What We Lose in a 'Post-Cinema' World

How I convinced myself that TikTok is cool, but feature films are better

I was dating someone years ago and we used to have these long and intense conversations spanning hours, working out our communication snags and emotions.

I noticed that about 30 minutes in, things would slow down for us as we started to confess deeper vulnerabilities. We would start to take longer pauses between sentences and everything we said would feel more significant.

We also had meta-conversations about how we had conversations. She would tell me she saw conversations as a path with infinite branches, and at every exchange, we would be at a crucial decision point. “Which way from here? You and I decide together.” It was a beautiful way of looking at conversations.

Since that relationship, I started to see more things through the branching paths metaphor. I saw that every art form was a path with infinite branches, infinite decision points that would ultimately land you in new psychological (and possibly vulnerable) territory. Film of course does this.

When you sit down to watch a movie, there is an assumption that the director has made intentional decisions to take you down a path, often harrowing in horror movies, to reach a certain destination. It’s why we lose patience for movies. Some people just walk out because they’ve lost faith in the director’s project. “You’re not taking me anywhere interesting bud.” Exit conversation.

In any case, part of what evokes vulnerability in the audience is the time window that films get. Films take time to watch. Duh.

When Martin Scorsese found out that Flowers of the Killer Moon was screened at some theaters with an intermission, he protested:

People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours. Also, there are many people who watch theatre for three and a half hours. There are real actors on stage — you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect; give cinema some respect.

Yea! Give it some respect! Okay, Scorsese sounds like a cranky old man, but let me refine his point. I think the whole magic of the medium of film is that it works on your mind over one extended experience. Filmmakers design their work to put you in a particular mental place that makes you receptive to ideas, worlds, and characters that you may not be receptive to at first. Film stretches your empathy, by having you feel what what it means to walk in someone’s shoes. That experience can be transformative.

The classic three-act story structure is just a template for a transformative experience. It takes you through a whole arc, first grabbing your attention with a good hook, and then posing a question by framing a specific conflict. That conflict is usually resolved somehow (not to say it has to end happily). We understand this arc on a visceral level. It’s designed to take you through a whole thought experiment in a relatively short amount of time.

The Matrix sets up an elaborate sci-fi scenario and asks us, “Is it better to live in ignorance and bliss or to be liberated from illusion and know about the true state of things?” Throughout the trilogy, our protagonists attempt to unravel the Matrix, and eventually succeed. The answer the trilogy offers is a strong endorsement of clear-eyed existence. “Yes, be liberated from illusion and you will transcend your limits and glimpse the beauty of the real world.” 

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie asks, “What if there were a parallel world where the dynamics between men and women were flipped? What if all women had more agency? What if they were liberated from the pressures and unrealistic ideals that we’ve imposed on them as a society?” 

In the end, Barbie meets her maker (literally) and gets to decide who she wants to be. The answer: women deserve full agency and self-determination and can only truly blossom when they have it.

One of my favorite films, Phantom Thread, sets up a scenario where an exacting artist meets a waitress who becomes his lover and muse. At a crucial moment in the film, our artist knows that his lover has poisoned his food, but he eats it anyway, with a knowing smile.

The film had to spend some time (around 90 minutes) to properly frame its question. It asks, “what kinds of relationships are possible, especially involving difficult personalities like a mercurial artist?” And it’s only because of the meaningful setup that we get a meaningful answer in the artist’s moment of complicit self-poisoning. The film tells us loud and clear: some domineering people crave subjugation and will embrace truly messed-up dynamics of harm and healing to function in a relationship. Yeeeesh.

In other words, in one sitting, a film is meant to take us through an emotional and cognitive journey that raises questions. And the only way it can do that is through putting us through scene after scene with our characters. The whole thing is staged to prime us to feel a certain way. The long and temporally continuous setup is key. It’s how we can come in with one mind and walk out with a new one in the space of ninety minutes.

I recently read an article that said we might be heading into the age of “post-cinema.” According to its author Martin Keady, we are “increasingly unable to surrender or give ourselves to films in the way that we once used to.”

It’s true. We’re continuously absorbed in smaller screens, and so the big screen doesn’t feel as grand as it used to, no matter how hard Nicole Kidman tries to convince us. 

It’s estimated that at film’s commercial high-point, somewhere around 1927, 90 cents of every American’s entertainment dollar was spent going to the movies. Film was the biggest mass-market art form. Today, barring major exceptions like Barbie and Oppenheimer last year, theaters are struggling to hold audiences.

Covid wrecked the industry in a lot of ways and the writers’ and actors’ strikes created massive production delays. More recently, we’ve seen a budget-conscious pullback from studios. 

This coming summer box office is expected to generate $3 billion in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada. Pre-Covid, we would expect at least $4 billion every year. There’s no guarantee we’ll hit those numbers again.

So is film in a state of permanent decline? Has the art form already seen its heyday in the last century?

If it is in decline, I hope there’s an art form that can take its place and do what film does. Is there something else that can take us down a path into a foreign world with foreign circumstances and pose compelling questions and answers that change our perspectives in a single sitting? Will that art form be as public and accessible as film, so that we can all tap into that conversation?

An Instagram reel never changed my life. TikToks wreck my brain chemistry. What’s next?

I don’t know, but I’ll take Nicole’s advice and get my butt in a theater. For now, that’s where all the yummy self-transcendence is.