"Cinema is dead. It died in 1962. I think it was in October!" — Aki Kaurismäki
Hello from the London Gatwick airport, as I write this while waiting for my flight to Edinburgh in a couple hours, where I’ll be spending the next three months on a research trip. I will probably have more to say about what I get up to in future newsletters, but for now I was thinking about my overnight flight from Montreal to London, and how the movie I chose to watch (on my own laptop) was the 1935 horror film Mark of the Vampire. Meanwhile, I could see other people watching an Ant-Man movie, Avatar: The Way of Water (the way it was meant to be seen), and the Bradley Cooper/Gaga A Star is Born, though that woman was also playing solitaire the entire time on her phone. My point isn’t that I have better taste than these people, because that goes without saying!!! Still, it did reignite a recent preoccupation for me. Whether it was the advent of television, the first blockbusters, the internet, or any number of other threats, cinema’s demise has long been foretold. It hasn’t happened yet, and let me answer the question posed in the title right away: no, cinema is not dead, and won’t be dead anytime soon.
Still, I’ve been thinking for a while now about what is going on, and decided to actually write it out here to try and make sense of it in a sustained way rather just via a somewhat cheeky tweet. This keeps coming up among friends of mine who are also in film studies, so it has come to seem to me that being into movies in the way that we are is, increasingly, a niche interest.
Simple enough to say, but what does that actually mean? On one hand, there is the continuing discourse around box office numbers, and whether or not the pandemic has permanently changed or perhaps even nullified the theatrical element of filmgoing. I’m not personally very invested in this aspect, not only because box office numbers are generally doing well enough, but mostly because the narrative itself misses the larger point which is that if people are seeing fewer movies, it’s more likely because so much of what plays in mainstream theatres sucks.
Even still, the nicheification of cinephilia runs deeper than this, I’d argue, on a more cultural level. One factor that is obvious is technological change and how viewing habits have subsequently shifted in myriad ways, especially since the introduction of the smartphone. One result has been the way everything becomes content within a media environment that deliberately smushes everything together because it is easier for media platforms to extract data about us that way, all the better to target advertising more effectively.
This is practically old-hat analysis at this point. As Kate Eichhorn writes in her book Content, “Genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely.” Everything inevitably bleeds and blurs into everything else, because it is, in the end, a largely same-y stream of pixel to pixel, from a TV episode to a string of TikTok videos to a Times op-ed to a video podcast episode on YouTube and so on ad infinitum. Recalling media historians and scholars of olde trying to understand how people watched television in their daily lives, Eichhorn calls this experience of content “a single and indistinguishable flow.” As every industry of cultural production has been forced (to varying degrees) to submit to this state of affairs, it becomes more difficult to assign or determine value.
Enter content capital, Eichhorn’s term to capture the more nebulous nature of what is called success when more traditional markers of cultural or economic capital don’t quite appreciate what is unique about the contentification of audiovisual experience. While Eichhorn is a bit loosey-goosey with the seemingly democratic nature of content capital (it is “more easily acquired” than other forms of capital, and can build it up simply by “hanging out online” and “posting content that garners a response”), the term is a useful way to understand, for instance, a figure like the poet Rupi Kaur, who managed to turn her popularity on Instagram into a full-on force of “Instapoets” and, then, bonafide blockbuster book sales — as Eichhorn explains, it matters not whether the work is “good,” only that it is “copious and easily viewable on a mobile device.”
This, too, remains somewhat reductive, but useful for orienting us to the real point: there is little difference to the consumer between a physical copy of Milk and Honey, an Instagram post of one of its poems, and a tote bag with the same poem embossed onto it. In a similar way, content creators online try out all kinds of products and mediums, as long as they are posting frequently and with a semi-consistent voice. In the end, “In this new field of cultural production, established forms of gatekeeping have finally crumbled and, in the process, have produced an entirely new spectrum of practices that hinge on the effectiveness of one’s content strategies.”
There is little difference for the creator, then, between what may have once been imagined as the piece of work (the film, the book, the song) and the endless ancillary content that is required to be produced at increased speed. It’s no wonder, then, that those of us on the receiving end (many of us are, ourselves, creators of some kind, publishing a newsletter into the content void — subscribe now!) likewise don’t really, on an experiential level, differentiate between the thing and its associated content, because it’s really all one thing, the same thing, together and apart.
Into this morass, put simply, cinema is just one of endless competing stimuli for our attention, and one that takes a certain higher investment of time to boot. This has always been true, but only more so now, but even this is only part of the story. People clearly do still go out in droves to watch feature length movies, even if it’s just to see the latest instalment in a never-ending superhero saga or the latest Wes Anderson, in any case based on a pre-existing awareness of the creator’s appeal to their interests. Hell, they’ll enthusiastically sit through three-hour epics like Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon, provided there’s enough marketing and meme muscle behind it.
The power of all this content, though, and how it comes to resemble everything else, is that a particular object, whether Barbie or Possibly in Michigan, loses its languishing veneer of aura. You might love it, but it’s just another thing, and it won’t stop you from non-discreetly scrolling on your phone in the movie theatre or otherwise engaging in something else at the same time. My sense is that this isn’t just a loss of attention span, though it probably is that, too. It’s also a shift in how we experience media itself, and it might seem more palpable among Gen Z and those that grew up this way, but I’d wager that it’s a much more common transition that’s taking place in what our media demand of us and how it becomes appropriate to engage with it. One result of all this, then, is that being really into, say movies new and old, or any other medium in all its historic breadth, is for the sickos.
If nothing else, it feels like an opportunity for a new media theory, and in my more optimistic moments it seems possible that this transformation need not mean the end of anything, for art, its creators, and its audiences always calibrate to its moment, to its medium, to itself. In my more cynical moments, though, it still does feel like the end of a media culture that I’ve come to appreciate precisely because it asked much of us. At its best, it desired our attention, sure, but also our critical senses, our beating hearts, our comparative prowess and analytical eye. Art is an investment, and whatever shape it takes on the other side of this transitionary moment, I hope it’s able to maintain that core demand. Otherwise, it’s all just empty pixels, all the way down.
Ephemera
The always-right John Herrman wrote a great piece about how every platform, from Netflix to Twitter, lies about views. “The internet promised, among other things, absolute audience surveillance, full measurability, and perfect knowledge of who was watching what, when, and for how long. What it delivered, instead, was metric tons of metric bullshit. Endowed with new powers of self-measurement, media companies, advertising firms, and online platforms have turned metrics into something approaching misinformation.”
Some good stuff at Wired: Edward Ongweso Jr on super apps, and Cory Doctorow on how Big Tech got so big.
Song Rec: “Stars” by Tirzah