Same As the Old Boss
It’s always seemed rather strange to me that, in spite of the fact that film critics may be the only unavoidable critics working (q.v. any movie preview on TV), there’s not really a “scene” of criticism or even really of cinematic discussion. Naturally there are a thousand counterexamples, but when you really get down to it, “film criticism” as we know it basically boils down to a forest of independent voices howling into the void and occasionally coming to agree on some stuff; we haven’t had a movement since Cahiers took a Turn in 1968.
Contrast that to the pop music scene, which is of course alive and kicking. My favorite example is ILX, a message board where you can find roughly a billion people who write for a billion publications; it doesn’t seem unfair to credit them with a lot of recent advances in pop music habits, not the least of which are the emergence of grime and the flowering of the MP3 blog.
Why exactly isn’t there a scene like this for film (not that I’m necessarily advocating one) - is pop music just better (no), or is the medium of film too sophisticated for this kind of scene-fostering(also no)? I can think of three reasons:
- With music, there’s more room to creatively describe stuff, which is the easiest, most democratic method of criticism around – even YOOOOOO can come up with a funny thing to compare the new Interpol album to. It is, however, worth pointing out that this turns criticism into multiplayer Notepad.
- Music is more easily worked into your everyday life – you can’t surreptitiously watch movies at work, but you can play your radio or whatever and nobody’ll even notice.
- The iPod.
You think I’m kidding about the last one, but you’re wrong. iPods come up over and over and over again on ILX, usually just referentially but occasionally as a subject of legitimate discussion. By this point it seems safe to say that the iPod is the most significant consumer electronic to come out since the VCR; other items may have moved more units, but none of them have changed the users interact with the entertainment half as much. It may seem like a status symbol, but it’s a symbol in the same way that the horse used to be a symbol for the gentry back in the day – it only represents something because it gives the user the power to something that the non-user absolutely cannot. As you can probably tell, I recently bought one.
By now, everybody can probably sing the iPod’s biggest selling point along with me: “You can always have total access to all your music”. Which is more or less true; I can certainly say that I’ve gotten into a bunch of new artists since getting the iPod, since I generally only want to hear Dizzee Rascal right when I actually want to hear him (although I reeeeeeeeeeeeally want to hear him right then). But in actuality, this isn’t really the side of the die that keeps me from feeling like I’ve wasted my money; that’s an honor reserved for the “shuffle” function.
Shuffle is exactly what you think it is: it throws every song on your iPod into one playlist ordered at random, and I swear before God and Christ together that it is absolutely the most fascinating thing you will ever access if the act of listening to music is something you like. It’s like the perfect synthesis of the radio and your taste; you’re not necessarily going to hear something you never saw coming (still the major selling point of the radio), but the next best thing to that is “not knowing what’s coming up next”, and that ain’t half bad. I doubt I would have ever had a split second for Dntel’s “The Dream of Evan and Chan” if it hadn’t come right on the heels of TV on the Radio’s “Satellite”, but it did, and now I can’t stop listening to it.
Now, given that you’re the one loading up your iPod with the music files themselves, you’d think that the attraction to this feature would be driven by the amount of control it offers you; you would also be wrong. Shuffle isn’t attractive because it presents you with stuff that matches your taste (or if that’s why it’s attractive to you, then you’re probably always half of a very irritating conversation) – it’s attractive because the power of selection is out of your hands. The sneaky thing about the iPod is that it’s actually a very smart piece of electronics, in that it can manage your data way better than you’d have ever thought, and right out of the box no less; I remember being floored once I realized that it factored out the word “the” when arranging a list of artists alphabetically. Clearly, this is a machine that knows how to organize information, and it doesn’t organize information like you do, unless of course you happen to be wholly electronic. It’s like catching a radio station and SkyNet holding hands.
My point is that film can’t possibly compete with that. The
whole idea of cinema is that you apply logic and recognition skills you learn
in the real world to a fake one, and in a relationship like that, there isn’t
really a whole lot of power left to give over to the gadgets. If anything, the
gadgetry of film empowers the audience; the handheld camera made the audience
filmmakers, and the VCR (and later DVD player) turned any television into a
potential site for cinema. I suppose that you could make a device that lets you
cut movies up into even smaller units and then shuffle scenes or shots, but
Christ almighty would that ever get irritating - I mean, there's got to be SOME respect for the form, right?
So I guess there’s no burgeoning scene for film right now because there’s nothing really new going on, or at least as far as the relationship between the consumer and the product goes. This isn’t to say that there’s no work being done in those terms – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 11’9”01 short is nothing if not eleven minutes of just that – but you get my point. People are always going to be drawn to the brand new, and right now the aesthetic experiences offered up by the iPod are just to shiny to be ignored. There’s movement in a direction going on with music right now, and that would win out.
Which is exactly why I find myself very interested in film all of a sudden. Film right now is well past its iPod stage; the VCR is old and busted, and the DVD player – which is really just a VCR for the new millennium – is only marginally more interesting than a toaster oven by this point. And yet the VCR totally exploded our notions of how we interact with film; suddenly audiences were surrendering more to a film’s content than to the experience of going to a movie, sitting in the dark, and staring at a giant image. Now we’re stuck with a raging debate about whether people who learn about film from watching DVDs and videotapes are actually learning anything about film whatsoever; I would imagine that there’s a storm brewing in the music community as to whether someone can legitimately understand a work outside of its original context.
I dunno. This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me; truly modern civilization always has the watermark of accelerated consumption. All I’m saying is that we should be dealing with cinema right now specifically because we deal with it more slowly, and if that means movies are replacing books (and, presumably, music is replacing movies?), then so be it. I still read books too, y’know.
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