Last weekend I went to see A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic. And though I have no strong interest in Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, or any of the other musicians featured in the film, I really liked it. It’s exactly the kind of film that I used to relish, one that not only tells a good story but does so with a great appreciation for the craft of filmmaking.
And honestly, I was shocked to discover that. Despite decades of passion about cinema, somehow it’s gotten to the point where I react to the announcement of each new film with nothing but skepticism. How did that happen?
If you follow the logic of auteurs like Martin Scorsese, who has decried the collapse of cinema as an art form, over the last 20 years Hollywood studios have become so obsessed with the big cash to be gained from blockbuster franchises (particularly those of the superhero variety), they killed investment in everything else. Like a farmer who overworks their soil with just one crop, they’ve blighted the entire industry.
Recently at the Sundance Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino spoke to another wrinkle in the current landscape, the demands of streaming. “What the fuck is a movie now?” he asked the crowd. “Something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks…and by the second week you can watch it on television?” Theatrical release, he said, has become “just a show pony exercise.”
This, too, is a function of the rapaciousness of the Hollywood system, which leapt into streaming to generate attention and new investment, but without any clear plan on how to make such ventures solvent. For years, Netflix and the like would trumpet their latest quarterly earnings (and continue to). But none of them were actually in the black — and I doubt any of them ever will be; with the costs of production, an audience that can jump ship at any time, and uncertain advertising dollars, streaming is simply not a viable business model.
When investors finally started to ask questions a few years ago, the studios leapt into a series of desperate measures, from firing whole areas of their staff or charging an arm and a leg for the ad-less options that had previously been their baseline to the release of most of their films online almost immediately because they need the streaming audience. More and more of Hollywood has become basically a run-down dollar store, and what was cinema is now just other content to put on the shelves.
Some have pushed back against Tarantino, just as they have against Scorsese’s comments about Marvel blockbusters, declaring their views out-of-date and snobbish. Luke Buckmaster writing on Flicks said the idea that films in theaters are the only real kind of films is am “antiquidated [sic] view…mostly pedalled by people with skin in the game.”
Martin Scorsese insists that the problem of movies today is not as simple as people just don’t want to go to more artsy films. “It’s a chicken-and-egg issue,” he argued. “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.”
“I’ve never seen Pulp Fiction in a cinema,” he wrote, “And…who cares? This hasn’t reduced my appreciation of it one bit.”
But the thing is, what exactly is the film that Buckmaster has appreciated? Because as someone who saw Pulp Fiction when it came out in 1994, and has seen it since, I can tell you, the shock of it in that immersive experience of watching it on a big screen in a crowded theater is completely different than watching it at home, whether on your jumbo TV or your laptop. And the fact that you can walk away from either experience with the same opinion— Buckmaster says it was “among the greatest motion pictures of the 90s”—is not to say you’ve had the same experience. You haven’t.
Of course filmmakers are upset because they have skin in the game. But unlike the studios, their “skin” is not first and foremost the promise of a big payout, but the presentation and experience of their art. To say that filmmakers shouldn’t be upset that films made for theaters are being released instead on TVs and iPads is like saying it doesn’t matter whether the Mona Lisa is hung in the Louvre or a KFC, or that the experience of hearing the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra or Missy Higgins is the same live or on your earbuds.
In his 2019 article in the New York Times explaining his comments about Marvel movies, in which he writes beautifully about the revelatory power of cinema, Martin Scorsese insists that the problem of movies today is not as simple as people just don’t want to go to more artsy films. “It’s a chicken-and-egg issue,” he argued. “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.”
I would say it’s even worse than that: If you insist on giving people nothing but crap, not only might some begin to insist the crap is as good as anything anyone ever had before. The many who know better may come to assume it’s all crap and stop believing films have anything meaningful to reveal at all.
Jim McDermott is an American culture critic and screenwriter.
Main image: Quentin Tarantino presents The Grand Prix Award during the closing ceremony during the 76th annual Cannes film festival at Palais des Festivals on May 27, 2023 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)