The movies are, once again, not dead. Art forms are more like viruses than animal species: They don’t become extinct; they mutate, recombine, go dormant and spread out again in new, sometimes unrecognizable ways, which carry memories of older selves encoded in their DNA.
Going to the movies may not always be a magical journey — more often, it means contending with parking, concession-stand lines, yakkers and texters in the next row, sticky floors and dim projection — but it has long been an object of sentimentality. The number of movies that fold in primal scenes of rapture at the cinema is beyond counting. “Babylon,” “Empire of Light” and “The Hand of God” are among the most recent I can think of: artifacts of the streaming era pointing backward toward previous golden ages. Elegies for moviegoing and prayers for its return. Some of the wistfulness comes from the idea of moviegoing as yet another symbol of the collective life we supposedly had before the atomized, polarized present. Remember how we used to do things together — shop, worship, watch sports, go to movies?
We didn’t really. We were always polarized, divided, alienated. That’s what it is to be modern, to be human. What made the movies matter — not any particular movie, but the movies as such — was that they captured and reflected this condition in a way that nothing else had. The communal embrace of the theater could also provide a profound solitude, a liberating anonymity. If streaming is a form of surveillance, moviegoing is the opposite.
No comments:
Post a Comment