Chapter Eleven
Key Light—Why Take Film Seriously?
“Why take film seriously?” This is the question moving throughout our discussions in Film,
Form, and Culture, and it’s not a trivial or self-evident question. Since you are taking an intro to
film course, you might immediately answer “yes,” of course film must be taken seriously. That’s
what we are doing here. But behind that answer has been a bit of work. Did you, at some point
in the course, feel that you might not be able to look at a film as a source of entertainment? Did
you find the comparison of Vertigo and This is 40 too incongruous? Perhaps that was the last
straw in our attempt to convince that all film deserves some serious attention. But in fact it is
the test of the high/mid/low theories of culture and a confirmation that you can embrace all
film and find links between them and your response to them.
But, at the moment, that embrace is shifting. Television, long considered at the low end
of the cultural spectrum, is now becoming the medium in which some of the most imaginative
filmmaking is occurring. Network television not so much, but cable, HBO especially, and
streaming services like Netflix and Amazon are creating fiction and documentary programming
with a variety and sophistication that seems missing in much contemporary conventional
cinema. To be sure, this is “narrow casting” in the sense that it is available only to people with
high end flat screens, a good Internet connection, and a willingness to pay a premium for the
services.
Does this mean that “quality” (if we can still use that word) is available only to a select
number of well-off viewers? That would suggest that “culture,” in the old sense of the word,
has shifted back to the well-to-do. House of Cards or True Detective have a considerably smaller
audience than the latest Marvel comic book adaptation at the multiplex.
I think we need to avoid getting back to the old class-based constructions of culture and
rather look at the spectrum of offerings and the variations of taste, something we have not
discussed in the text of Film, Form, and Culture. Taste is extremely personal, though it can be
influenced by peer pressure. A person who likes Spider-Man movies or Fifty Shades of Grey may
not be attracted to Spiral, the French police procedural on Netflix. Taste is part of the cultural
complex, and it is one of the things that defines us as individuals. It is also what generates the
now all but overwhelming amount of choice we have in regards to film across the media
landscape. As attendance in actual theaters diminishes, as digital filming, distribution, and
exhibition become universal, as the variety of screens multiplies, and the definitions of what is
cinema expand, so expand the cultures of the imagination.