Maybe it wasn’t just me, or even just the movies. The shock of empty theaters due to the pandemic and the simultaneous rise of streaming platforms may have caused irreparable damage to cinema’s sustainability and tarnished its luster. The attention that stardom and spectacle attracted was shifting to smaller screens and increasingly fragmented into narrow algorithmic niches. The respectable habit of going to the theater and sitting among strangers – which for Thomson was 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 – has diminished the uniqueness, the sacredness, of motion pictures as an art form.
Of course, interesting movies continue to be made, and occasionally crowds of people leave the house to see them, as was the case with recent low-budget Gen Z horror hits “Obsession” and “Backrooms.”
But among critics and other devotees, the long-standing habit of keeping films separate and superior to all other displayed material may involve a significant category error. Could it be that rather than being separate from television, streaming, TikTok, AI 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 in the universe of human consciousness?
Thomson’s term for that ubiquitous phenomenon is “movie.” For the most part, when he talks about “films” in the plural (or, synonymously, “film” or “cinema”), he is talking about the medium that developed in the 20th century as a popular form of entertainment, sometimes rising to the level of art. In contrast, “movie” refers not to an individual film but to a way of perception, of seeing and imagining the world, that the medium has imposed on us. Whether we go to the movies or not, most of us live in what he sometimes calls “movie state,” a state of perpetual fantasy and denial.
An obsessive film catalog
If in the 21st century we are facing the decline of films, we are also going through the triumph of “film”. And if Thomson is increasingly skeptical of movies, it’s because he’s loved them for as long as he can remember.
