I SAW THAT

A recent deluge of “film discourse” emerged towards the end of 2021, and while not unusual as the end of the year is Oscar season, rando avatars on Twitter and elsewhere are desperate for significance to latch on to. In a year that marked a second to the intangible pandemic, a year in which our digital overlords raked in record-shattering cash and newfangled pyramid schemes and cultish investment fads swept up markets, the notion that we’d sit and digest “films”, which are passive and non-interactive, seemed outdated- but film is still the universal currency of artistic culture because of their accessibility, and the significance we apply to them to speak to our times. Anyone, everyone, can sit their ass on the couch and watch whatever, and everyone is doing just that, given that quarantining and social distancing are still recommended, and periodic variants keep emerging, presenting new, panic-inducing risks. The complete command by streaming giants Netflix, HBO Max and Disney+, not to mention Amazon, means that at any one moment the average consumer has an infinite number of choices for content, choices that reflect one’s aesthetic but also socioeconomic mood and position. That complete domination of selection by massive Hollywood-tied streaming platforms is the story of film in the last 5-10 years.

Given that there has been a flattening of film culture, it could in fact lead to a democratization of the art form- thus far, however, that hasn’t happened. Instead of focusing on positivity, I’d like to focus on the negative- basically, to spite the corny line that Paul Thomas Anderson told to John Krasinski after Krasinski said he hated a movie:

“[Anderson] so sweetly took me aside and said very quietly, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that it’s not a good movie. If it wasn’t for you, that’s fine, but in our business, we’ve all got to support each other,’” Krasinski said. “The movie was very artsy, and he said, ‘You’ve got to support the big swing. If you put it out there that the movie’s not good, they won’t let us make more movies like that.’”

That conversation occurred around twelve years ago, and the big swings have come, but there is an elephant in the room with regards to Hollywood and the global film circuit: filmmaking feels flat and overcooked, and criticizing movies is not necessarily a disservice to filmmaking- if financiers and producers have the industry so firmly by the balls, that’s the problem. Krasinski has gone on to star in dreadful films and television shows, so he was probably inventing a conversation to justify his mediocre work. Regardless, both movies and movie criticism are in a hyperkinetic tech-addled quagmire, crowdsourced on Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd and dissected incorrectly and randomly by Twitter and other websites. As we look to grab on to meaning in our lives, films have become a more slippery medium, reflecting the ruination brought on by technology and the false consciousness of internet solipsism masking itself as intelligence and culture.

A smattering of books on the topic of entertainment over-saturation have made an impact, but they feel forgotten, brought up by the literary community at random times and often not given serious attention except in undergrad when one is trying to pierce the veil. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which came out in the 80’s amidst a rather crazy boom in Japanese home electronics and consumerism, doesn’t necessarily hold up in our current insane times, but it offers a helpful rubric for how to approach the intractable issue: we are amusing ourselves to death, abolishing meaning in art and destabilizing the “zeitgeist”, and then pointing out empirical reality’s flaws and acting confused: “how come there are poor people? Why are poor people mad at Democrats and not Republicans? How come crime and violence and terrorism happen? Why would people ever question vaccine requirements? I don’t know the answers, so I’m going to focus on identity, thereby perpetuating the problem”. The arch-ironic professional middle class, which consists of tens of millions of pseudo-sophisticated pundits regurgitating talking points and effecting zero change, view the world as content, something to react to and rate, an array of signifiers that one can select to reflect one’s own (superior) socioeconomic and emotional position in the matrix of social relations, which are constantly reproduced by communications networks and interactions, thus tightening their stranglehold on the future.

For a real downer, one need only plumb the depths of Reddit for five minutes, filled with the suggestions and musings of neglected people living within a video playing in their minds, settling on truths that have no basis in reality, reflecting only their small sample of lived experience- ah shucks down-home remedies reflecting a “common sense” that no longer exists and masquerades as communication as it is in fact the lack thereof. Multiply that by millions and one can get an idea how we’ve ended up in such dire straits. To bring it back to filmmaking: the industry congratulates viewers for watching the smart films (foreign, old, “meaningful”), despite the fact that they are ephemeral, primarily reflecting the viewer’s taste, allowing them to say, “I saw that”. Actors and directors advocating for political causes and appearing approachable on social media just enhances the simulacrum- we watch moving images on screens, we listen to them talk on screens about real life issues, rinse and repeat. The fundamental ideological component of the entertainment industry is to convince viewers that we are the actors, that we are the filmmakers- film snobs are worse off (myself included) than regular people, though both parties are caught in Plato’s cave, with endless iterations of the screen making escape near-impossible.

To wrap up the rant: films are meant to be included in a rich tapestry of other forms of art, all of which we can approach within the flow of our lives. To be an artist is to believe that you can contribute to the grand history of art, that you are worthy of respect and worthy of being listened to and that what you say “matters”. One look around at our current state of affairs would reveal that the socioeconomic interests of an artist don’t lead to positive change for society in general. Instead, the commercialization of expression leads to narcissism, competitive nonsense, and a market for attention that, in its extremeness, will break apart the whole system due to its complete fragmentation. When the temporary salve of the culture industry finally collapses, we can all let out a nice “I saw that”.