Is Culture Stuck?

Maybe the movies are dying? And maybe also books, music and television are dying? Maybe it's the end of "legacy media" as we know it? and culture has fragmented into so many pieces only sub-culture remains?

Or maybe culture is not stuck? Maybe the cultural guardians of the newslettersphere just don't like, or are not aware of, where culture is happening today?

People are reading fewer books, we hear, and young people especially are doing it wrong. People are watching fewer movies, especially in the theater. Music, many say, is dead; it's just the recycling of old styles and tropes, there's no innovation.

Also, vaudeville is dying. Wood block printing is in the red. And cave paintings are just graffiti now.

Shouldn't I be taking this more seriously? After all, I love books and movies and music, and art in general. I'm even trying to write fiction! Who am I kidding?

Will "mass culture" ever exist again?

Is this dire refrain something different from the role cultural critics have historically played, that is, articulating all of the ways the culture sucks now?

Is the novel, which has a cultural history of around two thousand years, or four hundred years, depending on what you think a novel is, actually dying? What do we even mean by that? In the US, hundreds of millions of books are sold every year. There are ups and downs, but the trend is up over all in the past twenty years. While people are reading physical books less than they used to, audio and digital books are making up some of the slack.

What about the movies? Are they dying? The pandemic took a monster bite out of the box office; the last couple years saw ticket sales on par with the early 2000s, which is a big downturn.

But what are "movies?" Major motion pictures are expensive, theatrical versions of "moving image art." This is why they are called movies in the first place. They are images that move. And there are more of them, in more forms, than at any other time in the last hundred years.

The cinematic experience of watching movies on a giant screen in the dark with a hundred strangers is not dead, it's just an increasingly smaller part of the moving image pie. But the pie itself is getting bigger and bigger all the time. Film lovers and filmmakers have lamented the death of film, as opposed to video, but this technological change has barely registered for the vast majority of the audience.

At the same time, the switch to digital video formats over the last thirty years has led to an explosion of moving image art. Not just shorts and feature narrative films and documentaries, but a universe of new forms and styles that have barely even been recognized, let alone categorized, let alone appreciated by the cultural gatekeepers. It is, of course, the cultural gatekeepers who are dying—that much is certain.

Is that the real complaint?

I'm getting old, too. I tripped and fell while attending a football game the other day, on concrete, and severely bruised my right hand, making it hard to do a lot of normal activities. I feel myself getting older—a fall like that would have been nothing thirty years ago, and it might be everything in another thirty years. It's palpable. And hard to deny.

Yet, of course, like everyone, I'd love to deny it as long as possible. Naturally, the things I like and that have been important to me in my life are The Important Things That Must Be Preserved. Which is ridiculous; also, it's the usual stance of the old.

Is culture stuck, or are the critics stuck?

I love going to the movies and, sure, I wish the movies were much, much better most of the time. I'm bothered that young people will rarely watch any films from before the 1970s, and only one or two films from even that decade, sure. I think Hollywood executives have made a cascading series of disastrous decisions for a long time, and I'm happy to tell you about them.

But the moving image is in its infancy. The online video that pundits love to dismiss is taking the medium in new directions every day. It's not cinema—it's something new. It's already mass culture. And it's thriving.