I really kind of hate to invoke Kane Parsons’ mostly dreadful Backrooms, but it’s the most obvious thing to turn to after having rounded the bleak corner from that opening paragraph. It’s almost embarrassing to have to point it out: mainstream cinema (which quite rapidly devolved into the only sort of cinema we really access) has now largely become that endless labyrinth of grim indistinguishable rooms and hallways where everything looks deadeningly the same, a self-consciously horrifying prefabricated hedgework maze of disconnection and dissociation. Not that the film itself has some type of durable analytical framework to approach those ideas in any useful way. It’s simply (and overly simply) a blunt example and symptom of the selfsame cultural deadlock that’s produced it, or given rise to it, or rather, sunk and lowered it as far as it’s been sunk. Somehow improbably, an even worse example came out in American cinemas a bit earlier this year, a Japanese film called Exit 8, in which a guy walks around endless identical white tiled hallways trying to find his way out of a subway pedestrian tunnel. I don’t care whatsoever that these films originated as internet phenomena or video games or whatever. That very lack of any serious or meritorious or educated provenance, and the increasing distance from its own historical sense of echolocation that instead results in a form of infinite unfolding simulation, is exactly what all of the postmodern theorists theorized is where we’d now wind up, and so we have.
Each spring I teach a course on music lyricism, and the most difficult aspect of it is getting the students to listen intently to songs with some intricacy of thematic meaning, structure, or songcraft, and then to analyze even briefly what makes it intricate and how. They’re so accustomed to listening to and watching things only in brief snippets that I have to keep the pace moving swiftly in order to huddle them together inside the boat, which is fine by me since I can row us alongside and past more songs and lyrics that way. I encourage them to bring in whatever interests them in any way on the days that they present songs they’ve selected, rather than forcing them to stay within any sort of rubric, almost as a way to create formal contrasts that they might or might not notice. While any kind of immersion is good in these days of continual distraction (though sometimes it’s cleverly disguised as meditation), in the realm of cinema I think it’s even more important that it be worthwhile immersion, the kind that wakes you up as it envelops you because if there’s one thing that I can assure you of after watching pretty much every single cinematic release so far this year, it’s that our cohesion to forms in a truly generative sense is actively fading; I would argue it’s even willfully fading. The more complacent you are, the more they can continue to sell you at far too high a price.
How strange then, and strangely sensible, after making us essentially strangers to ourselves, that the outcome and ultimate downfall of it all would be a glaringly obvious cultural narcissism, wanting to see only your own face in something: that’s what’s funny enough to laugh at, or sad enough to cry about, because if I can’t see myself in this thing, then why am I paying to sit here? There has been almost no cinema this year for me that’s represented any kind of serious travel, intellectual or spiritual travel. As if seriousness or rigor or historical reference to form (or even an authentic challenge to that form) would too easily upset the simplistic tidiness of capitalist narcissism, which has reset the terms in such a way that that the form can only function as you’ve come to expect it to commercially, no matter how ironically you title it Spider-Man: Brand New Day because there’s not a single fucking new thing about it, nor do you want there to be. Or maybe Avengers: Doomsday can just obliterate it all, set a continent of wildfires around the endlessly skull-numbing repetition, or you can just suddenly kill off James Bond at the end of the last movie if he no longer suits your purposes or your bankroll, who cares if he ever comes back or not, even The Odyssey isn’t worth reviving if all you have is a grand technician like a wizard of detritus to knock stuff around with bombastic drumming while sucking the poetry out of all of it since poetry’s not worth writing anymore anyway, but people sure will shell out $30 or more to pack every seat in front of the wall-to-wall IMAX screen to convince themselves that they’re inside Plato’s cave and it's art. Give all of that money to the small people out there who’ll still know how to take you on an actual journey, an experience that’s the psychological opposite of your own, one that’s not wrapped up in the blindly inherited narrative that you demand.
When I was in college back in the 1990s, I worked in the box office a couple of nights a week at a cinema in Cambridge that was at the time the largest art cinema in the country, nine screens that showed nothing but art films and independent fare all day every day. Now that cinema is showing only all of the same junk that every other cinema is showing, and for only about half of the day most days of the week. You still had over 200 cinematic releases per year that were indie films or more artfully crafted only 20 years ago now. This year you’ll be lucky to have barely 50 or so at the very most, and all of those I’ll have to watch at the art museum in Portland. So I don’t want to hear anything about how we’re in some cinematic golden age, or wow look at the young people returning to cinemas in bigger numbers because of something as comically dumb as Obsession or as much of a blatant substandard retread as Project Hail Mary, and don’t even pretend that to some degree the more artful and more culturally crucial films aren’t dying because “well they’re being made just not widely distributed anymore, you’ll just have to catch them at film festivals instead” since that’s clearly equivalent to some kind of death. People better start teaching future creators in the right ways again, and fast, yet even that’s too hopeful. More likely I’ll be back to scanning the underground, not for the exit, but for those rarer ways to burrow in more deeply. It’s still there in quick flashes, if you take the time and have the patience and insight to look for it. Robert Aramayo’s performance in I Swear. The opening credits sequence of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. André De Shields setting the pace of heartbreak in the recent cinematic release of Hadestown. Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen in The Invite. Leo Woodall in Tuner, Rose Byrne in Tow, Paul Rudd in Power Ballad. So much that nearly nobody is seeing because we now live in a culture almost entirely devoid of curiosity and adventure, just sell sell sell sell sell, and so everything with a heart behind it gets missed.
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