"I grew up on American movies. Sue me!" -- Martin Scorsese
I've decided that I'm going to dedicate Fridays to talking about movies. My posts may concern current films in theatrical release, new video releases, movies from earlier eras, the industry, film festivals, starts, whatever.
I try to explain to my kids how different entertainment is today. They can watch pretty much whatever they want whenever they want. The only limits are their parents' rules, not an arbitrary schedule. Audiovisual entertainments are commonplace. I suppose they were to me, too, since I watched more movies on tv than at the theater. But when i sit at the multiplex with them, waiting for the trailers to finish, I still get the goosebumps that something awesome is going to appear before my eyes for the next ninety minutes, like Hugo. (Or just sitting in the theater next to my wife, watching a movie for grownups -- really awesome because so rare!)
Movies are precious. Woody Allen once said (I'm paraphrasing) that to do great work on television is like a great artist whose medium is sand. Allen was referring to the ephemeral, temporary quality of television (though I imagine some Zen Buddhists might have some interesting responses to Allen). In its massive quantities of materials, its hours and hours of programming for a single series, television depreciates its own worth. This is epitomized by the phrase "jump the shark," referring to the point in the run of a series where the show has become lame. This happens even to the very best of television series; their popularity ultimately keeps them on the air too long, and that level of excellence is hard to maintain.
Of course, movies can be incredibly repetitive, too, with sequels and formulas. And before television, movies came in serials, too, cheaply produced, mainly aimed at kids. (Watch the old Batman serial from the forties -- he's fat!) But it still seems easier to sift through the sand and find the movie treasures buried there than it does to find tv treasures. I've taught courses in film history and television history, and I've also taught general survey courses in American literature. While obviously no one course of fourteen weeks will cover the breadth of any of these subjects, to do so for television seems much more of an exercise in futility.
This is not some kind of "purist" or "elitist" argument about one medium over another. It's a matter of uniqueness. While the metaphor may not be as relevant as it once was, Raymond Williams' term "flow" still applies to a large degree for television; it's something you just tap into and dive in at any point. Movies, like literature, can be taken out of the flow of culture. Libraries by their very nature encase culture in an historical box. Film collections do the same thing. Television is too unwieldy -- at least as a field of study. (The digital age has made storage much easier, but that doesn't mean all of tv can be studied. To watch the entire run of a daytime soap would take years, as Robert C. Allen noted.)
In this media conglomerated, synergistic universe, all forms of entertainment overlap. And maybe these distinctions become irrelevant -- movies, television, YouTube, etc. But even if we accept the blurring of these boundaries, one has to find a launch point in order to make sense of things -- while we might agree that language systems are full of arbitrary symbols, we still use them to present an order to our world. It's important of course to understand the politics of such order, just as it is important to understand the politics of canonization.
For me movies at their best maintain a mythic power; theaters are temples, altars of dreams, both materialistic and otherwise. and on Fridays, I'll offer a sermon or two.
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