Much has changed over the years in the world of cinematic storytelling. Camera quality has gotten sharper and CGI, along with other advancements, have shown us things we otherwise would never have been able to see. But perhaps the most striking characteristic of modern-day filmmaking is the proclivity to fill every second of every scene with all the bells, whistles, and general foofaraw that can be condensed to fit on the screen.
This is the direction in which media consumption has been moving for some time. The very nature of technology as it pertains to personal convenience has accelerated the already-rapidly deteriorating capacity of the general attention span of any given consumer. Apps like Tik Tok have spearheaded this movement by condensing content into clips so short they last only a fraction of the time of a television advertisement.
While being able to convey substantial portions of information – or at the very least entertainment value – in such a brief time should theoretically expedite information processing times, this fails to consider what is sacrificed in these types of exchanges.
The primary casualty here, and most everywhere in society today, is nuance. Humans, by our very nature, are highly complex creatures. We are each drastically different, and if our collective existence proves anything, it is that subtleties can make a world of difference.
Human nature also dictates that we must find ways to understand and categorize anything and everything we can. While this proclivity certainly has its practical applications, it falls on the wrong side of the war against nuance. Black and white thinking, in and of itself, is a slippery slope which, if left unchecked long enough, can have very real and very dire consequences.
Tyranny, as they say, is the deliberate removal of nuance. What is meant by this is, once idiosyncrasies start being done away with, everything starts to look, sound, and feel the same. The elimination of nuance and subtlety is essentially the death of independent thought, which is the type of ideology which can lead to fascist regimes and widespread censorship.
But back to the important stuff: superhero movies. Thanks in no small part to the immense box office success and top-tier brand marketing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, superhero films have become the biggest thing in cinema. Actor/musician Jared Leto – who himself has portrayed DC’s Joker on the big screen, as well as Marvel’s Morbius – credits the Marvel movie machine with keeping theaters in business at all, and given the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the film industry, one might have a difficult time arguing the point.
But the portrayal of these larger-than-life worlds with such frequency creates an issue in terms of emotional investment. The world is at risk of ending – every time. Lives are at stake – every time. These tropes often crop up multiple times scene to scene in the same films. The law of diminishing returns dictates that viewers will eventually lose the motivation to emotionally invest in the same hat trick again and again.
It’s the narrative equivalent of inflation: if the stakes are always high, they’re never high. To quote Josh Radnor’s character from the sitcom, How I Met Your Mother: “If all nights are legendary, no nights are legendary.”
This of course hasn’t stopped moviegoers from throwing their hard-earned dollars at every new film or series rolled out by the MCU month after month, but one can’t help but wonder how much time will have to pass before viewers tire of enduring the same three-hour cycle again and again. As far as nourishing the cosmic curiosity and desire for transcendence inherent in all of us, “pretty girl falls from ledge while Spider-Man tries to save her” has to be the intellectual equivalent of a pack of Skittles at this point.
And really, this is the case across the board in many ways. Pop music, for many, is no longer a form of artistic expression as much as a means to an end – a tactic used to control and manipulate consumers’ spending habits. Likewise, the focus of video games has moved away from storytelling to hone in on the sheer amount of downloadable content for which developers can charge players to access.
Generally speaking, the media we consume today is the sensory equivalent of a shoebox-sized chocolate chip brownie smothered in bacon grease injected with cheese wiz and butter pecan ice cream topped with cotton candy and peanut butter to be washed down with a glass of chocolate syrup. We’ve moved beyond the idea of sticking kids in front of ipads to distract them, and have advanced to sticking ourselves in front of the ipads while our deepest potential as human beings gathers dust.
Actor Josh Gad – known for his work in Frozen, The Book of Mormon, and Beauty and the Beast – recently made reference to this drastic change of pace in an interview with The Independent. The Grammy Award winning actor indicated filmmakers’ altered perception of what they believe an audience to be able to handle “in terms of telling a story slowly.”
Gad cited Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as an example of more methodical filmmaking, pointing out the lack of screen time allotted to the titular creature in favor of the utilization of creative framework and suspense as a means of getting the story across.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine many films devoid of wall-to-wall action sequences and perpetual melodrama acting as believable competitors in today’s box office market. Exposition-driven performance vehicles such as Donnie Darko or The Shawshank Redemption would likely stand little chance against star-studded behemoths that feature an explosion in every frame, the antiquated dread of a film like Nosferatu would be beyond lost on the modern movie audience.
But should the universe direct any filmmakers to this article, my advice would be to take a page from the writing handbook of John Mayer. In divulging the creative process for his latest album Sob Rock, the guitarist alluded to a glass of water as the basis of a metaphor. He pointed out that it’s easier to fit the world in a glass of water than to amplify a glass of water to such a degree that it’s the size of the actual world.
Don’t try to build something bigger than life, because you will fail. Focus on the glass of water. Build the best world you can within the confines of what the project requires, and the world will come to you. In short, don’t start work with perception of the finished product in mind. Cater to the intent of the work, and the right audience will make their way to it.
