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A proper audience
"Movies Are Dead?" That's the title of a think-piece by A. O. Scott in the Times this past Sunday. And the rest of the essay removed the question mark—sort of. This is the Times, after all, and we don't come down hard on one side or the other.
Scott romanticizes "the grainy swirl of emulsion as the light passes through the stock, the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector" and laments their loss. "But by any aesthetic as opposed to sentimental) standard, the high-quality, carefully restored digital transfers of classics and curiosities now available on DVD and Blu-ray offer a much better way to encounter the canon."
Oh, do they?
I admire the style and substance of Tony Scott's reviews, but I think in this instance, he's got it backwards. He's looking at the technology. But which of us is aware of the swirl of emulsion? The whirr of the projector? He should be looking at the other end of the filmic transaction, the audience.
The trouble with movies now, with movies on video or DVD or Blu-ray or any of the other marvels of digital media is that we, the audience, have taken over. We are in control.
Look at the picture of an audience above. It's a still from David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), the heyday of movies. The audience is watching a Donald Duck cartoon. And they are laughing. The next thing up is a preview and then a feature. And the audience has nothing to say about it. The projection system is in control. They can't do anything about it, except walk out, and that's what this couple does the next time they go to the movies. The audience is passive, or at least not performing or planning to perform actions.
Because the projection system is in control, the motor systems in these people's brains are shut down. With the motor systems, the reality-testing systems also shut down. These people will treat what they see on the screen as real. They will laugh or cry. at events as though they were happening. They will identify with these grainy swirls of emulsion as though they were real people to care about. In short, they will be what psychologists call "transported."
If they had been watching VHS or DVDs or Netflix streaming at home that wouldn't have happened—or it wouldn't have happened to the same degree. The audience would be in control, free to stop the DVD or streaming, put down the iPad for a moment, switch to another channel—whatever. They would be maintaining the possibility of action. Their motor systems would still have been engaged, and the "suspension of disbelief" or "poetic faith" that should be part of our movie experience wouldn't have happened or wouldn't have happened to the extent it should.
And that's why movies might be dead, not the new technologies, not the substitution of zeroes and ones for grains of silver, but how those new technologies change us as viewers.
"Movies Are Dead?" goes the Scott's questioning headline. The answer is, Not if we try to see movies as we used to, letting the movie take over.
