Welcome to InterZone, an irregular column exploring the intersection of technology, art, entertainment, popular culture, consumer behavior and (please forgive me for using the word) “lifestyles” in today’s modern now a-go-go world.
Technology transforms aesthetics. Deep down, we all know this. And the ways that technologies shape the form and content of various media (recorded music, television, film, video, online — all of which overlap to some extent) are pretty striking, even when they’re not terribly pretty otherwise. Movies, which no longer have much of anything to do with film or photography, are what they are because of how and where they’re made available, and that determines the audience they reach.
The concept of the “album” couldn’t have existed before the invention of the 12-inch, 33 1/3 rpm LP. And the invention of the .mp3 file format has brought recorded music full circle: While the pop-music industry of the rock ’n’ roll era was driven by the sales of singles (on two-sided 7-inch 45 rpm discs), which were supplanted by albums in the later ‘60s up through the age of the CD, downloads and iPods have put the emphasis back on individual songs.
The current “Golden Age” of (mostly cable/satellite) television depended on the advent of the large-screen 16:9 HDTV— and time-shifting/binge-watching delivery systems like DVDs (full-series box sets), DVRs (thanks, TiVo!), Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu, Roku, Apple TV, bittorrent and various other on-demand services. They’re as important in their way as David Chase, David Milch or David Simon (creators of the influential series “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “The Wire” — all of which, you might say, were “meant to be seen on the big screen” in ways that most theatrically released features these days really aren’t). I don’t even want to think about trying to watch such richly cinematic audio-visual productions as “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” or “Louie” or “Game of Thrones” or “The Good Wife” (the only “old-network” show I watch) on anything less than a 50-inch HDTV with surround sound. What would be the point?
In his Oct. 26 keynote address at the Middleburg Film Festival, SnagFilm founder Ted Leonsis said:
“The high priests – the studios of the world, the newspapers of the world – are fundamentally failing a large generation of the next creative-class individuals. Because in a world where everyone is a filmmaker, everyone has a story to tell, and now has the tools to do it … still, the distribution system is analog.”
“For the most part over the last 50 years, filmmaking has been in the auspices of older white men,” he said. “White men were the directors, white men were the producers, white men ran the studios. As we democratize the production and distribution of film, we’re going to see more and more women, more and more young people, more and more people outside of the United States.”
A few days later, producer Michael Shamberg (“Pulp Fiction,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Django Unchained”) disagreed with Leonsis on the merits of “democratization” now that the means of production are indeed in the hands of the proletariat. (I can hear the demagogic Ted Cruzers now: “That’s not democracy, that’s socialism! Kickstarter is for commies!”)
“You don’t democratize creativity,” Shamberg said. “You don’t democratize talent. And there’s still not that many people [with talent]. We’re still waiting for these incredible geniuses. Steven Soderbergh was making films in high school. Steven Spielberg has been making films since grade school.”
In the words of Randy Newman: What has happened down here is the winds have changed. What all this “democratization” means is that we’re facing a glut of, uh, “product.” And since we no longer think of sounds or images as experience but as consumable, fetishized commodities, that means that supply far outstrips demand. And the reason is simple: The old gatekeepers — the studios, the financiers, even the professional craftspeople — are no longer so important. Anybody can make a movie without those “older white men” and their bankrolls. The question now is: How do skill and talent fit into the equation?
The music business has already been down this path. British writer and self-described “embittered superannuated music journalist” David Gerard wrote last month on his Rocknerd blog that the main problem with the current state of the music biz is:
“There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and shit for musicians. […]
“Economically, the 20th century was just a weird time: where it was possible to mass-produce recordings, but it was difficult and expensive; so we had a record company oligopoly, which is great for squeezing out cash. Now it’s not. Marginal cost approaches zero, and it’s marginal cost, not setup cost, that determines prices. So the price will tend to zero. Microeconomics is a bastard. […]
“Musicians are in competition with every other musician in the world, including literally everyone who wants to be a musician and doesn’t have to do it for money. All of whom have access now to the same outlets and channels the other musicians do.”
Same goes for the economics of producing and distributing film and video (the inclusive term of choice for which is simply “cinema,” regardless of the delivery platform, whether it’s theatrical, disc or streaming. In a digital world, start-up costs — high-quality equipment, including software — are relatively low. (Louis C.K. edits some episodes of his FX show “Louie” on his MacBook with Final Cut Pro. Stand-up specials, too.)
And forget about the prohibitively expensive, now-outmoded concepts of “prints and advertising” — the former doesn’t exist and the latter is of limited utility when word-of-mouth (positive or negative) can be tweeted instantaneously. As for distribution expenses: Well, all it takes is one HD .mkv or h.264 .mp4 sitting in “the cloud” somewhere and it can be streamed or downloaded, with no loss of quality, millions of times at no cost to the “end user” (or consumer, if you prefer) or the distributor who has an unlimited broadband plan.
But if Rebecca “Friday” Black can become a household name for a song and YouTube music video that even its biggest fans love for its giddy, unbridled awfulness, where does “talent” figure in? Shamberg says it’s still the key to success, but Gerard believes it’s no longer a significant factor (or an “X-Factor”) in what gets made or distributed:
“Because any talentless hack is now a musician. There are bands who would have trouble playing a police siren in tune, who download a cracked copy of Cubase — you know how much musicians pirate their software, VSTs and sample packs, right? — and tap in every note. There are people like me who do this. A two-hundred-quid laptop with LMMS and I suddenly have better studio equipment than I could have hired for $100/hour thirty years ago. You can do better with a proper engineer in a proper studio, but you don’t have to. And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time.
“You can protest that your music is a finely-prepared steak cooked by sheer genius, and be quite correct in this, and you have trouble paying for your kitchen, your restaurant, your cow. But everyone else is giving away zero-marginal-cost digital steaks, even if they’re actually reconstituted tofu or maybe poop.
“This means art becomes entirely a folk enterprise: the sound of the culture talking amongst itself. This is lovely in its way, but all a bit fucked if you aspire to higher quality in your subcultural group.”
Or, as Leonsis said, “there are two billion people who are potential independent filmmakers.” Anybody with an iPhone. Or even an Android model.
Shamberg:
“We’re really competing for people’s time. We’re not selling an object that coexists with your time like an automobile or a toaster. So I want your time. I’m competing with everybody. I’m competing with social media. If a kid wants to spend two hours a day on their Facebook page, they don’t necessarily want to see films.”
True, but wasn’t that always the case when it came to leisure-time entertainment? There’s always been more than one way to pass the time. The alternatives used to be conversation (live or telephonic), books, television, games… and they still are.
Everything’s cyclical to some degree. From the consumer’s point of view, maybe the concept of the “movie,” which used to refer to an event that required your presence at a particular time and place, and went through a mixed analog/digital phase when it was mass-produced and sold in the form of a physical artifact (cassettes, disks), is becoming an experience again, albeit one that’s available on demand using commercially available equipment like TVs, game boxes, computers, tablets or smartphones. But the digital file itself isn’t something you can hold or put on a shelf. It’s ineffable, not unlike the beams that used to emerge from the little windows in the booth at the back of the auditorium and light up the screen. That idea of what “a movie” signifies may be closer to the pre-1980s model than the one we’ve become accustomed to since the VCR explosion.
Unless you consider, say, an SD card or a USB thumb drive a consumer fetish object.