...For several generations, going to the movies was not just escapism; it was like watching a new Western canon being composed in real time. ......After Avengers: Endgame came out, I never again heard my students quote a new movie in class. The canon has closed. Nowadays, when I say “I hear [a new movie] is good”, I mean “someone online wrote this was good.” People don’t actually talk about movies anymore.To add salt to the wound, the lovers of mainstream film who invited you to watch Casablanca and Singing in the Rain have been replaced by people who are arguing about the in-world consistency of the 9th Star Wars/Halloween/Aliens movie. Debates about the filmic canon have given way to debates about specific mythologies created so that studios can keep making movies with the same main characters....
If a certain stretch of Europe had not been inundated with chivalric literature about knights we'd have never gotten Don Quixote. Had the topes of the martial arts genre not been worn so threadbare by the 1980s within Japanese genre entertainment we might not have gotten Ranma 1/2. There are times when spectacular spoofs of stolid genres are possible because the genres have managed to become so stolid. Yes, you saw what I just did there. We're living in an era in which American studios are doing remarks of Japanese cartoons based on manga that are forty or more years old.
We live in an era in which a writer at ArtsFuse can refer to Chainsaw Man: The Movie - Reze Arc as a critique of late-stage capitalism and a real alternative to Marvel-Disney superhero bloat. Look, I watched season 1 of Chainsaw Man and it was and is a hyperviolent variant of the superhero genre. Power is probably the most overt homage to Eric Cartman anyone could have invented without actually being Eric Cartman from South Park. What I find disingenuous about a claim that the franchise is an alternative to Hollywood is just that claim. But I am skeptical about the idea that we lack a mainstream just because an author implies there's been no movies quoted from students since Endgame.
The lack of a "mainstream" has existed in some art forms for generations now. The central thrust of Leonard Meyer's Music, The Arts, and Ideas half a century ago was there was no classical music mainstream. Instead a panoply and plethora of styles and forms co-existed across the entire planet.
Back in the day George Steiner remarked on the demise of literacy for literature in the book In Bluebird's Castle but then, at the end, almost too much in passing suggested that college students in the 1970s had become astonishingly musically literate. Maybe the capacity for literacy and hyper-literacy among the young had been or was migrating away from classical Western canon literary works to music? Teachers whose literal business is to teach canons (or make them, that's an option, too) can lament that canons seem to be closed. Alternatively, guardians of real culture can declare that the canon isn't closed, really, it's just that nobody has made anything worth canonizing--they will leave out the part that they never tend to come up with any nominees for what ought to be canonized now. Dave Matthews the composer of string quartets or Dave Matthews the songwriter in The Dave Matthews Band?
The idea that cinema was the collective cultural ritual of our time has been a popular idea. The idea is so popular I noticed that early on in Cinemagogue: The MARVEL-Us Era James Harleman observed how Hollywood became so desperate during covid-19 restriction they began to make advertisements declaring that cinema tells the stories that shape our lives. In his earlier book he proposed that films were the sermons and cinema the pulpit of American contemporary culture. The crisis of covid-19 was many things and in part it presented a crisis of movie-going, if movies are sermons and cinema is church then people aren't going to church anymore!
The death of criticism has been getting announced for about thirty years now so I confess to being particularly jaded by these kinds of jeremiads. James Harleman mentioned in his first Cinemagogue that more movies have been made in the last twenty years than the previous century, if memory serves. That spectacular flooding of the market can make the mainstream seem so mainstream that people may just turn to Chainsaw Man as an alternative.
As a counterpoint to Andrew Barber's points about the demise of cinema, it may be that earlier epochs of criticism were designed around never having to engage franchise in criticism. Arguing about the in-world consistency of franchises can be important, particularly as franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek seem to keep hobbling away into irrelevancy via over-saturation. The problem may not be this or that political messaging of The Message (a la The Critical Drinker) the problem may be closer to Screen Junkies' remark that Disney forgot what made Star Wars movies special, they go the #$%^ away for ten years to make sure people miss the franchise, not swamping us with a movie every other year and three TV shows on Disney+.
In the last ten years I think that what critics mean by the death of criticism is neither the death of criticism nor the death of an art form, it's not even necessarily their own mortality. The axiom that critics who lament the death of an art form are lamenting their own mortality is too easily endorsed in the 2020s. No, I'm going to come up with something more scabrous and suggest that the thing critics may be lamenting is that honey is tasteless to a person who is full but to the starving person any bitter thing tastes great. Critics are vocationally committed to levels of arts consumption that bludgeon their capacity to be moved by the arts. The crisis is they've consumed too much, not that consumers are consuming the wrong things.
There can be a type of thinkpiece in Christian online magazines and blogging that goes something roughly like this: I threw myself entirely into X (ahem, Twitter) and found after a few years it was bad for my soul. Therefore I'm going to write a thinkpiece about how bad X is for your soul based on a semi-confessional essay where I don't exactly get specific about why using X was bad for my soul but I'll tell you, the rhetorical "you" why it's most likely bad for your soul as it was for mine. To pivot back to James Harleman's newer Cinemagogue, his pastoral concern, shared early in the book, was that though he loves movies and loves watching movies, his worry was that many people know more movie dialogue and more movie scenes than know biblical literature.
I've never been a cinephile and don't consider myself a cinephile so I don't feel there is any sense of crisis if fewer and fewer people are going to the movies. Every art form has peaks and valleys, and forms and genres have shelf lives. I have written a few times that the prestige of the polyphonic votive mass has nose-dived compared to the medieval and Renaissance periods but Christian masses still get composed and performed across the world. The symphony was the most prestigious expression of music in the trans-Atlantic Euro-American world for about two centuries but it likely will be no longer. The symphony isn't going away but its moment of prestige has passed. Barber seems to have concluded that the moment for cinema has passed and has waved goodbye.
I have thought about why it seems Hollywood has kept returning to certain franchises and it led me to speculate that when the franchises seemed to cluster around utopian and dystopian impulses in pop culture from the JFK/LBJ administrations and the Reagan administrations that there was possibly a geopolitical/civic religious element to the franchises that kept getting revisited. Nostalgia and the Anxieties of Empire: Toward a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia was something I wrote more than ten years ago. It seemed to me that whether it's Star Trek or the Marvel superheroes; or Star Wars and Aliens and The Terminator, it seems plausible to suggest that the nostalgia Hollywood has for sci-fi franchises has clustered around the blue-state and red-state peaks of American civic religion, and the franchises that are most often visited feature some aspect of the greatest dreads and optimisms of those eras.
As someone who thinks pax Americana has been over for some time, and that it started ending since 9/11/2001, I float the idea that the crisis of cinema isn't the crisis of cinema, it's the crisis of an empire that is no longer the leader of the free world (whatever that may now mean). After a lifetime of engagement the usual genre franchises of Star Trek and Star Wars are both dead to me. The Terminator franchise and the Alien franchise don't interest me, either. Robocop didn't need to be revisited and Top Gun is impossible to take seriously when you know how many ways Mitchell should have been court-martialed based on all the things he did wrong in the original film. Part of the reason Asian cinema exploded on to the West Coast in the 1990s was because the usual suspects were just too usual in what they were cranking out within the American cinematic mainstream. All two brothers had to do in the lae 1990s was simply do a passable homage to Hong Kong action cinema and The Matrix spun out a bunch of needless sequels to what was a pretty fun action romp (deBoer is wrong to say it wasn't very good, it was a pretty good knock-off of tropes from John Woo's action films mixed with sci-fi elements).
Late last year I played with the idea that when arts critics have no real gatekeeping power they are nothing more than super-consumers. There can be two senses in which criticism has a crisis of legitimacy in the present. The first crisis is the lack of a gatekeeping power. Noah Berlatsky used to declare that a critic has the power to decide whether or not something even is art. But why should I take Richard Brody seriously in making that kind of judgment call? Just because he writes for The New Yorker? If the thing that separates a critic from a normal person is the normal person Saul has watched thousands of hours and the critic David has watched tens of thousands of hours of television then what is the basis for the critic regarding the normal person as having less qualification to decide what they enjoy? Absent the gatekeeping capacity the critic can be the drunk who has the bad liver and the broken heart lamenting the kids who are just drinking Zima and not whatever the critic just sipped from a few moments ago.
Barber's mention of Ebert seems telling because Ebert used to say that he realized that there was no point in telling people not to eat hot dogs. He realized that it made more sense as a critic interacting with a real public to say "Okay, you shouldn't eat hot dogs all the time but I liked this hot dog."
That, now that I think of it, may be the quality of expression I have hardly ever seen in 20 years of reading Mere Orthodoxy. I'm not sure I have anything to add beyond that right now.
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