dreams of being a composer, but has since been relegated to 'commercial work,' he tells Juno. What kind of commercial work? 'Commercials,' he deadpans. The odour of failure hangs over him, even as he has constructed a picturesque portrait of American life—the McMansion, the marriage, the nuclear family, the suburban idyll. Mark jokes— a little too quickly—that he and Vanessa are yuppies; the couple gaze at their new baby’s bedroom and engage in pointed discourse about paint shades: custard vs. cheesecake.
There is a cynical streak that runs through all of Reitman’s earlier, best-known films: work sucks, the suburbs are stultifying, we’re getting lonelier. Each thesis has remained reasonably potent even as Reitman himself has not. The shift came in 2014 with his film Men, Women & Children—a Homeric saga of internet life following an entangled web of high schoolers and their parents texting, cheating, flirting, stalking, and gaming online. People called it 'sluggish', 'simplistic', 'facile'. (If I am ever panned in such terms, please take me to the glue factory.)
Men, Women & Children may have signalled the beginning of the end for Reitman—who has yet to make another film that rivals the decorated heights of his early career. Yes, it is a little Banksy-ish in all its preachy technophobia. Yes, it smacks of ‘not a cell phone in sight, just people living in the moment’. Yes, it veers towards the after-school special with its storylines of eating disorder forums, porn addiction, and online predators. But in its dying throes, it offers a glimpse into the momentary glimmer of Reitman’s career. ‘That’s home, that’s us,’ a narrator intones over an image from the gelid depths of outer space, where our planet occupies barely more than a pixel. ‘On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of … Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there in that mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. How frequent their misunderstandings, how fervent their hatred…’
The voice-over skews mawkish as it continues; something about kindness and humanity. But I prefer the nihilistic reading: the Earth is small and meaningless; we are small and meaningless. Reitman’s characters—spiky, alienated, sad, searching—bear no cosmic consequence. Their predicaments are human-sized. The universe is indifferent. I would repeat the manifesto in my kitchen at 3AM like an evil affirmation: you are small, you are meaningless, you are nothing. The image soothed me. It helped me sleep. Soon, seasons changed. I exited my flop era; Reitman entered his. There was something beautiful about the meaninglessness, the flop era merely a speck in the infinite magma of time.
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In the first decade of his career, Reitman directed six films. In the decade since—everything after Men, Women & Children—he has helmed just three features. There is Tully, a deliciously ruthless picture of motherhood and its accompanying mania—the last vestiges of his earlier success. There is The Front Runner, an instantly forgettable political potboiler starring, as co-leads, Hugh Jackman and his hideously sideswept wig. And then there is the film which has presumably consumed Reitman’s fantasies since he was but a babe running amok on his papa’s set: the 2021 Ghostbusters reboot that he once swore never to make for fear of existing in his father’s shadow.
The fear, as it turns out, was justified. The original Ghostbusters films were thrillingly antic patchworks that encompassed everything from steampunk to corporate kitsch, brimming with B-movie squelches and outrageously hyperbolic allusions to ancient mythologies. In simpler terms, they were fun. Reitman’s version, meanwhile, feels rote by default: a stuttering echolalia of his father’s work shorn of charm or panache. It is his flop era writ small: a stunning capsule of his descent from acclaim.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife takes place thirty-one years after the two previous entries on which Ivan Reitman made his name. In the intervening decades, our gang of spirit snuffers has dispersed; the obdurate Egon Spengler is the only member of the original quartet who continues their mission, decamping to the outskirts of Oklahoma to brave the sinister spectres attempting entry into the human realm. To aid his quest, he has sequestered himself away in a decaying mansion, estranged from friends and family. When he dies suddenly, his daughter (Carrie Coon) and two grandchildren—the straight-shooting science whiz Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and the overzealous dweeb Trevor (Finn Wolfhard)—inherit both his farm and, unbeknownst to them yet, his legacy as a poltergeist whisperer.
The parallels to life are so obvious that even vocalising them risks triteness. For Reitman, as it is for Phoebe and Trevor, inheritance is fraught: all three are eager to take on their forefathers’ mantles while knowing it may lead to certain doom. The film, of course, writes an optimistic ending: ghosts are vanquished, the Spengler name burns on into the future. In all its simpering earnestness, it practically guarantees the inverse for its director, who remains dwarfed by his father's achievements; whose attempts at furthering the Reitman name only cements the nepo baby allegations.
Reitman’s first films were surprising in their cynicism: here was a director born into prestige casting a keen eye on the ails of people unlike him—peons like you and me. Forgive me for attempting to divine some truth from Reitman’s personal biography—I know it’s gauche. But how else to understand the son of a winning family so fixated on losers? His early work feels like a correction of his status: a disavowal of his father’s Hollywood successes to centre on the flop era of others—characters caught amidst the stochastic wiles of an unforgiving world and hardened by circumstance. Ghostbusters, by comparison, is an admission of his own flop era, playing—in some Freudian way—like a snivelling attempt to earn his dad’s approval.
On a purely stylistic level, there are slivers of Reitman’s career hallmarks here: the small-town Americana setting, complete with a neon-saturated diner straight out of Riverdale; the sardonic quips, mostly courtesy of granddaughter Phoebe. There’s even a shade of Reitman’s signature nebbish in Paul Rudd’s Gary Grooberson: a summer school teacher prone to awkward flirtations who unwittingly finds himself enmeshed in a plot to save the world from a few dastardly demons. But the film is so rife with corny callbacks to Reitman Sr.’s universe that it grows unwieldy with the weight of history. ‘Who ya gonna call?’ a sheriff wisecracks at one point, and for a second the film stands still, anticipating some moment of recognition. It’s not so much a wink as a full-body spasm—the cinematic equivalent of someone telling a recycled joke then screeching ‘Get it? Get it? Get it??????’ directly into your ear until you die. It is a son trying on his father’s suit only to find his lanky arms engulfed by fabric.
If Reitman’s films were once limpid, his late style is merely limp. Truthfully, I resisted watching his Ghostbusters sequel for as long as sanely possible, and then some more, and then some more. Were it not for my editor I would have happily lived the rest of my years ignoring the existence of Reitman’s recent contributions. My deadline came and passed; my apartment had never looked cleaner. Ghostbusters sat untouched. As long as I avoided it, I could ward off Reitman’s flop era—and thereby my own. It began infiltrating my sleep. I had dreams—omens—about rising at 3AM to watch Ghostbusters on my computer; each time the dream would dissolve before the film commenced. Soon, the dreams became reality: I started waking up in the early hours in a cold sweat, head heavy, room spinning. For a second, I would imagine I was fifteen again, my laptop beckoning from an adjacent room. Weeks went by like this.
What would Art Spencer make of it all? Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult—these were films which anthropologised the drudgery of being that nevertheless felt like fantasies of adulthood. In their misanthropy, they provided a template for the future; if hell is other people then heaven is being a hater. The losers of these films cosplay as winners, scorning their peers for some semblance of power even as they remain ill-adjusted to contemporary life. I was a perennial loser as a teenager. I wrote my vaguely offensive screeds like a prayer, thinking they would grant me superiority. They didn’t. I failed. Reitman, eventually, failed too.
If life imitates art, then Reitman was always doomed to his eternal fixation: the flop era. In Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the camera peers upwards again and again, discovering a sky of roiling clouds cast in an infernal glow. The ground beneath quakes. To Reitman, it’s earth-shattering. Geological. To everyone else it’s merely trite.
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Michael Sun is a critic and essayist. He regularly contributes to The Guardian, where he recently hosted the online culture podcast Saved for Later. His writing on film and music has also appeared in The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, ABC, Liminal, and many more. In his spare time, he designs posters for events, lovers, friends, and enemies. He hosts a weekly show on FBi Radio in Sydney, where he lives. @michael.pdf