Maybe it wasn’t just me, or even just the movies. Maybe the shock of the pandemic’s empty theaters and the simultaneous ascendance of streaming platforms had irreparably dented cinema’s durability and tarnished its luster. Attention that had been magnetized by stardom and spectacle was migrating to smaller screens and fragmenting into ever narrower algorithmic niches. The venerable habit of going to a theater to sit among strangers — for Thomson the origin of the modern crowd — was in decline. The saturation of daily life with moving images — in your pocket, on your wrist, on every available surface — had undermined the specialness, the sacredness, of motion pictures as an art.
Of course, interesting movies continue to be made, and now and then crowds of people still leave the house to see them, as recently happened with the low-budget, Gen Z horror hits “Obsession” and “Backrooms.”
But the longstanding habit, among critics and other devotees, of holding movies apart from and superior to all the other screened content may involve a crucial category error. Could it be that, instead of being distinct from television, streaming, TikTok, A.I. slop and all the other screen forms, movies are actually their common ancestor, their home planet, the H.R. Giger alien xenomorph that has replicated itself across the universe of human consciousness?
Thomson’s word for that all-enveloping phenomenon is “movie.” For the most part, when he talks about “movies” in the plural (or, synonymously, about “film” or “cinema”), he’s talking about the medium that evolved through the 20th century as a popular form of entertainment, sometimes rising to the level of art. “Movie,” in contrast, refers not to an individual film but to the mode of cognition, the way of seeing and imagining the world, that the medium has imposed on us. Whether or not we go to the movies, most of us live in what he sometimes calls “the condition of movie,” a state of perpetual fantasy and denial.
An Obsessive Film Cataloger
If in the 21st century we’re facing the decline of movies, we’re also living through the triumph of “movie.” And if Thomson is increasingly suspicious of movie, it’s partly because, for as long as he can remember, he has been in love with movies.
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