So you take your disk and insert it into your Little Elvis, and a couple of minutes later you’re printing up stuff like gangbusters on your new printer. Take your other disk and insert it into your PC for the same purpose, and you have sold your soul to the devil. I tried twice to set up the damned thing last night, and hung both times. I’ll try again tonight. WARNING: Do not walk under the windows of the chez this evening, as you may get hit by a tossed Dell.
Aaarrggghhhhh!!!!
If, as is apparent, I have co-opted Fukuyama’s end of history coinage for my own somewhat different purposes, and if I tend to ignore the communist aspects of French pomo, among other academic sins which I’m sure anyone who knows anything about my subjects would be happy to point out on listening to or reading my various philosophical ruminations, then it should also be apparent that I am becoming more of a philosopher than an academic. I absorb whatever it is I absorb from my own various sources, stir it up a bit in the old mental cauldron, and the resulting stew is not really commentary so much as personal synthesis. Given that I presume to assert that the subjective synthesis is based on objective data, what else is that but, if not philosophy (i.e., a love of knowledge or wisdom), at least pointed philosophical analysis? If philosophy is merely the digestion of the works of philosophers, it is purely academic. Applying meaningful ideas that one derives from one’s study of philosophy, in other words using philosophy to some particular end, is what I’m after. And I would suggest that this meaningful application is tantamount to the thing—philosophy—itself.
(In a way, this is not far removed from the idea of arguing the resolution vs theory arguments. The latter are dry and academic and ultimately jejune, in my opinion, while determinations derived from the former can lead to right actions. All the discussions in the universe about what LD ought to be will result in nothing but changes, or lack thereof, in the processes of LD. Whereas all the discussions in the world about, say, domestic abuse or corporate ethics, will result in a more informed citizenry as high school debaters mature and move from the educational phases of their lives into whatever comes next.)
One thing I would elaborate on from my recent Postmodern Condition lecture is that no matter how you reckon with the Foucaultian proposition of a subjectively empowered elite calling the shots on subjective issues in such a way as too remove their subjectivity, we are clearly living today in an ever more post-Foucaultian world. We less and less, if at all, accept authority, especially when we are hard-pressed to figure out why that authority is in its august authoritarian position in the first place. The rather silly Time Person of the Year, “You,” is a good example of this. Or more to the point, those items iterated as indicative of You being worthy of celebration, are good examples of it. Look at movies, for instance. Content notwithstanding, the business of movies is, indeed, a business. A film comes out, and its producers want us to fork over the money it takes to buy a ticket or rent/buy the DVD. It is a monetary transaction, one way or the other. At best, they make a profit, and we are reasonably content that we have gotten the appropriate entertainment value for our expenditure. Normal market forces are at play throughout. They try to sell us what we want, we try to buy what we want, etc. But how do we know what we want? Let’s say that the movie process, for a consumer, is a $20 transaction. It costs $20 for a pair of tickets to the Cineplex, or $20 for DVD. How do we decide where to spend our $20? This is a matter of concern for both the consumers and the producers. We want value for our $20. They want our $20.
The initial dialectic of successful film production in the beginning of the 1900s quickly entailed the concept of branding. The idea of “movie star,” human brands consumers would seek out, was recognized early by movie producers. People went to Mary Pickford movies because she was a recognizable and hence marketable brand. Douglas Fairbanks movies were another brand. As were Charlie Chaplin movies. And so forth. Moviegoers were more likely to buy tickets when the name of the marquee was familiar. (Usually the movies were familiar, too, but that goes with the branding.) New brands were constantly tested, and new types of brands. Alfred Hitchcock’s brand showed that a filmmaker, as compared to an actor, could sell product. And there were also a few other non-acting names above the titles that could bring people to the movie palaces, like David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind.
For a variety of reasons, this sort of branding eventually went bust. The studio systems no longer provided the milieu for the creation of stars, directors became the “new” stars, even critics became stars. Movie-going, which was a regular event for decades, became a special event as television co-opted regular entertainment ingestion. Lots of things changed after “Hollywood” and the big movie studios, but the end result was, indisputedly, that there were fewer films, and people were pickier about which ones to see. The end of history, as far as Hollywood was concerned, came with the breakup of the studios in the 1950s, and along with it, the end of the studio system that owned both the means of production and the venues for distribution, complete and total vertical integration. A slow sapping of strength as one studio after another faltered and died was the result. Hollywood was over.
What replaced Hollywood, by which I mean the big Hollywood studios, was independent filmmaking. Some people say that the ‘70s was a golden age of moviemaking, and this might be true, although there have been others. The 70s saw a new generation of moviemakers make it big: Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, etc. Theirs was a self-conscious brand of filmmaking, as most of them had been educated at film schools, which means that they were the products of not only their filmmaking predecessors but of academics and critiques and theories and all that that entails. As Jean-Luc Goddard so famously said, the best criticism of a film is to make another film, and that’s what these folks were doing. Add to this mix, literally, the French. Cahiers du cinema was the journal where folks like Goddard and Francois Truffaut were writing about movies, and French new wavers were hatching the auteur theory of films, positing the director as the creative center of a film, even including the old Hollywood films that hitherto had appeared to be products of process rather than a single individual. (It is something of an apotheosis of all this when Spielberg cast Truffaut in Close Encounters, Spielberg being the most old-fashioned of the new Hollywood directors.) From the consumers’ point of view—and there were still film consumers because it still takes a whole lot of money to make movies and therefore a whole lot of people paying to see those movies remains a requirement—there were even star critics who percolated down from academia, name brand writers like Kael and Sarris whose opinions were sought after even when one wasn’t all that interested in seeing the movies they were talking about. Film criticism became worthy of shelf space in book stores. But the question arose soon enough: why should I trust these people’s opinions of films? I mean, they’re just other yabbos sitting in the movie theater with whatever personal tastes they might have. Why are their tastes more important than my own?
Here’s the problem of post-history Hollywood. Without a fixed method of collecting money for product (i.e., studio-owned theaters), how do you get people to spend that $20 we were talking about? Before post-history Hollywood, your monopoly did the job for you. But now what?
The beginning of the purest post-historic Hollywood moment is the invention of the movie blockbuster. Usually this honor goes to Jaws and in some respects (i.e. opening weekend) that may be correct, but the earlier The Exorcist sticks in my mind as the first movie that people lined up for from day one, the first movie event, the first big blockbuster. Regardless, in the 70s the event movie came into being, movies that everyone lined up for and saw the minute it opened. Of course, this immediately raises the question, why show up for this movie, about which you know nothing? But I’m more interested in the slightly deeper question, why after you know that a movie is going to be “big” do you accept that bigness as a reason to go see it? In other words, one way or another a film is hyped or publicized, and people find out about it. That’s a different story than why, once people learn that something is going to be, or is, boffo (that’s “big box office” to you), they feel compelled to see it, to add to its boffo-ness. And in that compulsion, more today than ever, is the essence of post-historical, post-Foucaultian Hollywood.
Today, we don’t go see a movie because we have been led there by critics. No critics hold sway in 2007 as they did in the 70s. We have “Rotten Tomatoes” so that we can quantify criticism, which is entirely qualitative and therefore inherently unquantifiable. Siskel and Ebert, who became Ebert and Roper, who I used to refer to as NotSiskel and Ebert, and who have lately been NotSiskel and NotEbert, are the closest we get to critical name brands, but we watch them to see the clips to glean our own impressions of films, and we don’t care much whether they’re Siskel, Ebert, Roper, in any or no combination, with or without guest hosts (including, sacre bleu, Fred Willard), and in ads, there had better be two thumbs up, owners of hands notwithstanding, or forget about it. The fact that Sony invented make-believe critics to supply quotes for its ads proved to some extent that the critical blurbs were mere garnish on the ad page. We have digested our Foucault entirely, divesting all our knowledge elites of their power. The knowledge elite no longer exists.
Instead, we go to particular movies because those are the movies we are going to. We put our ears to the ground one way or the other and select those films, and we grab our $20 and we are off to the races. We, the general public, know the weekend box-office of every film released, every week. We do not know the weekly sales of Chevy Impalas, but we know how Borat and Happy Feet are doing. We know that Pirates II set opening weekend records. We may sense that it’s a so-so movie, but we went in droves, and if that wasn’t enough, we spent enough more $20s to make it the biggest selling DVD on release right before Christmas. Quality did not or does not interest us. Quantity, on the other hand, does. We go where the crowd goes. But not because we’re “keeping up;” it’s not that we wish to be au courant. We believe that the crowd knows better than the old elite because we believe that the crowd represents us. The crowd is the aggregate of the disenfranchised, the common person writ large, hence ourselves. We want out own opinions to matter. In this case, we accept the opinions of those just like us, the other members of the crowd.
And we take this further. NetFlix recommends movies based on what we like as we rate each film in their collection. They show us how everyone else feels about the movies. But they’ve gotten rid of their in-house critic from the olden days, and only residually push Ebert as their critic brand, although they do have a handful of other critics as part of a film’s overall presentation, sort of a “Rotten Cherry Tomatoes.” We “Digg” content on the internet, which means we decide what to read based on quantity of readership and acclamation by quantities rather than by quality, to which we add our own quantitatively incremental vote. And, ultimately, we create our own films, because we can, and we then Digg/thumb-up/recommend/watch in the same follow-the-crowd pattern. We watch the same viral videos. We go to YouTube to see what other people are seeing. Google pays megabucks to buy YouTube just in case it actually is the future. And, if YouTube IS the future? Is post-history’s next step away from a knowledge elite the creation of a content-producing non-elite? I mean, I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks YouTube is the largest collection of moving pictorial crap ever collected in the shortest amount of time, and yeah, Time is right that YOU did it, but no offense folks, you didn’t do it very well, and personally I don’t think that you’re going to be getting all that much better at it any time soon.
Blogging, of course, is another symptom of the post-historical, post-Foucaultian postmodern condition. Mea culpa, brothers and sisters, mea culpa. The sheer idea that I can consider myself a philosopher only can arise in the post-historical, post-Foucaultian environment.
My guess is that, in the long run, the growth of private movies will have little or no effect on public movies. The ability to privately publish books hasn’t changed literature, it’s just enabled more people to privately publish books. Similarly the ability to privately publish films won’t change cinema, it will merely enable more people to privately publish their movies. When I plop down at night to save the cheerleader, I’ll be looking for an hour’s quality (in my mind) entertainment, not quantity (in the popular mind) entertainment. Maybe you’ll be sitting down for an hour of good old YouTube videos. But somehow, I really don’t think so. And with the breakdown of the historical dialectic, that’s as much predicting as I’m willing to make.
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