Cultural Mediocrity: Why Movies Matter
“They are expected to want that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer’s inalienable right, is denied, and even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be deceived from the start by virtue of economic concentration.”
-Theodor Adorno
One of the worst excuses to skip a movie is the phrase “I don’t want to have to think.” Life is strenuous enough without subjecting ourselves to vigorous mental exercise during leisure time, I get it. I even understand the occasional trip to a purely stupid movie, I think this provides a special kind of joy that is only really replicated in a cheat dessert. But like cheat desserts or fast food, we shouldn’t make this our exclusive source of sustenance. If all we were surrounded by was ice-cream, cotton candy, and fast food with the constant pressured to indulge we would all feel pretty sick. This school of thought is not so different from what is happening to cinema in a much subtler way. My problem with “I don’t want to think” is it frequently means “I don’t want to be challenged” and this is a dangerous trend for society to embrace.
The thinking should takes place after a movie, once you have left the darkness of the theater back into the tangle of wires and obligations that make up your life. For two hours in the theater you are spared from the responsibility of thinking and just asked to observe. When it is over some form of thinking occurs whether you like it or not. Sometimes there isn’t a lot to think about. It was an enjoyable experience and now it is over and you are on to the next thing in life. Or it was a terrible, boring experience and now it is over and you are on to the next thing in life. It is easy to watch a movie that leaves you as soon as you leave the theater. It is a safe entertainment experience, you have nothing at stake. Sometimes there is a lot to think about. When a movie truly challenges you is when it isn’t so easily digestible. You have to sit with it for a little while, it haunts you, lingering in the back of your mind and barging in intermittently throughout your day. Sometimes it never leaves you and without your permission it has made you into a different person. This is an essential facet of art that film is no exception from. It is culturally damaging to avoid this in exchange for fast food entertainment experiences and the phrase “I don’t want to have to think” serves to perpetuate this ideology.
Theodor Adorno took to the philosophical task of studying leisure time in the ranks of the middle class. He saw consumer culture and the subtle ways in which it used manipulation to “standardize” consumer tastes. Adorno believed powerful capitalist forces wrested an audience’s choice and preference out of their own hands in overt and subconscious ways. Audience expectations are groomed which in turn makes the commoditization of film content easier. It is not hard to see this throughout society. It’s reflected in our collective obsession with aggregate review sites, like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. These “grades” reward inoffensive crowd pleasers and punish challenging movies that take risks and attempt to movie the medium forward. We can see it in the bloated marketing budgets that only conglomerate studio factories can afford, saturating every street corner, screen, and fast food bag with advertisement. We see it in the leverage distributors have over exhibitors. Strong arming movie theaters into pushing smaller movies off limited screens in exchange for “bigger movies”. Regardless of either movie’s “quality” a theater’s hands are tied because of the implicit threat of losing the business of the next tent pole in the distributor’s pipeline. In the end of the day people tend to see what they hear about and what they have easy access to.
It is important to make the distinction, Adorno is not targeting the concept of popular culture but instead the idea of “mass culture”, an altogether sterile and feelingless production on the part of monopoly capitalism. Mediums like film and music should help us better understand ourselves and our communities. Society should embrace film naturally instead of doing so because of systemic and carefully manicured market forces. Film is a business; production companies need to make money on movies in order to make more movies. It is becoming harder and harder for a production company to get by without almost exclusively focusing on this objective truth. It perpetuates a culture of mediocrity that will only continue to get worse as conglomerations gain more and more power in our society. When we lose cinema to the film business we all lose. Film, when it isn’t viewed as a manufacture good, has a vital role in making us more self aware, well rounded members of society. It can endow us with the necessary developments to make positive societal change. It can give us an excuse to escape our heads and really feel something for a moment.
How can we fix this? We can start by not being afraid to “think”. Audiences are the real decision makers when it comes to what is successful in the film business. We should push outside of our comfort zones to see movies that challenge us in some way. We should encourage friends to join and then debate with them after it is finished. Better yet, debate with yourself for a bit. Question your feelings or your perspective now you have spent some time looking through the eyes of someone else. Allowing ourselves to become accustomed to cheap movie experiences robs ourselves of progress. By shifting societal expectations, we will eventually demand a movie experience to be more than just two-hours in a dark room. We will expect for it to effect us when we walk out the door and question what it means to be fulfilled by a movie. Listen to more than advertisers when seeking movies endorsed for their substance. Lastly, start holding movies to a higher standard. Culture is a social construct, ultimately it’s fate lies in our hands and not the hands of conglomerates. Recognize this power. If we demand them to be better, they will be forced to be better. Acknowledging the problem is a hard but crucial step, “I don’t want to have to think” isn’t a valid excuse.