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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