These I came across far outside the temporal window-of-hype weakly drummed up by Netflix and other streamers that seems to exist for maybe the cumulative total of a fortnight. That’s the nature of Hollywood films in the age of streaming. They are little discussed outside of their own cultural niches. They are good for employing people and giving them a modest-to-meager living—though, as the dismal results for the actors’ strike show, not too well and perhaps not for long.
When friends or strangers at bars report to me that they’ve seen a streaming-only release, I always express shock.
“You’ve heard of ‘x’?” I ask.
“No,” they say. “I just was browsing on Netflix one night and it was there.”
Voilà: a film is now just there. It is not discovered, or dug from the depths, like Scorsese happening upon Italian neorealist flicks on late-night ’50s TV. It is not heard about in advance, anticipated, and then avidly watched. A movie now is only perceived and absorbed as yet more content. Because of the endless scroll, we (falsely but understandably) think we have seen everything available. The moving image, so omnipresent on our phones and in our daily lives, doesn’t bear a dark-enclosing specialness.
Hardly Working: David Fincher’s “The Killer” on Notebook | MUBI
Ironic that I watched The Killer yesterday exactly because I read the above blog post. I think the movie is quite beautiful but otherwise it didn’t move me.
>A movie now is only perceived and absorbed as yet more content. Because of the endless scroll, we (falsely but understandably) think we have seen everything available. The moving image, so omnipresent on our phones and in our daily lives, doesn’t bear a dark-enclosing specialness.
I am (within 200 pages) just finishing the book(s)[1] “The Matter With Things” by Iain McGilchrist. After having read these books, it’s no wonder that we are so easily re-calibrated by electronic appliances in a relatively short time.
If you think about the iPhone for instance, it came out in mid-2007 but really didn’t do much. I received one as a gift … but there were no third party apps. It takes three more years to get to the iPhone 4 and that is where this really begins to take off because by then the competition for eyeballs between iOS devices and Android devices is hot and third party apps become “a thing.” So this “revolution” (or whatever you want to call it) is only “13-ish” years old. If this “revolution” were a person they would just be in 8th grade.
But once you read McGilchrist’s book, it’s no wonder that we became so enmeshed with these devices in such a short time. These devices are now part of (mainstream) culture.
I read a stat that indicated that the world population (found at https://www.census.gov/popclock/) and the number of mobile devices found have crossed: There are now more mobile devices than there are people on the planet. That’s pretty astonishing.
In an essay I read recently, the author[2] says, “Drug us with a steady diet of titillating and banal content on those compact drug delivery devices that we carry around with us all the time, in our pockets, in our hands, glazed eyes staring down, beside us as we sleep.”
No kidding. It’s really not possible to be over-assiduous.
—
1. The “book” is in two volumes.
2. ref:https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/era-of-the-false-narrative%5D
But The Smiths soundtrack…
:-)