Imagine going to a very fancy restaurant for an expensive dinner. You’ve been told by several famous food critics and chefs that this is one of the greatest restaurants ever. The service is a bit slow so you end up sitting there for three hours. The food is great and the ingredients are timeless. The recipe is fifty years old but it feels familiar and the plating does not look dated. Yet, you wonder if you lack the requisite amount of taste buds to truly appreciate the effort. You feel sated when you leave you feel like you’ve left with the same life you sat down with.

The next day, you eat McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I watched Greenland, Freaky, and A Quiet Place 2 all in the span of a week¹. Before that, I had watched The Leopard.

The Stakes

While watching the Quiet Place sequel, I realized why I could not bring myself to care about the fate of the Abbott family. The stakes were not real enough. There simply wasn’t enough uncertainty in the narrative for me to be invested in what happens next. I was just waiting for the clock to run out. I thought back to the three other movies I had watched earlier in the week. Greenland looks like a disaster movie, but it does not act like one even though it ends like one. Freaky aka Freaky Friday the 13th was made by the same mind that made “Groundhog Day but serial killer.” Another attempt at a fake out but can you truly fool an audience that has sucked on the teat of TV Tropes?

Don’t get me wrong. These movies entertained me as I watched them. I think we can all agree movies act as escapes. They ask us to imagine what would it be like to witness the end of our home due to a merciless universe. They ask us to imagine what would it be like to switch body & soul with a ghoulishly inventive serial killer. They ask us to imagine what would it be like if the Clickers from The Last of Us took performance-enhancing steroids and invaded our planet. I don’t mean to sound more dismissive² than I already do. They all have things to say about healthcare in the United States, the idea of a meritocracy in a failing world, queer identity, co-dependent relationships, and families.

But I find myself recalling two minutes of Nights of Cabiria more than most of the previously named movies. I was more worried for Cabiria more than any of the characters in all the three movies combined³.

The Death of Something

The Leopard, released in 1963, considered to be one of the greatest movies ever by Martin Scorsese & Roger Ebert among others, ends with a ballroom sequence lasting 45 minutes, the kind of thing you only see in movies. None of the spoken dialogue in the ballroom scene reflects what is being communicated. The prince, (Burt Lancaster, magnificent) moves from room to room and there is a sadness that follows him like a shadow. It asks us to imagine what it would be like to grow old and fade away as we all must one day. It is a glorious celebration marking the end of an era in a format that most of us can’t access anymore.

Martin Scorsese, or Marty as I like to call him, said that the big movie franchises are more like theme parks, and they are not cinema. Marty is right and he can say whatever the hell he wants because he is Marty, and he has done more than most who think he is wrong⁴. I can’t help but think of the prince at the ball when I hear Marty lamenting the state of cinema and the slow death of the individual artist.

Franchise movie making has killed narrative unpredictability for me. The stakes are so much lower if you know that there is going to be a sequel. Your protagonist will never have to encounter the one enemy that we are all guaranteed to encounter in our lives: mortality. Franchise movie making over-indexes on plot because plot moves forward, and plot keeps the money train going. Prequels are particularly noxious because they insist on playing out an elaborate dance towards a finish that we all anticipate⁵.

The Franchise does not allow stories to end. One of the things that drives a movie’s popularity is the ending. This is not about an ending as defined by structure but an ending defined by whatever internal story compass we all have. The Franchise cares only about propagating itself and therefore must ignore endings. As actors age, they are replaced by younger actors or entirely different actors. There is no true death possible for the comic book hero. The characters are just archetypes that can be represented by other characters. The franchise movie has skill and style and even substance of a sort. But it lacks the ability to leave the audience feeling like they discovered a new insight about human nature. It lacks danger and wonder both. It will never ask us what could happen if you were to try and transport a cargo of unstable explosives in South America. It will never ask us how it feels to be terrorized by anonymous tapes that suddenly appear on your doorstep. It will never ask us what it feels like to watch your daughter fall in love with a younger man right before your own eyes⁶.

The patterns will be repeated, finite variations on finite themes. The assembly belt of narrative commodification has been tried and tested and I was once its consumer. I simply don’t have the taste for that particular gruel anymore.

If you give the people what they want, they will want more of that thing.

An Economic Concern

In more ways than one, this is a question of economics. I find myself measuring the importance of a thing with the amount of attention I am willing to devote to the thing. Attention and Love are provided to that which we think is important. So, if I choose to pay attention to something, it is because I value it more⁷.

So, what do I want? I want something that expands my sense of what is possible. I want something that does something new with the same sights and sounds. I want something that teaches me something I can take with me through life. I want something that I can relate to, not directly but on some level of abstraction. And then, sometimes I just want to consume empty calories⁸.

“Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament.”

“There are a lot of heartless, soulless spectacle films out there that don’t reflect what should be happening. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve talked to film directors before they went and made a big movie, and said, ‘Hey, we’re in this together, let’s do something different with these big movies. Let’s make them something different than everything that has come before them.’ And then see them cater to every single studio whim and be grossed out, frankly.”

The question raised by Marty then is an entirely economic one. The Studio and the Franchise can subsume any individual merit and vision and turn it into an all-enveloping blanket of sameness. The blanket is warm and cozy and it is not wrong to crave the blanket. But if you cover yourself head to toe with the blanket, you risk missing out on a different experiences and different worlds.

What Do I Want?

In which I talk to myself.

Movies with superheroes are not cinema.

But you like Spider-Man 2, the one with Molina as Doc Ock? And you also liked Chronicle, kinda. There are examples of superhero movies, outside of the Franchise tent-pole⁹, using the superhero vehicle to tell entirely human stories. There is also Midnight Special, a movie that does a whole lot more than “transcend the genre.”

Movies that exist outside of “reality” are not cinema.

Dumb. No other way to describe it. A lot of my favorite movies have a touch of unreality. They have to. It’s called movie magic, for a reason.

Movies that don’t stay with you over time are not cinema.

This is just unfair considering how many movies you watch and then remember that you had already watched them years ago. Though, I think there is something clearly valuable about a movie that is well-regarded several years after it first emerged.

Movies without prequels or sequels are not cinema.

Contentious and ultimately naive, especially if you have no knowledge of the business of movie making and of story-telling itself. David Lynch did it with Twin Peaks and you respect him. Sergio Leone and George Lucas are remembered for creating trilogies. Hitchcock was practically his own franchise. It is natural for a story-teller to want to return to a favorite well. It is unnatural, perhaps, for that desire to be perverted by a machine designed to manufacture nostalgia-coated easy-to-swallow pills.

Movies with a “message” are cinema.

This is the hardest one to address and you know it. What counts as message? Almost all movies have a message¹⁰. Now, you might take this one step further and address the type of message that a movie has. Movies don’t exist to provide you with an insight about humanity or the meaning of life. That is an expectation hoisted by you on their shoulders.

Movies that you can watch multiple times are cinema.

This one’s tricky. Obviously, there is something about the ‘rewatch value’ of a movie. Does that mean Zombieland and The Handmaiden are comparable? Wait, is that what we are doing? Comparing pieces of art, knowing fully well that is a fool’s errand?

Yes, ultimately, trying to define what is cinema is trying to define what is art which is an old, old debate, across all mediums and all genres.

And yet, there are things that I want from “cinema.”

I find myself craving the complexity and the unpredictability of daily life, the contradictory and the paradoxical and the whimsical ways of human beings, our capacity to love each other and hurt each other, our ability to self-destruct and our struggle against time.

The world, as we know it, is full of questions. About time, still and moving. About life, the tranquility of its surface and the turmoil of its innards. About thinking and feeling and the contradictions of being¹¹.

And cinema, as perhaps, all art, seeks to present these questions, make bold claims about the answers to these questions, to present understanding, falsely, to provide acceptance, truly. To stand the test of time, so to speak.

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