So Ducie Street was her first fate—a pleasant enough fate. The house, being only a little larger than Wickham Place, trained her for the immense establishment that was promised in the spring. They were frequently away, but at home life ran fairly regularly. In the morning Henry went to business, and his sandwich—a relic this of some prehistoric craving—was always cut by her own hand. He did not rely upon the sandwich for lunch, but liked to have it by him in case he grew hungry at eleven. When he had gone, there was the house to look after, and the servants to humanise, and several kettles of Helen’s to keep on the boil. Her conscience pricked her a little about the Basts; she was not sorry to have lost sight of them. No doubt Leonard was worth helping, but being Henry’s wife, she preferred to help some one else. As for theatres and discussion societies, they attracted her less and less. She began to “miss” new movements, and to spend her spare time re-reading or thinking, rather to the concern of her Chelsea friends. They attributed the change to her marriage, and perhaps some deep instinct did warn her not to travel further from her husband than was inevitable. Yet the main cause lay deeper still; she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things. It was doubtless a pity not to keep up with Wedekind or John, but some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power.
—EM Forster, Howards End
Some weeks back I reread Chris Fujiwara’s excellent essay “To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema,” which probes the the very contemporaneity of movies and film culture. Film journalism, including the sort of criticism that tackles current work, hinges upon market releases and the waves of festival premiers that feed into the market. Living in a major metropolitan area and seeing regularly a lot of the new releases, and/or attending multiple international film festivals per year, is the way that most people would establish a credible claim to a real familiarity with, specifically, contemporary cinema.
Indeed, the rest of us are downstream of selection decisions made before these briefly-contemporary movies get to the screens of multiplexes, arthouses, and festival venues. We see what we’ve already been primed to see.
Fujiwara’s piece traces some of the problems arising in this ongoing historical situation. On one hand, “the cinema no longer circulates within a common space and time but has withdrawn into that state of inaccessibility,” like a museum; but the “flip side of this museification is the impossibility of ignoring anything. The journalist exemplifies this condition, whose realm is the internet. The journalist is doomed to say yes to things, even in trying to say no, just by acknowledging them.”
Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent films today, meanwhile, are largely made by a class of people born into connection and privilege, and who, consequently, have often focused primarily on working in the industry. There are a lot of talented kids who might have worked hard to land their gigs, of course, but there’s often a sense that these were always intent on being people who made movies (and were known for such). It seems relatively unusual for a younger director or actor, for instance, to have had a career outside of the movies that wasn’t ultimately in service of that industry hustle. I think that this diminishes the possible range of expression that we could see if we had a more variegated pool of talent. Connected with this, current moviemakers seem less fixated on inventing new and interesting solutions to express a vision of reality or a vision of the imagination, and more concerned with recreating a vision of some other movie they’ve watched and want to emulate. Vibes, dude. This is not an encouraging recipe for what’s playing at your local Regal Cinema or for the glitzier of the film festivals.
Anyway, again: even if we’re trying to be current, we typically see what we’ve already been primed to see. As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, I was still excited in some sense by contemporary movies because there existed hidden gems and interesting facets to whatever could be sampled. I didn’t walk into theaters or rent DVDs completely indiscriminately, but I also watched a lot more random recent stuff because an acceptable proportion of it seemed to reward attention.
Since that time, though, such a liberal approach seems to have had rapidly diminishing returns. I’m sure some of this is down to me, and the fact that I’m aging. I’m unconvinced it’s totally that, though. There are real changes in films, things that can be tracked and described and measured. Either way, I know that sitting down to this-or-that new release is less likely than before to make me think, “hmm, there are some interesting things here,” and more likely to make me think, “this is unbelievably stilted, derivative, and annoying. I’ve practically seen all this before anyway. Life is too short.”
I just can’t bring myself to care as much as I used to for “the contemporary cinema,” and this contrasts in stark relief with the care and curiosity that I feel toward so many other aspects of culture and entertainment. I’m certainly not winding down as I get older; I feel instead as though I’m encountering too many fascinating things to count!
All this is to say, though, there’s no grand pronouncement here; I’m not swearing off new films, not even new bad ones. I’m definitely not dictating what you should find compelling—watch as many or as few new movies as you want, and be as excited by them as you like. I’ll continue to sample things. There are actively working filmmakers I enjoy, and projects that intrigue. But, empirically, I have lost all urge to stay current or comprehensive with contemporary cinema because so many of the movies seem bad, lifeless, mere echoes of more interesting things. Instead I follow the trails to those more interesting things.
Nothing requires us to be “current” with the consumption patterns of any particular art form or commercial enterprise. An appealing fiction beckons to us, perhaps, that we can be on the vanguard, like the major artistic vanguards and scenes of the twentieth century. But I’m not sure this is really the case, at least not in a way that would also be consonant with online life. Instead it seems more likely that we are being coordinated with herd movements. In those cases where we might claim to be among the first, I’d just ask—first to what?
There is a temptation for the person who has moved out of that first stage of adulthood to continue to demonstrate to oneself and peers that you’re not just some boomer—you’re open to all the upcoming trends. So you will see middle-aged people who aren’t simply open-minded but are weirdly, obnoxiously invested in championing the tastes and behaviors of teenagers. Of course with the cinema, an invention of modernity that is maybe dying already (it all depends on how you’re defining terms), the defenders of the art form have sometimes been quick to identify and rally behind whatever aesthetic “advance” they see. It’s fun to be feel like one is surfing the wave going forward. But I’m not morally certain that whatever advances we see are perpetuating cinema—what if they’re moving beyond it, leaving it behind, doing something else that may not have a name yet?
And I think it’s permissible to let that forthcoming thing take its time showing up.
(Personally, by the way, I think one of the best things a grown person can do to support youth cultures is to let them be. Don’t take an immoderate interest in them, don’t validate them or attempt to get validation from them, don’t emulate them, don’t build your identity around being Cool or Relatable, don’t wear clothing popular among teenagers, don’t reach into your 1994 Intro to Cultural Studies course reader to skim a few concepts to justify online that you think “the kids are all right.” Just let the kids and adolescents be, and when called upon, help them with their entrances into adult culture, adult literature, adult behaviors, adult vocations. Alas, we don’t seem to have a good system for this right now.)
So, weeks after seeing them, and several more weeks after they were an Event, I can confirm that I did see both Barbie and Oppenheimer. It seems like there were a few short weeks in which one could venture an Opinion about one or both of these (as films, as cultural phenomena), and the registering of an Opinion might have even seemed quite weighty, but now—it’s yesterday’s papers.
Because you are reading my Substack, it’s fathomable that you’re curious what I thought about these movies, in which case I can tell you that both of them seemed fine. I genuinely liked some aspects of both of them. There’s more I could say about either one but I’m not sure how interesting it would be to you or to me, not without a more organic pretext. I do take it as a sign of how detached I’ve become from today’s breathless film cultural discussion that my main thought about the superlatives attributed to either film recently is that they seem completely incomprehensible—especially when I compare the experience of seeing these (on nice big screens) with the decidedly more modest, yet far more overpowering, experience of watching Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1989 film Beijing Watermelon on my laptop not long after I saw the second of the Barbenheimer pair. Inspired by actual events, Obayashi’s movie traces a complex system of interpersonal trade-offs that result from some generosities between a family of Japanese grocers and some Chinese students; I think that if you haven’t seen it but you’re curious, you should just jump in and not even worry about more specific information beforehand. Beijing Watermelon is the type of film that makes a label like “masterpiece” or “necessary” or “great” seem false when applied to so many of the recent headline-grabbers.
Great works and masterpieces do not need to be consonant with one another; I’m a believer in pluralism. But great works do, I think, tend to clarify falseness, tepidness, and timidity in lesser works that might seem locally impressive. Art’s shelf life is long, and I’m ready to have done with a contemporary cinema whose sell-by dates are quicker even than the greengrocer’s.
This may be a tangent, but I've been thinking a lot lately that film is fundamentally more conservative than music or literature because it costs so much to make. Films that matter as art are increasingly marginal, but a low budget by the film world's standards could allow someone to spend several months in a recording studio and pay for session musicians and professional mixers. (Even the $15,000 budget for SKINAMARINK is more than most people have to throw around on a project that will probably lose money.) A few years ago, Kent Jones wrote that film was becoming a niche akin to poetry or ballet, but poets can work by just sitting down with a pen and notebook.