The Independent Moviemaker - Are Movies Still Relevant?

It's hard for me to remember a time when watching movies, making movies, talking movies wasn't a central part of my life. When I was a kid, I used to go to bed and think about a particular movie until I fell asleep, hoping I could watch the movie in my dreams. I miss watching movies. It's too bad, they don't miss me.

Movies today are better made than ever before. They're more visually exciting, faster paced, more beautiful than ever. And yet, there's something missing. They seem to have lost their social relevance. Or to put it another way, movies are simply not important anymore.

This is not an argument for a return to the past, but rather an admonition, a plea, for movies to return to the present. The main reason for the general malaise that has swept through the movie industry is that movies have stopped fulfilling their role in society.

This is not an argument in favor of art movies. Hollywood has always been about making money. Movies were the poor man's entertainment. A quarter got you a double feature, a few shorts, popcorn and a coke. And Hollywood needed an awful lot of quarters to build those palmy studios and hillside mansions. From the beginning, movies were a lowest common denominator form of entertainment. So perhaps it's the denominator that's changed. I've always said that if you're old enough to complain about the quality of movies, it's because you've aged out of movies' target demographic. But that's too easy. There's something more to it - and that something lies in the relationship between movies and society.

Movies are meant to be seen in a theater. They are a group experience. And they are a group experience for a reason. Storytelling is an ancient ritual, designed to provide a collective experience. Stories unified people, gave them connections. Almost everyone in Western culture knows the story of little red riding hood, the three little pigs, Cinderella, etc.... Movies are perhaps the single most powerful storytelling tool ever created (although I might argue that interactive media has supplanted them). As such, they can serve that function of storytelling greater than any other medium. When kids walk around with 'Vote for Pedro' t-shirts they are telling the world they've seen a movie, and using the film to define their group. This is the power of film. It feeds and reveals the collective unconscious. But so few movies today seek to fulfill this role - giving up the unification of collective storytelling for the thrill of the ride. In so doing, they've given up that little bit of magic that comes from knowing a movie feels right. An analogy is listening to the radio. I've always felt that there's something magical in hearing a song you want to listen to on the radio. Of course it's easier than ever to listen to what you want to hear. Just pop in a CD or hit a button on your I-pod, and you can listen to whatever you want. But there's something cool in hearing that same song on the radio - a feeling that it's not just you who wants to hear it. That somehow you're connected to others through this song. Movies are the same way. The magic of movies is not so much in the individual, as it is in the group. And for whatever reason, movies seemed to have lost this magic. Perhaps part of the issue is societal. Society is more fragmented than ever.

There's something vaguely disappointing about seeing a movie in a half-empty theater. You look around and think, "Man. Nobody's here." It's nice in a way. There are fewer distractions. Fewer cell phones going off and the like, but still, it's somehow less fulfilling. To me, that feeling of disappointment is akin to the magic that is missing in movies.

The strength of movies has always been the ability to evoke emotion. The problem with this is it's either a hit or miss proposition. When you go after emotions, if you don't capture them, the movie fails miserably. And miserable failures are what Hollywood seeks to avoid at all cost. Movies today aren't made so much with the mentality of let's make a hit. The mentality now is let's not make a bomb. It's a subtle distinction, but one that makes all the difference in the end product - the movie itself. This is also a product of the corporate mentality that has ruled Hollywood for the last twenty five years. The movies that result from this mentality are neither great nor bad. There aren't a lot of Heaven's Gate disasters anymore. From a corporate standpoint, this is good. No one wants to lose money. However, just as there aren't any absolute disasters, there aren't any absolute hits either. What you get is this grey middle ground that's predictable, controllable, neither offending nor truly pleasing. This is the corporate mindset. And it makes sense. With so much money on the line, studios cannot afford to take real chances on their big budget movies. This impacts movies most keenly in their emotional content. The corporate mentality gives you films that make fun of emotion, that make fun of themselves, that rely on camp and effects to deliver the thrills. Problem is, when a movie makes fun of itself, it's also making fun of you for watching it. It's almost as though the film is afraid to say -- go ahead and laugh, go ahead and cry. This lack of emotion is the product of fear. Fear that if we go for it and fail, we'll be out of a job, so it's better not to go for it at all.

Having said this, the studios do try to evoke emotion through their smaller budgeted films. The independent movies they pick up. However, this approach is problematic. These smaller movies are not as important to the studios, so they don't get the push they need to achieve social relevance. In other words, these aren't the movies that everyone is going to see. They are specialty pictures. So these films lose that group effect. Also gone is the thought that here is a movie that reflects our times.

Or perhaps, the movies are reflecting our times. And it's the times that have changed. Either way, I suppose I can always go see Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and be blown away, so that I won't think about it for a couple hours.