The Culture is Fine, Thanks
Forgive me for a little anti-curmudgeon curmudgeoning, but the numbers cited in this Mary Sue post by Jamie Frevele (and the post itself, to some extent) set off all my neurons. We see these dire warnings of the demise of the movie industry at fairly regular intervals throughout the year, every year, and they’re always the same. Movies aren’t as good, it’s too expensive to go to the movies, popcorn costs a million dollars – no wonder no one wants to go! But how much of this holds up to scrutiny?
I submit: not much.
First, quality. I am never really persuaded by this argument, and we hear it all the time in all fields. Movies, music, books, politics, life. Nothing is as good as it used to be. Where’s the evidence, though? What would that kind of evidence even look like? Do we just start listing the good movies from every year and see which year wins? Because, spoiler alert, 2007 is one of the five or ten best years in the history of film. Unless we’ve crashed hard in the last four years, this argument is overstated. Not to mention the ways in which it (inevitably) ignores the proliferation of choice over the last couple decades. We have tons of movies from all kinds of countries. And lots of them are really good! (The aforementioned 2007, for instance, featured the American release of a 2006 German film called The Lives of Others, which I consider the best movie of the last decade.) This argument requires some kind of recency bias in order to work, and any amount of scrutiny blows it apart.
Second, cost. The numbers don’t even bear this out. As the original article and the Mary Sue post both note, revenues are up this year. Ticket sales are down, sure, but actual dollar bills going into the pockets of the theaters and studios are increasing. For a large number of people it clearly isn’t too expensive to go to the movies. Further, these people seem to think 3D (which, full disclosure, I hate with the fire of a thousand suns) is something that justifies increased ticket prices. Which brings me to what Frevele says on this subject:
Personally, I was not thrilled that I had to pay about $17 to see Fright Night in 3D, as much as I liked it. But I could not find a good showtime for a regular version of the movie, so I had to spend the $17 on a movie that really, really, really didn’t have to be in 3D. I’m sure I’m not the only member of the moviegoing public who kind of resented having this decision made for me, or making the assumption that I require gimmicky fads to see a vampire horror comedy whose virtue lies in the script and performances and not the odd drop of blood that OMG LOOKS SO CLOSE TO ME.
I think the only answer to this is, “But you did pay $17, right?” The theater set a price for a product that it thought people would pay, and the theater was correct. The only crime here seems to be that Frevele wanted even more consumer surplus than she got. It just isn’t compelling.
What is going on here, which I think is not being properly appreciated by people inside the industry, is a demand-side issue rather than a supply-side one. Theaters aren’t fundamentally failing to provide a product that people want to buy; they are responding to the fact that people have a lot of options and are choosing to exercise more of them. For some people, staying at home to watch a movie using Netflix’s instant streaming service is worth more than a night at the movies. For some it’s catching up on a show on DVR, or renting an on-demand movie from their cable provider, or reading a book on their Kindle, or whatever. People have a lot of things they can use their time for, and many of them are opting for things they would rather do than go to the movies. The theaters, in turn, are responding to that dynamic by increasing the options they are uniquely situated to provide (things like 3D and IMAX and, apparently, 400-pound tubs of popcorn) – and they are making more money with fewer customers. Everybody is winning!
This doesn’t seem like the death of a culture to me. Just the opposite, frankly.
This is exactly what I was trying to say in my anti-decline piece. In thirty years people will be bitching about how crappy movies are, and oh what a high point 2011 or 2005 or whatever was.Report
90% of anything is crap. Over the years, we tend to filter that out on the radio. that’s why the oldies sound better — you ain’t got the crap to wade through.Report
Exactly! It’s sort of a spontaneous curating of our collective taste…Report
Who is recalling 1981 as a high point?Report
Raiders, Chariots, Das Boot, Arthur, Absence of Malice, Body Heat, Gallipoli, Gregory’s Girl, Mephisto, Reds, S.O.B., Thief…
Yeah, I’m just cherry-picking of off Wikipedia — but isn’t that kind of the point? Bet we could do just about the same thing for any year.Report
Video games passed movies about 8 yrs ago in revenues. As Andy Grove said long ago, it is all about eyeballs.Report
Things aren’t as good as they used to be. They’re just different.Report
It’s all been downhill since Modern Times.Report
Does the anti-curmudgeon argument amount to anything more than, “When people say that X used to be better in the past that is sooooo annoying! Because X is just as good now!”?Report
It’s like you say that the curmudgeon argument is unquantifiable and biased, and both criticisms are totally true. Then you assert that recent years were some of the best ever for movies, without any attempt to quantify that. I thought maybe you were being ironic there or tongue in cheek. Yes, The Lives of Others was absolutely excellent, although the Germans have been making excellent movies since the beginning of cinema, so I’m not sure what “the proliferation of choice” means. The problem I have with the claim that people have always been saying that art was better in the past is that it totally discounts the possibility that the quality of art could ever decline because it writes off any and all claims that it is declining. Hey, people used to say the same thing about Elvis, so there.
I mean, I’m really not decided about whether past decades or this decade have been better for art, but it seems to me like you and E.D. don’t think it’s an interesting question to ask and find it irritating that someone might suggest this era isn’t just as good as any other for (fill in the blank).Report
No, I think the argument is that it has always been this way. People always pine for the good ol’ days, and then the present fades and becomes to another set of people the good ol’ days and so on and so forth ad infinitum.Report
“The problem I have with the claim that ‘people have always been saying that art was better in the past’ is that it totally discounts the possibility that the quality of art could ever decline because it writes off any and all claims made that it is declining.” Maybe it has always been this way, but even if it were to decline, how would we know, given that people always pine for the good old days? Unfortunately, it’s not something like climate change where we can easily quantify whether it’s been getting hotter or not in recent years and come to the same conclusions without controversy. 😉Report
try reading Hugo, and then read George RR Martin. You tell me that fiction writing hasn’t improved over the years.Report
I’m willing to make two claims. The weak one, which is easier to defend, is that people always think the past was better. As I say, you hear this a lot. But you wait a few years and people forget those arguments and start new ones. This is E.D.’s version of the argument.
I would further make a strong claim, which is that “it used to be better” is just obviously false. Movies are just as good as they’ve ever been, and I will argue with anyone who says otherwise. I don’t need this claim for my overall point to stick, but I do also believe it.Report
Okay, so I guess I find the first claim irrelevant if we’re trying to decide if movies are getting better, worse, or about the same in quality. Let’s say that, starting in 2012, movies really do get worse each year, so that by 2032 the films are something like ‘Ass: The Movie’ in Idiotocracy. In that case, the fact that ‘there have always been people saying the past was better’ is not at all helpful in assessing the situation. Similarly, the fact that there have always been people, particularly the very young, who overestimate the present doesn’t get us anywhere.
In terms of the stronger claim, you may well be right about that, but your point- that the curmudgeons don’t quantify their claims and it’s not clear how they would quantify them- is just as valid about what you’re saying. Saying it’s self-evident that movies are just as good as they’ve ever been is a bit of a dodge- it’s self evident so you’re not offering evidence. Similarly, saying you’d argue with anyone who claims otherwise isn’t really offering evidence for your claim.
So, maybe I’m just asking, when you say that movies are just as good as ever, how do you decide that? You mentioned 2006 as being great for movies, and I think we’d agree for that year on Babel, The Lives of Others, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Last King of Scotland. Probably neither of us would think of Happy Feet. The Departed won a bunch of awards, but I think it’s uncontroversial to say it was pretty mediocre Scorsese. I don’t really know how 2006 would stack up to famous ‘great movie years’ like 1939, 1941, 1946, 1959, 1962, or 1974. And really I don’t even know how people come to a conclusion one way or another about the general quality of movies in particular eras or in the present era. So how did you get there?Report
To be fair, I said 2007. And then promptly imported a 2006 movie into 2007 because that’s when it got an American release. Not totally fair, I guess.
In any case, your Best Picture nominees that year were No Country For Old Men (a great movie, one of the Coens’ two or three best), There Will Be Blood (also great), Juno (as good a traditional comedy as we’ve seen in a long time), Michael Clayton (an okay movie filled with excellent performances), and Atonement (the only certified Oscar-bait movie on the list).
You also have 3:10 to Yuma, the conclusion to the Bourne series, Ratatouille, Eastern Promises, the aforementioned-and-slightly-cheating Lives of Others, Knocked Up, King of Kong, The Savages, Sweeney Todd, Gone Baby Gone, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Into the Wild, American Gangster, the fifth Harry Potter, Superbad, the criminally-underrated Zodiac, Lust Caution, The Lookout, Persepolis, Enchanted, Breach, A Mighty Heart, Bridge to Terebithia, I’m Not There, Lars and the Real Girl, and the first Transformers.
We can haggle about the overall canon-level quality of most of those (although several – No Country, Blood, and Lives of Others – are pretty unequivocally canon-level), but not one of them is anything less than “pretty good”. It’s just an amazing list of films, and people who can look at that and say, “Oh, it used to be better” just aren’t playing fair.Report
Sorry about that. I just woke up and looked up the Lives of Others without re-reading the post. This is also a really bad time for me to be commenting here, but doing so is getting my mind off a bunch of other things. Sort of.
Okay, so definitely I’d agree that 2007 was superb. At the time, I remember saying this. My wife and I were stunned that we had so many great movies to go out and see. And I can see where the existence of a recent great movie year would dispel the claim that it used to be better. But I’m not sure how far 2007 takes us. I mean, I’m not a believer that it simply used to be better. On the other hand, I have noticed that my wife and I have gone out to the movies less and less in the last few years and we really do tend to see all the really good movies that come out. Last year was a perfect example. I am Love, True Grit, and The Social Network were absolutely superb; Winter’s Bone and The King’s Speech were overrated; Black Swan and Inception were interesting at least, and The Kids are Alright was alright. I don’t know if Paul Schrader’s comment that there would have been a Social Network equivalent released every week in the 70s was accurate, but, man, if they made more than a handful of them each year, we would go see them.Report
I think we don’t disagree that there are weak years. I just think there is a tendency to overestimate the the number of strong years in the past. 1977 was great, but 1978 was just okay (The Deer Hunter, Grease, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, and Animal House are of varying levels of quality, but it’s not a list that is on average much better than the best movies of the last year or two).
You are also, I think, slighting 2010 a little more than it deserves. I would add these to your list:
Great: Restrepo, Scott Pilgrim
Good: True Grit, Blue Valentine, 127 Hours, Tangled, Easy A, Biutiful
Decent: Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, Kick-Ass, The Town, Harry Potter 7.1, The Ghost Writer, The Fighter, Despicable Me, Shutter Island
I can make lists like this for pretty much every year, which is why I turned to the “make a list” metric in the original post. There are a lot of movies out there – I don’t have stats on things like the overall number of movies being made, but it has to be on a generally-increasing trend, right? – and you’re bound to find some pretty high quality stuff if you look.Report
This is why this gets so hard- it’s just so subjective. I definitely would put Shutter Island in the ‘good’ category and maybe very good; Scott Pilgrim, meanwhile, I’d rank a lot lower and Easy A I’d call ‘decent’. But it’s one of those ‘your results may vary’ things.
Looking at the list though I notice exactly what Will Truman says below about children’s movies getting better. There are a lot of good children’s movies being made now, and definitely more than there were in the 70s when Disney was cranking out Herby the Love Bug Goes to El Salvador or whatever. Maybe if my wife and I had children we’d feel differently.
As for more movies being made, it’s definitely the case. Oddly enough though, US distribution of foreign movies has narrowed quite a bit, but production of movies in other countries is way up too. There’s also a problem with film distribution in North America more generally. I said I am Love was really good- I didn’t mention having to drive an hour and a half to see it in a theater. But the narrowing of distribution combined with the sheer volume of mediocre tent pole movies that are coming out might be making it harder to see the diamonds in the rough.Report
Toy Story 3 had a planeful of puerto rican men in tears. And they weren’t fluent in English. It’s a good story, for kids or no. I’d place it at Good.
I’d upgrade Kick-Ass, but then again, I like oni.Report
Oops, I forgot La Vie en Rose, Away From Her, and 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It’s probable that I’ve missed even more. As I say, I don’t think it should be even slightly controversial that a huge number of really good films came out in 2007.Report
When we talk about whether movies have gotten better or worse, more or fewer, I think you have to look at what kind of movies.
Children’s movies have gotten better. Unquestionably. And there’s more than just the Disney annual flick like there used to be.
Comedies have gotten better or worse, depending on how you look at it. There are a lot more raunchy comedies. There seem to be much fewer family comedies (in the theaters, at least), if you exclude the children’s movies that have become more palatable to adults.
The overall range of movies seem to have gone down. Again, in the theaters. There’s 100 movies I’ve never heard of at the local rental place and RedBox has made direct-to-video a much more palatable model.
Worth pointing out again and again is how much better, and more diverse, TV has gotten, making the necessity for good movies much less crucial than in years past. TV has, in its own way, exposed the limitations of the entire movie format. Why tell a story in two hours when you can do so in 10 with automatic sequels?Report
There’s also the issue of content restrictions, which are far less onerous (at least on premium-cable channels.)Report
Quite so. The introduction of new channels also allowed for more experimentation. That these shows were on cable networks lowered expectations and opportunity costs to the point that niche shows were in a better position to thrive.Report
Also, even if movies are worse than they were thirty, thirty-five, or forty years ago, which I’d disagree with, television is still loads better than it was at the same time. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of hours of top-drawer entertainment being produced each year, compared to the 70’s when you basically had whatever Norman Lear was making and the odd really good episode of the Rockford Files (note – hyperbole alert :))Report
There’s an amazing difference between watching old TV shows and watching old movies. You notice how much more one has improved over the other.Report
Hell, there’s a huge difference watching TV shows from 15 years ago and today. I mean, ER and NYPD Blue are both good shows well above most network television today, but they wouldn’t sniff a Drama Series Emmy nomination today.Report