Wednesday, 20 September 2017


A Marxist at the Movies (3):

 

THE HOLLYWOOD EYE by JON BOORSTIN – A Critique Interlude

 

          In the main bulk of film watching and moviegoing, the fundamental bond between viewer and film is: money. Without money to spend we could not go to the cinema or buy box-sets. Otherwise we have download, and Pay TV which is a surcharge on top of the licence fee. Not forgetting that the often-lavish TV adverts on commercial stations add cost to the many advertised products and services we consume.

          I am of course writing of films that are considered going commercial concerns, not those pictures favoured especially by cineastes that stopped being ‘commercial’ a long time ago, except in commercial DVD form. The cheapest deals money-wise are films on BBC channels and borrowing DVDs from the public library – whatever the TV licence fee and Council Tax to pay for each. Of course the proportion of Council Tax for libraries is small but you still have to pay the whole tax! Anyhow libraries are disappearing at a rate of knots.

          The only one who gets truly free viewing of commercial films, where this is allowed, may be the prison convict who – along with minimal purchasing power – pays no fees or taxes at all.

          There is another category of free-viewers, so to speak: those in the upper reaches of film making and teaching/learning who can request viewings for purposes of research and appreciation. Film journalists go to previews or obtain free tickets and might at the very least offset research costs against tax. But all these don’t count because – whether this is enjoyed or not – it is ‘work’. But I sometimes wonder whether the prolonged and habitual obtaining of films without paying for them comes to insulate film makers and critics from the fact that others (or their parents) have to pay for them in one form or another. Somebody has to pay or the films don’t get made.

          All this is why I say that the almost invariable bond between films and their audiences is money. Invariable and invisible.

          Invisible, that is, until the experience of seeing the film – if a letdown – causes the viewer to feel somehow cheated out of the money paid for a ticket or download or DVD, causing much grumbling. Cinema tickets are not cheap and certainly not for a family of (say) four. Partly the cost of seeing a film makes one determined to enjoy it, or at least determined that one’s children will enjoy it. But equally it can cause dismay and even anger if the enjoyment proved elusive.

          Car-leasing is now the most affordable way of ‘owning’ a car – until the subprime car bubble bursts – but for most people it remains our most expensive commodity after a house or flat. It is also the most underutilised. Allowing for use for certain business purposes (like commercial travelling or farming) the car will likely be parked on average for 22-23 hours out of the 24. Except for car holidays and most definitely not for airborne ones or cruises.

          Underutilisation is the likely fate also for the rather more (!) modestly-priced DVD. DVDs at home end up on a shelf with dozens of others many of which will either never be viewed again after the first time, or only a few times’ each in the remaining lifetime of the purchaser. This will be true of those films labelled – and there is an irony here – as ‘straight to DVD’, which usually means they are of such low quality that they will hardly be viewed again after the once. By contrast, your refrigerator (say) functions – and not on mere ‘standby’ - 24 hours a day.

          Indeed home viewing taken as a whole may be more needlessly expensive than the cinema ticket, dear as that may seem at the time. You don’t ‘buy’ or ‘lease’ a film at the cinema but at least you aren’t lumbered with it afterwards. With download you may be stuck with ‘the 1000 Movies’ offer of many films you would not watch more than once if at all.         There is a particular financial emphasis on filmic experience: films in general, that is, feature-films, are far more expensive to make than, say, paintings and books, and sometimes even more expensive to hype than to make. The cost of film promotion frequently exceeds that of film production – I suspect this is even truer now than in 1991 and before. Boorstin does not mention the promotions executives – now brought in for their say-so at ever earlier stages in development. This hyping leads to occasional mismatch between the publicity and the actual film, resulting in viewers’ confusion of expectations. Unknown, it seems, to the Boorstin of 1991, advance publicity – grown into a huge and intrusive industry of its own (to reduce market risk on ever-higher budgets) – inserts itself between the viewer and the picture, manipulating a particular expectancy at the outset. Boorstin’s Voyeuristic, Vicarious and Visceral – if these separate aspects exist – do not come to the picture out of a socio-economic void. And the cost of film publicity has become an ever bigger factor in the price of viewing.

          Financial considerations are bound to impinge to one degree or another on the film viewing experience. And so films have to be made that appease the purse or wallet as well as the ‘mind’ and ‘emotions’, not to speak of the ‘visceral’. The wallet, indeed, may be the most ‘visceral  element of all.

          Boorstin doesn’t say so, but the viewing of commercially-viable films is first and foremost a financial transaction. As with cars, such transactions  have become fancier, that’s all.

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