The Fragmentation of Movie-Watching
Let's play a game. Ready? Okay, here's a little list for you.
Best Picture Oscar nominees, 1952
Wasn't that fun? Okay, what's next? Well, here's another little list.
New York Times Top Ten Movies, 1952 (in order of release)
[Note: MOULIN ROUGE was released at the very end of 1952, and made the New York Times Top Ten for 1953.]
And another one...
Top 10 Box-Office Hits (US), 1952
[Note: MOULIN ROUGE was released at the very end of 1952 and made #10 on the 1953 list.]
OK, we'll get back to these lists in a little while. Right now, though, you'd better hold on to your hats and wallets, 'cause we're about to zip forward a staggering 35 years in time. They said it couldn't be done...
Best Picture Oscar nominees, 1987
New York Times Top Ten Movies, 1987 (alphabetical)
Top 10 Box-Office Hits (US), 1987
Now I know what you're thinking: "What a jerk this guy is! He's put all these lists up one after the other instead of doing a couple of tables or something - now I've got to scroll up and down endlessly just to know what he's talking about!" Right? Not to worry folks, I'll talk you through it.
Let's take 1952 first. It shouldn't take more than a cursory glance at the lists to see that certain films recur in all of them. Cecil B. DeMille's extravagantly vulgar circus movie THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, for example, was nominated for (and in fact won) the Oscar for Best Picture, appeared on the Times Top Ten, and was the year's top moneymaker. (Irrelevant but amusing story about the film : just before its release, the notoriously vain DeMille previewed it for Billy Wilder, who unsurprisingly enough hated this kind of movie. When the lights came on Wilder sat stupefied for a few moments then turned to DeMille, who was waiting for his reaction, and said in a suitably awestruck voice, "Cecil, you have just made THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.")
Yet it wasn't only DeMille's epic that enjoyed this combination of critical and commercial success back in 1952. In fact, if you look at the five Best Picture nominees - all of whom were also judged by the New York Times to be among the best movies of the year (or the following year, in the case of MOULIN ROUGE) - you'll notice that four of the five were also among the biggest box-office hits. Only THE QUIET MAN found critics and public diverging (though not by much : it was actually the year's #12 hit, just outside the Top Ten!).
What's more, the year's top moneymakers also included a number of other prestige pictures. QUO VADIS, for example, had been one of 1951's "big" movies, winning 8 Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) ; THE AFRICAN QUEEN had won nominations for Best Director, Actor and Actress, also in 1951 ; THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO was #5 on the National Board of Review Top Ten list for 1952. All these movies were presumably contenders for the Times list.
What this means is that, if you were an occasional filmgoer in 1952 - not a film buff, but a person who liked to "keep in touch" with the latest movies - you could watch a total of about eight movies, maybe less, and be able to feel that you knew what was going on. With your handful of movies you'd have watched not only what the critics and the Academy had been lauding over the year, but also what everyone else had been watching. You could hold forth at parties, give everyone the benefit of your opinion, pontificate on the state of current movies, quite secure in the knowledge that you were "hip" (or perhaps "hep", this being 1952).
Flash-forward to 1987. And, since I know you've probably scrolled up a couple of times already to sneak a peek at the lists, I won't belabour this. Not one of the 1987 Oscar nominees appeared on the Times Top Ten list. That's none as in zero. Zilch. Rien du tout. A complete absence of nominees. Granted, all but one of the five films (no prizes for guessing which one) were probably contenders for the list - but the paper was still able to find ten other films it considered to be just as good, and even better.
Nor is there much overlap with the year's top 10 money-makers. One of the Times ten - THE UNTOUCHABLES - makes the list, as do two of the five Oscar nominees. But the other nine choices on the Times list (with the possible exception of FULL METAL JACKET) probably made less money put together than the year's #10 hit made on its own ; and at least two of the remaining three nominees - HOPE AND GLORY and THE LAST EMPEROR - are unashamedly uncommercial movies (even with its nine Oscars, EMPEROR barely made $30 million in the US). Above all, it's fair to say that the vast majority of the year's Top 10 hits were not even in contention for critical acclaim or Oscar nominations. Beyond FATAL ATTRACTION - one of those rare occasions when a film's success gets elevated by pundits into something more, a symbol of the Zeitgeist - and two or three well-crafted big-studio movies (MOONSTRUCK, THE UNTOUCHABLES, maybe GOOD MORNING VIETNAM) that pretty much everyone liked, critics and public might as well have been living on different planets.
What does this mean for our occasional moviegoer? In a word, disaster. No longer is it possible for him to pretend that, despite his job and his other interests, he still "knows" movies. Every time he opens his mouth at a dinner party - to praise Cher's performance in MOONSTRUCK, say - there's invariably some smug know-it-all asking if he's seen Stephane Audran's far superior performance in BABETTE'S FEAST. And if he tries - as he occasionally does - to bond with his kids over a movie at the local multiplex, he invariably finds the result to be a crude, headache-inducing action movie which the kids adore but which he can barely make head or tail of.
The result? Hemmed in between the LETHAL WEAPONs and the snoozy, subtitled arthouse fare, our hero changes tactics. He still sees his eight or so movies a year, most of them on video - mostly using the Oscars as a guide to what's worth seeing - but he no longer feels like he knows what's going on. When the talk turns to movies at a dinner party he declares that, unfortunately, he no longer has the time to watch as many movies as he'd like ; and, if the others persist with things cinematic (unless of course they're talking about MOONSTRUCK and FATAL ATTRACTION), he moves away to another conversation.
But here's the twist : though our man feels left out, he is in fact absolutely typical. All that distinguishes him from others - the BABETTE'S FEAST crowd, or the multiplex teenagers - are his terms of reference. Just as he uses the Oscars as a guide, the others might (respectively) use "Film Comment" or the 1987 equivalent of "Entertainment Weekly" ; but they're all equally ignorant about each other's tastes. In 1952 anyone who went to "the pictures", teenagers and intellectuals alike, would undoubtedly have seen HIGH NOON or GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH ; but a 1987 teen may decide not to bother with MOONSTRUCK (let alone AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS), and a 1987 egghead may not have time for THE UNTOUCHABLES (let alone STAKEOUT).
In other words, fragmentation has set in : films are no longer the glue that binds together different ages and classes, and film-watching no longer makes children of us all. Instead it's become cliquey, reflecting our aesthetic prejudices back at us. If we like what we watch, it's mainly because we only watch what we like.
Even from here I can see the doubt in your faces. We-e-ell maybe, you're thinking - but surely this game is rigged, right? Well, yes and no. Obviously I've chosen the two years for maximum contrast, but the same point could've been made with any comparison of 50s and 80s/90s movie lists (try it ; if you need old charts, Eddie Dorman Kay's "Box-Office Champs" is the best source I know of). Clearly, the 1952 results would be very different had I used a cineaste's publication like Cahiers du Cinema as my yardstick, instead of the New York Times and the aggressively middlebrow Bosley Crowther - but after all the point is to show the critical consensus of that time, not the perverse (and revolutionary) tastes of some Left Bank film-buffs.
The only proviso that should perhaps be mentioned is that in 1952 the Times didn't include any foreign-language films on its Top 10, whereas in 1987 it did ; but, though you might argue that IKIRU or FORBIDDEN GAMES would certainly have knocked the likes of IVANHOE right off the list, I doubt it's so clear-cut. Certainly the ghettoisation of foreign-language movies in a separate (and subsidiary) list seems to imply they'd have a hard time making it into the actual Ten - and besides, even in 1987, there was only one foreign-language film among the paper's best-of-the-year.
Above all, things don't seem to have changed very much in the ten years since 1987 : fragmentation, it seems, is here to stay. Indeed, what works at the box-office has become, if anything, even more incompatible in the past decade with what critics appreciate : as I write this (in late November 1997) the year's ten most successful films are almost finalised - going on past experience, we're only a couple of Christmas hits away from the definitive list. Of the present ten, only FACE / OFF seems at all likely to feature in best-of-the-year lists, and none of the Ten seems particularly likely to garner Oscar nominations come February (we are of course excluding the likes of Best Song - where HERCULES is probably a lock, bless its faux-Hellenic little heart).
As for overlap between critics and Oscars - well, it remains to be seen whether last year's indie-friendly lineup of nominees was a fluke or a Significant Development, but it's certainly hard to see critics' darlings like CRASH and ULEE'S GOLD slugging it out for Best Picture. In fact it's even hard to see an acclaimed but unsuccessful (and controversial) movie like BOOGIE NIGHTS in the running - the Academy loves a hit. (Don't worry, I still have a couple of months before I have to eat my words.)
So, if the above is even halfway correct - if we the audience are in fact breaking up into discrete, mutually exclusive camps - is this necessarily a Bad Thing? Clearly, despite my rather portentous title, the answer must be "no" - or "not entirely". If film-watching is in fact fragmenting, there's a very good reason for that : consumer choice. Why watch LIAR LIAR (says Consumer X) when you can watch Kiarostami? Why watch a pretentious Persian (says Consumer Y) when you can watch THE LOST WORLD? Why bother with dinos (says Consumer Z) when you can watch THE ENGLISH PATIENT? Much as I love old movies, would I want to go back to 1952, when you could either watch a big-studio movie or stay home and read a book? No way, Daddy-O.
In fact, what's happened to movie-watching in the 90s is much the same as what's happened to TV-watching, or to a million other things in our increasingly custom-made, individualised, consumer-oriented world. Quite simply, you can now (increasingly) create your own personalised little world, reflecting your particular tastes ; the concept of a communal lifestyle, a shared culture acting as a societal glue, is becoming increasingly obsolete. Just as network TV has been joined - and in many cases supplanted - by cable, satellite, pay-as-you-view and a host of other alternatives, why shouldn't the film market also fragment?
No reason. Except perhaps that it is a market. Unlike TV, where minority channels can be just as accessible as mainstream ones, the making and distribution of films depends directly on the size of their audience - and, once that audience falls below a certain threshold, movies become literally unaffordable. The idea of choice is all very well in theory but, as lowbrow movies inevitably take over the smaller markets (trust me ; I know what I'm talking about), it becomes severely limited. And people just stop caring.
Most of my friends here in Cyprus are occasional filmgoers, as described above. They're educated people, and they don't particularly relish watching stuff like SPEED 2 and DOUBLE TEAM every time they go to the cinema ; yet they invariably look pained and unhappy when they ask me for a good movie and I mention something like IRMA VEP - because they know it's outside their parameters. Watching it means moving to a different section of the fragmented audience - the part that hunts down little-known movies to enjoy their unusual, possibly elitist pleasures. In a weird way, they don't want to watch IRMA VEP because they're afraid they'll like it.
It makes sense. See, my friends aren't film-buffs - and what's more, they don't want to be film-buffs. They're just looking for a synthesis, a film that'll feed their wish for simple escapism without making them feel like morons. A film like...well, like HIGH NOON. Or even THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. They're not passionate about movies - in fact, as the years go by, they care less and less about movies. They just wish movies today weren't quite so extreme. They wish movie-watching hadn't become so fragmented.
So the new movie audience staggers on, unsteady on its too-many legs and supporting an increasingly eclectic mess of different fragments and segments ; and, as people become more and more used to watching a particular kind of movie, coalition into a truly diverse whole becomes more and more impossible. Instead, the different parts develop in their different ways. Until, eventually, some of the more esoteric fragments will perhaps become too small to be viable, bringing everything back to a new, probably dumber version of the 1952 situation : everyone watching the same things, except those who've given up on movies altogether and are curled up at home with a good book. Or perhaps with their TVs tuned to the Kiarostami Channel.
Copyright Theo Panayides 1997