Why is it that we still go to the movies? Why do we bother now that we can sit at home in front of a huge television screen with booming sound coming out of speakers all around the room?
The movie industry has been mugged and left for dead more times than can be counted. But each time, it has gotten up, dusted itself off, and America has responded by once again buying tickets and waiting for the lights to dim and the screen to come alive.
“Hollywood has constantly been pronounced a corpse, yet it never dies,” says Jeanine Basinger, professor of film studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
“It survived the collapse of silent films and the arrival of sound. It survived the Depression, in fact it was booming. It got through World War II, survived the collapse of its own studio system, fought off television, met the challenge of the foreign film. It survived videocassettes, now DVDs and streaming on the Internet,” she says. “It’s never going to die.”
Peter Lev, a historian of film at Towson University in Maryland, agrees. “I think something called film will probably be around in 100 years, even if the technology has nothing to do with celluloid.”
Although television ratings for the Academy Awards have been slipping, their place in America’s cultural and fantasy world remains secure. Television shows might attract much bigger audiences than movies, but few are as interested in seeing their stars get their statuettes, and the Oscars clearly remain the king of the awards shows.
This is emblematic of movies’ retention of the top spot in the pantheon of America’s imagination.
“It is still the best medium for communicating a realistic image of the world,” says Saverio Giovacchini, a film historian at the University of Maryland. “Television has made leaps, but cinema is still the best at mimesis, at re-creating a world, at giving a skin to our thoughts and dreams.”
That is particularly true in America.
“Movies really are an American invention,” Basinger says. “Yes, other people can claim to have invented the technology, but no one has embraced the idea of moving image escapism quite the way America has.”
In times of record trade deficits, movies remain one of America’s major exports, bringing billions of foreign capital into this country in return for images made in Hollywood.
“It is not just film that is being sent abroad, it is American ideals as well,” says Sheri Parks, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. “The American genius is to create a popular culture that translates into other cultures.”
And within America, the movie theater remains an almost mythic cultural space, a place of magic and ritual and rites of passage.
Gilberto Perez, a film historian at Sarah Lawrence College, says that some have said that the big screen has a hypnotic effect.
“In the darkened theater, the big picture takes over and draws you into the experience, that’s one theory,” he says. “The way it draws you into the world that is represented on screen, the way it takes over, of course that is not going to happen at home watching on a much smaller screen TV when you can get up and get a cup of coffee.”
It is also important that in a movie theater, you are sharing the experience with others, both friends and strangers, who have chosen to come together to form an ad hoc tribe.
“There is also the public and communal aspect of it,” Parks says. “Things are more emotional, more fun, more exciting when experienced with other people.”
The movie theater remains a public space at a time when more and more Americans retreat into their homes and cars and eschew many of the communal activities taken for granted by previous generations.
Such spaces are particularly essential for adolescents as they first venture out into the wider world, seeking their community, their friends, their mates. Going to the movies remains the quintessential first date, at once intimate and public.
Imagine the difference in asking that date to come over to your house and watch a DVD. “It would be the modern equivalent of `Come up and see my etchings,'” Basinger says.
Though it seems hard to imagine now, there were many who thought the movies would not survive the advent of sound that augmented silent images with scratchy voices. The technology impeded filmmakers by forcing actors to remain close to a hidden microphone.
Of course, the opposite happened. Movie attendance almost doubled. By the late 1930s, well over half the country was seeing a movie every week. Radio was popular, but it could not compete.
Attendance began dropping after World War II–all those baby boomers were babies and kept their parents home–but it was the rapid spread of TV sets a decade later that really threatened the movies.
Average weekly attendance plummeted, from 100 million in 1946 to 15 million a quarter-century later. It has climbed back to about 25 million today–less than 10 percent of the population–obviously far short of its glory days.
More blows were to come, from VCRs and videocassette rentals; from cable’s commercial-free films; and now from digital technology with DVDs, big screens and sound systems that brought home theaters–once the province of the rich–to middle America.
More Top Picks Shades Sail
Hollywood responded with a combination of technological and business decisions that have kept it thriving. When TV arrived, theaters offered 3-D movies and Cinerama–three projectors filling a huge screen with an eerily realistic picture.
Lev says that “This Is Cinerama,” a 1952 film that introduced the technology, is his earliest film-going memory.
“I basically remember the roller coaster ride,” he says. It was absolutely stunning.”
Cinerama lasted only a decade, but it ushered in other wide-screen techniques, such as Cinemascope, that forever altered the size of the screen and the movie-going experience.
The industry had a tougher time figuring out what to do about the suburbanization of the country that led to the demise of the downtown movie palaces that had been first-run showcases.
The advent of the multiplex was badly handled, expanding choice but decreasing quality by putting movies on tiny screens in a warren of little theaters, sometimes with the sound of the movie next door clearly audible.
The arrival of videocassettes and cable TV woke filmmakers up. Sound was drastically improved and became a much more important part of the theatrical experience. The new suburban multiplexes began to rival the old movie palaces with huge screens and stadium seating that put viewers closer to the screen.
These new cinemas recognized their role as public spaces with food courts, video games and other such areas.
Parallel to that was the fact that Hollywood was buying into the competing technologies. Once movie moguls got over their battle with the upstart television, they realized it provided another way to make money off their films. The networks paid big money for the right to broadcast popular movies. The same was true, eventually, of cable, videocassettes and DVDs.
“The reason Hollywood is never going to die is because it eats its young,” Basinger says. “Whenever anything comes along as an offshoot showing moving images as entertainment, Hollywood consumes it. The story of Hollywood is a vampire movie in which nobody can find the stake.”
Giovacchini says that the combination of a bottom-line mentality and a continued appeal to intellectuals has helped keep the American movie industry relevant.
He contrasts that with Italy, where intellectuals turned their back on the popularity–and importance–of spaghetti westerns.
“Italian intellectuals abandoned mainstream cinema and created a kind of double circuit: the mainstream one, dominated by American films, and the art cinema, seen by few, and heavily subsidized by the state,” he says. “I think the fact that American cinema is embraced by, and works in collaboration with, so many people is a relatively unique situation in the world.”
So in America, popular films help set the intellectual agenda–whether it is the politics of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the assisted suicide in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” or the theology of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”
For a brief time, network television had that role with heavily watched major miniseries and movies such as “Roots,” “The Holocaust” and “The Day After.” But the onset of cable, while it threatened the movie industry, also so splintered the TV audience that it ensured that movies would remain one of the country’s few cultural touchstones.
Basinger says movies are personal touchstones as well.
“I had an ex-student who was contemplating a bad marriage and I finally said to him, `Are you really going to marry a woman who hates `Vertigo?'” she says. “He instantly saw I was right and that she was wrong for him.
“It is a very good way to understand someone else’s emotional makeup,” she said. “By their movies you will know them.”