Panic and anger can be a movie tonic

The desire for escapism that accompanies rough financial times is real, but boom times are also followed by painful and protracted cultural hangovers, and cultural hangovers are all about artistic reckoning. When good times give way suddenly to bad (or, in this case, when bad times give way suddenly to worse), fashion, materialism and excess suddenly become suspect. The arts revert temporarily (until there's money to be made again) to the starving, the angry and the ugly. There's something cathartic about this -- the nihilism of film noir, punk rock, the "pathetic aesthetic" of the early '90s constitute a jubilant 11th hour yawp against unreflective hedonism in boom times.

This isn't to say that Hollywood, that great lagging cultural indicator, will be in the forefront of this shift. Nor that audiences will embrace the backlash en masse. So far, this hasn't been the case, despite the fact that more and more movies seem to embody the cynicism of the times. Driving by my local mini-multiplex last weekend I noticed a trifecta of disaffection: "W," "Religulous" and "Burn After Reading" were playing side-by-side, and it occurred to me that this lineup would not have been thinkable even as recently as 2006.

The pendulum seems to be swinging again from the decadent mainstream art of fat times to the scrappy countercultural art of lean times. For a while, at least, anger and unadorned reality may stage a cathartic comeback.

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carina.chocano@latimes.com