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Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better? FOR as long as anyone in the movie world can remember (which may be only 20 years or so, but never mind), the fall season has been marked by a sober kind of excitement. The commercial entertainments of summer give way to more ambitious fare, and the grown-up segment of the audience goes back to the theaters looking for stirring performances, complex storytelling, important themes and big emotions. That’s the theory, anyway. Recently, though, that eager, earnest sense of anticipation — which this section of The New York Times, along with similar preview issues of other publications, both reflects and encourages — has been accompanied, at least among insiders and journalists, by annual paroxysms of anxiety. A few years ago the dominant worry was that a glut of serious movies would overwhelm the marketplace, the films crowding one another out, a concern that was followed almost seamlessly by the fear that such films might disappear altogether. Several of the major studios shut down or scaled back their specialty divisions even before the global economy began to sag. Since then producers have had more and more trouble raising money through private equity and the preselling of foreign rights. As DVD sales sink, and the best minds in the movie industry try to figure out how to take advantage of video on demand, Internet streaming and other forms of digital distribution, the business climate seems grimmer than ever. Perhaps the movie business, as it has before, will take care of itself and figure out a way to wring profits from changed circumstances. What concerns me more, apart from the quality of the movies themselves (which will continue to vary and to seem, in successive weeks, either better or worse than ever), is the state of the audience. By which I mean you, if you have read this far. Do you still care about movies? Should you? You probably do, and I somewhat self-interestedly think that you should, but how much of this is the force of habit and the weight of tradition? People like going to the movies. As personal screens and media platforms mutate and proliferate, with content streaming from all directions, there is still something special about the experience of buying a ticket and a tub of popcorn and sitting, alone or with friends, watching pictures projected through the darkness. And movies still occupy an Olympian position in the pop-culture landscape. They are bigger than television, grander than video games, more important than viral Internet videos — even if those things can often be more interesting, more profitable or more fun. Movie stars are coveted for magazine covers and talk-show guest spots; the premier movie awards show is a red-letter date on the global television calendar; movie advertisements festoon billboards, buses and Web pages. Movies are everywhere! Everyone loves movies! But love is never easy, and the relationship between cinema and its public, which has endured for more than a century, has hit a rough patch. Some data, and some impressions: This summer, box office revenue was higher than ever, but the number of people going to movies was the lowest since the summer of 1997. (Remember “Con Air” and “Men in Black” and “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”? It seems like so long ago. Or maybe just yesterday.) This apparent paradox is explained by rising ticket prices, and especially the lucrative practice of charging a premium for movies shown in 3-D. Some of the biggest hits of the season were presented in this format, which seems an especially profitable vehicle for children’s entertainment. It was not a brilliant summer, even if some of the more dyspeptic complaining, like the novelist and screenwriter Joe Queenan’s apocalyptic late-July rant in The Wall Street Journal, might seem exaggerated. Summertime brought the usual fare — superhero sequels, action thrillers, goofball comedies, animated spectacles for the whole family, remakes and reboots and rehashes. A lot of these were not as good as previous examples, though it may be splitting hairs to distinguish levels of mediocrity. But the Will Ferrell comedy (“The Other Guys”) was not as good as “Talladega Nights” or “Anchorman”; the Steve Carell comedy (“Dinner for Schmucks”) was nowhere near “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”; and, as Mr. Queenan noted at some length, the Adam Sandler comedy (“Grown-Ups”) was downright lame. People went to see them anyway, and also “Ironman 2” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” and “Sex and the City 2” and “Salt.” And quite a few went to Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a film that, whatever its flaws, showed originality rare in big-budget studio releases. It was also unusual in inspiring excited talk and obsessive argument on the Web and in multiplex parking lots. Did the top fall at the end? Did you hear that music? Was it all a dream? “Inception” and “Toy Story 3,” virtually alone among the scores of summer releases, came close to sustaining the dream of Old Hollywood, spawned back when the movies enjoyed a monopoly on visual entertainment and preserved the utopian capitalist ideal of the summer blockbuster. Movies are for everybody. But of course not everyone goes to the same movies. A few times a year it seems that way — the parents cry while the children giggle at the Pixar movie; even your nongeek friends need to check out “Avatar” or “Inception” to see what everyone is talking about — but more often movies follow the logic of division, splitting what used to be called the mass audience into demographic segments. There are, supposedly, “guy movies” and “chick flicks”; genre movies aimed at teenagers; films that cater implicitly or overtly to various ethnic, religious and ideological subgroups. Sometimes there is crossover, or (to borrow from the jargon of electoral politics) high turnout from the base. And occasionally a movie seems to sweep away all distinctions — between popular and critical success; between box office power and awards prestige — and becomes the focus of passionate discussion that ripples through the culture. When was the last time this happened? Will it happen with “The Social Network” by David Fincher or “Hereafter” by Clint Eastwood or “Black Swan” by Darren Aronofsky or any of the other ambitious movies lining up at the fall festivals? I’m not talking awards prospects or box office numbers, though these have become the easy measures of success. I mean a sense of cultural impact commensurate with the ambition displayed and the money spent. Or will some of the festival favorites — “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this year’s surprise winner of the top prize in Cannes and showing at the New York Film Festival this month; or “Meek’s Cutoff,” Kelly Reichardt’s western; or Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” — send out ripples beyond the cinephile coteries that are sure to embrace them? The salient question is this: Will any of the movies surfacing this fall provoke the kind of conversation that television series routinely do, breaking beyond niches into something larger? This bad summer movie season, in what seems to be one of the best television years ever, reinforces a suspicion that has been brewing for some time. Television, a business with its own troubles, is nonetheless able to inspire loyal devotion among viewers, to sustain virtual water-cooler rehashes on dozens of Web sites and to hold a fun-house mirror up to reality as movies rarely do. Look back over the past decade. How many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological density of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”? Engaged recent American history with the verve and insight of “Mad Men”? Turned indeterminacy and ambiguity into high entertainment with the conviction of “Lost”? Addressed modern families with the sharp humor and sly warmth of “Modern Family”? Look at “Glee,” and then try to think of any big-screen teen comedy or musical — or, for that matter, movie set in Ohio — that manages to be so madly satirical with so little mean-spiritedness. I swear, I’m not trying to horn in on my colleagues’ territory. But the traditional relationship between film and television has reversed, as American movies have become conservative and cautious, while scripted series, on both broadcast networks and cable, are often more daring, topical and willing to risk giving offense. This may represent not an aesthetic fault line, but rather a corporate division of labor, since the television networks and the movie studios belong to the same conglomerates, and there is frequent crossover among executives and producers as well as directors, actors and writers. And looked at from another angle — from your couch to the living room wall, say, or from your armchair to the laptop or other mobile electronic device in your hand — the distinction between movies and television grows more tenuous every day. The most interesting, provocative and surprising movies of the coming season may well reach you through video on demand or Internet streaming, playing in only a handful of theaters so that critics can have a chance to spread the word about them. Those movies will reach a smaller audience — a demographic niche existing uncomfortably within the mass public that has always represented the movies’ phantom ideal. And some of the best movies of the future may be movies for the few, or even for no one, expressions of idiosyncratic personal visions or ideas that linger happily at the margins. Oscar Wilde observed that there are as many publics as there are people, a notion that flips the utopian idea of movies for everyone on its head. At the movies, you’re on your own. |
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