the coda to The Phantom Empire, by Geoffrey O’Brien, touches upon a question I ponder from time to time: will we always have movies? won’t, at some point in the collapsing future, the tools necessary to make films become harder and harder to come by? most significantly, contemporary film stock is made from petroleum byproducts—and the components in digital cameras are extracted in processes that are also detrimental to the environment. the mechanism for distribution, the zigzagging of flights between locations, studios, and premieres, the state subsidies that launder the blood money of the American Experiment. “And will this empire indeed go on forever? Won’t the electricity run out, won’t the raw materials have to be rationed, won’t such practices fall victim to the impending war against pollutants?….[Maybe people in the future] would simply lose interest. Having evolved out of a world where the little living pictures were everywhere, perhaps the most exciting thing they could witness would be the screen going blank.”
movies, more than any other medium, inspire the deepest ambivalence in me. people can decry novels as “bourgeois,” reflections of a particular formation of subjectivity, relics of an era and a class with the leisure time required to read hundreds of pages. I’m not convinced by this, but it gives pause, and novels certainly can be used as a method of withdrawal from the world. nonetheless, stories, even those written on paper and bound in books, will not likely disappear, and they have been and will remain objects that beckon to the highest aspects of the human spirit.
painting has certainly become a little more than a barnacle on the flank of financialized capital. since at least the 1950s, what appears on a canvas is less important than how much money can exchange hands behind it. the most “valuable” paintings more often than not sit in Swiss warehouses or on Caribbean islands, hidden from the prying hands of national governments seeking to remove wealth from circulation, not to mention any eyes that might see something beautiful. but then we are confronted with those images on the cave walls of southern France, and we’re reminded just how mysterious this impulse is, to represent, in whatever material’s to hand, the forms that constitute the world.
movies, though. movies swallowed reality. movies promise a shared community experience, but only by turning each audience member into an interchangeable cipher. the movies colonize our memories, our dreamspaces; not just with their plots, but with the private lives of their actors, the business intrigue between their production companies. the movies are everywhere, too: television shows, advertisements, music videos, TikTok dances, YouTube essays, surveillance footage. and the movies operate by flagrantly manipulating perception: whether or not you recognize it as technique, or an illusion, the fact is that with movies we’ve managed the most effective means of mind control ever dreamt of. the Roman empire would kill to have movies, and perhaps that’s exactly what happened; Leni Riefenstahl, Ronald Reagan, Top Gun: Maverick.
but a world without movies? without the beauty, splendor, horror, or longing we’ve experienced through the screen? without these glimpses into a reality we inhabit but can’t quite realize? it pains me to imagine a world without movies. but perhaps that’s what exactly what the movies want us to feel.
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