Is Serious Cinema a Dying Medium?
It's Hard for Me to Even Remember the Last Time I Watched a Movie in a Theatre...
Millman explain some commonsense reasons why the film experience has changed so much in recent years:
It’s a subject I’ve written about before, here and here and here and no doubt elsewhere as well. My usual take on this is that movies have gotten small for a reason, and we just have to live with it. Many of the structural reasons are articulated well in the Times article I linked to in the previous paragraph. The big one is that people’s habits have changed. They are staying home far more than they used to—playing poker at home, going to religious services at home, looking for romance (via apps) at home—and they spend more time alone as well. People still go out, but it’s more of an event and less something you just do as a matter of course, and so the only movies most people are going to are those that can be construed as events. And movies in particular have trouble motivating people to go out because you can stay home and have a great experience watching on a big screen at a time of your convenience and for less money.
Millman makes a number of fascinating observations about the evolving state of the film industry and the difficulty of producing the sorts of films that were more commonplace a few decades ago. Read the whole thing.
This observation of his seems particularly prescient and relevant, though. My emphases added:
I suspect the culture war has also taken a serious toll on film’s cultural influence. Film simply isn’t as central to the culture as it once was, which inherently limits its ability to reach and affect a mass audience. But our culture is also far more fragmented than it used to be with people increasingly siloed in their distinct affinity-based niches. Necessarily, fewer projects are likely to have appeal across these proliferating divides. Add onto that the deep fissures between urban and rural regions, and between more and less educated people, and you’ve narrowed your potential audience further. Finally, Hollywood has long flattered itself that its prestige films were not only artful but socially worthy, but contemporary sensibilities have made earning those particular laurels a grueling gauntlet that seriously inhibits the creation of art.
Way back in January 2014 when I was associate editor at PJ Media in charge of growing the “PJ Lifestyle” section which often focused on entertainment I was already starting to pick up on this notion that film just wasn’t as important to the broader culture as it was when I fell in love with the medium back in the period of 1997 through 2005.
I went and dug up my old post on this - “Why This Year's Oscar Nominations Confirm Film Is Now a Culturally Dead Medium” - to recall what I said at the time. Again, my emphases added:
A few years back the Academy decided to expand the number of films they’d nominate for best picture, thus diluting the significance of the award. It used to be that only five films would be nominated and it could be a genuinely close race. In 2008 it was Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (The best of the them won, IMHO.) Then in 2009 it ballooned to ten, offering an assortment ranging from Avatar to Up to Precious and Inglourious Basterds.
It seems weird to compare a blue aliens action flick to a Pixar family comedy to a ghetto sentimentality to a high-brow grindhouse bloodbath. But I guess that’s just the nature of our postmodern film age. (Of the films nominated, fanatical Disney partisan I am, Up would’ve earned my vote.)
This year’s list is similarly all over the map and I haven’t seen any of them, though I imagine The Wife and I will catch some of when they start making their way to Netflix streaming. With her finishing up graduate school we tend to only make it to the theaters to see something that’s really big and mind-blowing. The Hobbit films in IMAX 3-D are well worth whichever arm or leg you’ll need to barter for a ticket.
But for a comedy or a drama, why bother going out to the theaters? The effect of seeing it on a decent-sized screen at home isn’t much different. And why bother trying to see all the best picture nominees before the show so you can talk about it when they’ve inflated the category to ten? That’s a lot of work!
Film is now a culturally dead medium. It’s akin to painting, ballet, classical music, drama, and the literary novel. Other, newer technologies have spawned mediums with greater power and influence amongst the masses while high-thinking elitists talk mostly to themselves about how their art is saving the world.
In my recent controversial autobiographical essay on why my adolescence was so painful I reminisced on how I found community and emotional solace while working at a small arthouse theatre which primarily showed “movies for grownups” - experimental art films, provocative independent features, subtitled foreign language gems, and classics of the medium.
I wrote:
By senior year I’d stumbled onto another community where I felt at home finally, one of genuine outsiders. I started working at the 3-screen arthouse movie theater called Castleton Arts on the north side of Indianapolis. Everyone there was an oddball like me and enjoyed quirky movies and strange writings and provocative political ideas. (It’s since been bulldozed and replaced with a storage unit once a larger Landmark art theater opened down the street a few miles.)
I’ll always remember the bold colors and unique experience of taking in the epic “Apocalypse Now: Redux” on the big screen:
But the world has changed so much now in 2023 compared to how it was “at the turn of the century.” The internet was still in its adolescence then - it would take so long just to illegally download an MP3 of a song one should have been buying on CD. The idea of “streaming” a whole film off the internet seemed still like a dream.
Finding and watching “art films” required effort and time - one needed to go to a speciality theatre or acquire an often tricky-to-find DVD. I remember even buying an “all-region” DVD player so I could order films so obscure they weren’t even released in America. I remember being so thrilled to acquire an Italian copy of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendary El Topo and finally see it. Now it’s finally available in America remastered on Blu-Ray in 4K:
Back in 2004 through 2006 I was writing newspaper articles and published movie review as I aspired to write screenplays for feature films. Yet by 2020 I was writing about internet-streaming miniseries for online publications and being paid well to write scripts for YouTube videos.
In my ongoing series on antisemitism and culture my regular introduction includes an aphorism popularized by my late mentor Andrew Breitbart which I took so seriously it reshaped my career in 2015: “Politics is downstream from culture.” But before then in another PJ Media article from March 2014 - “How Conservatives Can Conquer Hollywood” - building on my critique of cinema’s slow death I made a deeper realization, again my emphasis added:
Conservatives should be looking to the future and to new mediums of entertainment. Humans are not going to amuse themselves by sitting around staring at screens forever. I still believe in the Breitbartian idea that the battle for the culture is more important than the fight over political ideology. Where I’ve changed is in realizing that there’s actually a force more important and powerful to affect and control. Culture is driven by technology. Movable type came before the Gutenberg Bible. Edison’s film camera came before Hollywood. The techniques of animation had to be discovered by Disney and his animators through years of experimenting with Silly Symphony and Mickey Mouse shorts before Snow White could be achieved.
So yeah, politics is downstream of culture. But technology has the power to carve the shape of the river itself.
I still hope to produce, write, and direct feature films someday. Just as someday I’ll finish my first novel and then write more. But as with the creation of this substack, I’m going to keep adapting to and embracing new technologies and the exciting new cultural mediums which they enable.
I urge everyone else who cares about film, art, culture, and the human experience to do the same.