collections: a weekly reset

It’s February 23rd. I’m trying my best to write with some semblance of consistency, and forcing myself to write, even if I secretly don’t want to, for at least an hour a week. Consistent quantity creates quality, said a self-help book (probably).

  • martin scorsese hates content: one of the godfathers of modern cinema has strong words about what the algorithm did to content
  • wandavision made (linear) television cool again: if netflix invented the binge, then disney+ reinvented water cooler talk


💌


martin scorsese hates content

one of the godfathers of modern cinema has strong words about what the algorithm did to content

The twitter-sphere was in an uproar because one of the most renowned and decorated filmmakers of our time was criticizing the art of the Netflix binge and the cinematic universe of comic books. Content is a dirty word, likened to the systemic devaluation and reduction of the art of cinema.

“Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores.

I love content. If I could say content consumption (and then thinking about it) was a hobby, I would turn it into a self-proclaimed profession. I love consuming content, and I am hoping to do it consciously by thinking out loud and morphing those thoughts into these words.

There flaws are numerous; I’ll name a few. First is the historically exclusionary vantage point from which he is writing. The title of tastemaker is often reserved for the select few who manifest the wealth and cultural capital to decide what constitutes culture (and who gets to make more of it). Curators are a mere cultivation of the elite, in granting a handful with the influence to make opinionated decisions about what the rest of us are allowed to like and spend our money on. The concentration of the custodianship on those with existing connections and clout. They were born with the high ground of high culture.

If I had a hill to die on, it would be the valley between high culture and low culture. The auteurs want us to be patrons, not consumers. Content is commodification, and their art is anything but.

What a shame it would be to make good art accessible; shame on those who enjoy anything else.

wandavision made (linear) television cool again

if netflix invented the binge, then disney+ reinvented water cooler talk

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I love television. It’s the only part of my personality that I have left. Wandavision is nerdy: nerdy in the sense that it is based off of comic books (and comic book characters turned into blockbuster movies), but it also nerds out on television. The conceit of Wandavision is that Wanda has create a television-esque fantasy world for her life with Vision. Each episode is based on a hyper-specific sitcom era, from Bewitched to Modern Family, but they’re not parodies—they’re homages. They are delicate recreations that honor the source inspiration rather than make a mockery of it. That is explicitly how it avoids feeling anachronistic or disjointed: these era-spanning episodes simply inhabit the era they are in. It admires the good old television tropes as much as it transforms them and riffs on them for a modern audience.

As far as Scorsese’s critique goes for media and the algorithm, his homeland is the art of cinema. Mine is television and the telegenicity of stories that become rendered into digestible, thirty-minute to an hour pockets of weekly narrative. Netflix gets a lot of credit where it is due for pioneering the “binge” habit loop, and it’s marketing department prides itself on the innovation. After Netflix began dumping entire series of shows with all the episodes at once, it introduced “binge-worthiness” and a metric of worth for television. In a wild game of endurance, the more episodes you could continuously consume in a single sitting, the more prized the content.

This distribution and consumption model destroyed the traditional conventions of linear tv: the idea that a season of a show would run its course over a non-instantaneous span of time, the episodes would air week after week. After the episode aired, you would have to wait until next week for the next one. As Netflix grew into a content powerhouse, audiences began expecting episodes to drop all at once: they had been spoiled, and grown accustomed to the instant gratification. The water cooler conversation about the last episode (and you can’t spoil what hasn’t aired)

Wandavision is not that kind of show. It’s a slow-burn. It has layers of mystery and suspense that only work because the episodes are spaced out, and each episode ends on a cliffhanger that require a week of theorizing and fan speculation. That is what makes tv feel special over a prolonged period of time: the way the conversation stretches into weeks and months, and viewers are just as excited as they were during week one.

More to come on Wandavision.

this past week