Week 5: Response

I’m more inclined to reflect on Jenkins’ article because it was written ten years ago, so we’re able to look back at his words, and, knowing what 2010 is like, analyze whether his prophecies were on par or not. While Lanier’s book is indeed provocative, and he backs up his argument with past examples from history (MIDI, how the width of railroad tracks impacted the development of the train for decades, etc), his theories are speculation like Jenkins’ were ten years ago, and until some time passes we have to wait to see if Lanier’s warnings in You Are Not a Gadget come true.

My first question concerning Jenkins’ article was: has amateur filmmaking threatened the commercial film industry or just found a niche of its own, mostly separate from mainstream Hollywood?

Jenkins predicted that amateur and fan film would threaten the commercial film industry, but I don’t think it has become a  threat so much as developed a market of its own. Youtube is the amateur filmmaker’s movie theater, and millions of hits do garner attention from strangers all over the world, yet a two minute “Charlie Bit My Finger” video does not compete with Inception.

People enjoy watching and sharing Youtube videos, but those do not replace  the experience of going to the movies or the level quality that Hollywood works on (most of the time). Very rarely an independent movie made on a very small budget will work its way to commercial success, but this isn’t a threat to the commercial movie industry so much as another chance for Hollywood to hop on the independent director and make as much money through them as possible.

Jenkins explains the notion of “books, hooks, and looks” and ancillary markets in his article, two terms that explain the market strategy Hollywood has been using to make as much money off of franchises as possible since the 1970s. My second question was: after almost three decades (or more) of the “entertainment supersystem model” of studios milking as much money as possible out of books, action figures, tee-shirts, video games, and other merchandise from films, are we as an audience more aware of how the gross commercialism outweighs the focus of the film? Do we care if a film was made to make money or made to be art?

My answer to this question is two-sided. Yes I think most (or more) audiences are aware of the fact that gross commercialism can outweigh the focus of a film, but no, I don’t think that a large part of the audience care.

One example of this I always notice, being a Pixar fan, is when I go to Walmart. In the card and giftwrapping section of the store, there are countless greeting cards, party supplies (cups, plates, hats, etc), wrapping paper, gift bags, and stickers covered with characters from the Pixar movie Cars. I’ve never seen Cars because I’ve been advised against it: all of the die-hard and and analytical Pixar fans I know claim Cars is the worst Pixar movie.

Yet the  Cars stuff sells. When Up was being advertised before it was released in theaters, the movie trailer said “From the creators who brought you Cars and Finding Nemo,” even though two critically acclaimed (and amazing) Pixar films had been released since Cars: Ratatouille and (my favorite) Wall-E. The other Pixar movies have won more awards and have received much more praised, but because Cars sells more merchandise, you can throw your kid a Cars-themed birthday party almost 5 years after the movie came out, but might have a harder time throwing a Wall-E party almost 3 years after its released.

It’s easy to tell the difference between the movies that were meant to sell and the movies that were meant to move the audience. Think about all of the promotion that Michael Bay movies receive, all of the excess that comes with the release of a Transformers movie. In fact, with some movies the title is irrelevant, it’s the director’s name that matters because the name has become a product with which to sell seats “From Director Michael Bay, who brought you Transformers and Transformers Two…”

But then there are other movies, like Juno, that aren’t produced by any big names and don’t have any huge hitters in the cast and aren’t marketed in any kind of commercial way, but still grow to earn more and more attention and win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, not because of the corresponding merchandise but because the film is actually good.

Hopefully that notion, that some good stuff can compete with the rotten, will console Lanier a bit. Not everything conforms!

Tags: response