>>376151Baywatch's Cultural BlindnessThe Hollywood version of the '90s TV series panders to prurience and the longing for escape.by Armond White
The new Baywatch movie, a reboot of the Nineties beach-set crime-and-melodrama TV series, continues Hollywood's unoriginal marketing. It holds momentary interest for the way it adapts television culture (free, meaningless distraction) for a new era.
On the big screen, Baywatch might seem a variation on its cathode-ray source simply because it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Hollywood's leading exponent of biracial diversity, and Zac Efron, Hollywood's newest male pin-up. Respectively, they play lifeguards Mitch and Matt - not entirely interchangeable but alliterative nonentities who bring little distinction to the basic formula. The combination of over-the-top action-movie stunts and crass humor is shameless, both below-the-belt and beneath most folks' IQs.
Hollywood movies have become television at just the point when media shills are spreading the fake news that we're experiencing a "new golden age" of TV. These shills don't call it a "renaissance," because that word might intimidate victims of our failed education system and even cynics realize that nothing gets reborn in Hollywood, that recycling is not the same as being given new life.
Yet the level of audacity in the Baywatch movie, directed by Seth Gordon with the same insipidness he brought to Identity Thief and Horrible Bosses, is greater than in the cornball TV series. And Johnson's and Efron's exaggerated beefcake and lame ethnic contrasts add to the overkill. Only a child mired in TV culture's hard sell would find any of this unique. Such unenlightened appreciation would be a sign of the cultural catastrophe in which old television shows are granted the same interest that Hollywood used to give to classic drama and literature. This pop-culture emergency is more urgent that the film's plot, in which the team of lifeguards oppose a drug dealer (Priyanka Chopra), an idea rehashed from last month's movie version of the TV series CHiPs.
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