Road to nowhere?
I sat and read George Lucas’ frank disclosure that he will not be making any more big-budget movies with stunned amazement, as I’m sure we all did. Not so much because it was unexpected (it wasn’t), but because he said what we’ve all been thinking, if subconsciously.
But then something else occurred to me, something far more profound and disturbing to me personally, and I’m wondering if I’m not alone.
I work in the film industry - a hard, occaisionally brutal profession. Face it, there are easier ways to make money. I started thinking about the path that brought me here, the motivation to stick with it when times are tough.
For me, it was a feeling. That amazing rush of emotion when engaging with the ritual of cinema. Going with my parents to see a movie - a rare, special thing.
I was stunned to realize that that experience, the ritual I had as a kid, is extinct. Not just for me, but for everyone.
Think about it. When we were growing up, the cinema was the only place to see a new film. You could see it a couple of times, and then it….dissappeared. For years. Today, with on-demand downloads and DVD, this seems unthinkable - to not be able to see a movie whenever you want. But think about what that meant back then, how special it made the whole experience seem. It probably imbued it with far more mystique than we imagine. Like the memory of a first love, always better than the actual experience.
So I think I shed a couple of inner tears on realizing this. My wish to re-create the feeling I had when I was young may just be a phantom. There is no way to re-create that either for myself, or for anyone else. The precise circumstances that allowed a person to feel that way are gone, probably forever.
We’ve deliberately torn down the mystique of cinema. From DVD extras, showing every last detail of the making of, to reading about fictional celebrities every move. It’s all for consumption at our whim. We’ve saturated ourselves with the feeling to the point where it’s become meaningless.
One-hundred years ago, riding in a car was a rare, new, exhilarating experience to be talked about with friends for weeks. Ask yourself what you felt driving to work this morning.
How do we find the ways to bring that sense of occaision, of wonder back to this experience? Can we ever? What do you think?