The digital revolution: Film

By Geoff Pevere

Entertainment Columnist

Published On Fri Dec 03 2010

It may be the most significant social change to ever happen in such a short
time. Because of digital technologies and their dizzying rate of evolution,
much of what we once took for granted – including our institutions, business
models and brains themselves – are being radically reconfigured. Nowhere
is this more apparent, drastic and crucial than in the realm of pop culture. If
the digital revolution has facilitated a completely new relationship with our
old media, those media themselves must adapt or die.

In the coming weeks, Geoff Pevere will investigate these seismic shifts — for
both industries and consumers — in four erupting areas: film, music, books
and TV.

First part, the movies.

*****

A couple of months ago, Atom Egoyan went to the movies with his 17-year-
old son Arshile. Their choice was The Social Network, a movie about how
Facebook changed not only the lives of those who launched it but the world
it was launched into.

They saw it in a megaplex, one of those all-in entertainment complexes that

hastened the oblivion of just about every other kind of movie theatre in the
mid-’90s. It’s also the place that, more than anything else, helped the movie
exhibition business stave off extinction in the digital age. It’s the primary
reason we still actually go the movies at a time when technology could just
as easily bring the movies to us.

Egoyan, who is 50 years old and one of the most famous filmmakers this
country has produced, was alarmed by his moviegoing experience.

Not by the film, which he enjoyed. By the audience.

“The way people were talking to each other, like absolutely out loud, having
conversations as though there was no sense of this as an experience that
needed a degree of respect or consideration, was amazing,” he says. “It was
as though they were watching in their living room.”

For Egoyan, this signified more than a shift in people’s moviegoing

etiquette. He suspects a fundamental change in the way people think of
“the cinema.”
“People were not respecting it as a cinema experience as I understood it,”
he explains. “They were talking, they were texting each other, there were all
these other sources of light in that room.

“The cinema is about one single source of light, projected on a screen, and
people being absorbed in this almost atavistic way, in this Platonic notion of
a cave.”

***

If the caves are rowdier, does it necessarily follow that the cave dwellers
have devolved?

Egoyan isn’t alone in wondering. Digital media have not only created a
world starkly different from the world of a mere 15 years ago, they have
changed the way people who live in the world think, behave, create and
consume.

They have facilitated a generation gap that makes the divide between
Boomers and their parents narrow by comparison, and they have
accelerated the pace of cultural and political change to something like warp
speed. In this world, The Social Network, set in 2004, can seem like the Dark
Ages.

This is not hype. The future has arrived more quickly that most people were
prepared for, and the consequences of this abrupt collision with tomorrow
will likely not be fully understood for generations to come. Meanwhile, this
much is certain: culturally, we’re not even in the same solar system as
Kansas anymore.

“We believe the world has reached a critical turning point,” writes Don
Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in Macrowikinomics, a book that situates
changing cultural industries as central to the new digital era. “Reboot all the
old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or
collapse.”

Neurologically, the reboot has already occurred, write Dr. Gary Small and
Gigi Vorgan in iBrain: Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind: “The
current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live
and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

And not simply in the way you may think: “Rather than simply catching
‘Digital,’ ” write Small and Vorgan, “many of us are developing neural
circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed
concentration.

“Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving

right now — at a speed like never before,” they write.

Nowhere has this shift been more dramatic than in popular culture. The old
models for the creation, production and dissemination of these things have
virtually collapsed in the past decade. The industries producing music,
movies, TV, books and news have seen their paradigms not merely shift but
explode, and each is scrambling to re-define itself for a future where the
only thing from the past that applies is our passion for pleasure.

This is a key point. For all that is changing neurologically, socially and
institutionally, content is constant. As the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and
New Media Collide, “History teaches us that old media never die — and they
don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to
access media content.”

But tools change their users.

“If old consumers were isolated individuals, the new consumers are more
socially connected,” Jenkins writes. “If the work of media consumers was
once silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy and public.”

Few people have given more thought nor spoken more widely on the subject
of digital cultural rupture than Tapscott, a business strategy consultant. He
describes a “generation lap” in which, for the first time in history, kids are
more expert in navigating the informational environment than their parents.

The implications are huge: We’re looking at generations with different brain
skills, generations who view and engage with the world differently, and the
end of the mass media industries as we knew them. Movies, for instance,
were created in the era of what Tapscott calls “one-to-many media.”

“What we’ve got now is the antithesis of that,” he explains. “It’s a media
that’s one-to-one and many-to-many. It’s highly distributed and
decentralized. It’s not controllable and as such it has an awesome
neutrality. It will be what we want it to be.”

“This new media,” he adds, “doesn’t understand the rules that you’re
supposed to play by. When information is no longer atoms and becomes
bits, content, whether music or a movie or whatever, doesn’t know that it
shouldn’t be infinitely reproduced and fly around the world at the speed of
light. And this is turning all of these traditional industrial-age media
industries on their heads.”

Piracy is one result. But that’s only the iceberg-tip of a much deeper shift in
values. When people have grown up expecting instant access to just about
anything; when they’ve grown accustomed to getting it free and having a
participatory role in it, they are fundamentally different media users than
their parents. As a result all entertainment media — TV, music, publishing
and graphic arts — are on the wild frontier.

*****

It’s a Saturday afternoon at the megaplex, mid-life for a new release.

Since the mid-1970s, when the staggering success of Jaws and Star Wars
compelled the movie industry to re-think its entire release strategy,
opening-weekend box office has become the equivalent of the Roman
emperor’s thumb. Because other exhibition platforms — DVD, pay-per-view,
Netflix, piracy — have so dramatically shortened a movie’s theatrical shelf
life, the average release has to click instantly to be counted a success.

It’s a process that began in the 1980s, with the widespread use of home
video viewing technology and the proliferation of those shoebox-sized multi-
screen facilities called the multiplex. That was the industry’s first response
to the corrosive competition caused by the VCR. The megaplex was the next
generation: bigger, brighter, better and buff. It was built to defend its
terrain.

All the same, the days where you actually needed to “go to the show,” as
my grandparents called it, are gone. With the click of a button, the show will
come to you.

And that raises questions.

Like: what has this done to the industry, since so much control has shifted
from producer to consumer?

Like: what has this done to the medium, since filmmakers now make films
that are as likely to be viewed in the back seat of a car as the twelfth-row
centre of a movie theatre?

Like: just what are we talking about when we talk about the movie
“audience”?

Like: How can the go-to-the-show tradition ever compete with an

entertainment universe as vast, convenient and cheap as the touch-pad
delivery system?

And, most mysteriously, why do people bother going to movies at all any
more, especially when they’ll come to you faster than microwave popcorn?

Because they do. In 2009, a record $10.6 billion (U.S.) was generated at the
box office in Canada and United States, while almost $30 billion was made
worldwide. This marked an increase from the previous year, and significant
enough that the increase can’t be accounted for by rising ticket prices
alone. The fact is, people like to go to the show.

The megaplex has something to do with it. Charles R. Acland is associate

professor of communications Studies at Concordia University. In his book
Screen Traffic, he describes how the introduction of the megaplex — with its
many screens, optimal viewing conditions and self-contained entertainment
environment — was designed in response to the temptation to stay at
home.
“So exhibitors, as well as film producers and media companies,” Acland
explains, “wanted to re-think ‘what was the special location?’ and one
aspect of it was a kind of upscaling, making things a little more
technologically standardized, a little more state of the art — at least along
their terms. And along with that, a little more expensive.”

***

Cut back to Saturday afternoon. In the lobby on the main floor of the AMC
complex at Dundas and Yonge, four young women talk, still deciding what to
see. They’re here as part of a birthday celebration, and their only plan was
to hook up here. They’d settle on a movie once everyone arrived.

This was exactly what the megaplex was designed for. Since the mid-’90s, if
theatres wanted to generate box office, they not only had to give people a
good reason to get out of the house — especially since home viewing
systems were increasingly sophisticated and affordable — you had to give
them choice: the same principle as the supermarket, the big box store, the
mall and the video rental store. If you could get people to go to a show the
way they used to go to the show, the business of movie exhibition might
stave off stay-at-home oblivion.

Judging by the people I speak with this Saturday afternoon, it’s worked.
Take Naomi, 20; Sarah, 20; Anastasia, 20; and Victoria, 19: what they see is
actually incidental to the event. The event is the going.

“It’s a social thing,” Victoria explains. “Today it’s a friend’s birthday, so

we’re going to see a movie together. If you watch something at home you’re
not going to gather around together the same way.”

Victoria’s friends also watch movies at home. Naomi prefers her laptop, and
Sarah and Anastasia watch DVDs on TV. But nothing compares with meeting
friends to see something together.

“I like comedies,” adds anastasia. “Watching funny movies with a group

makes it better. When you’re watching in the theatre and everybody laughs,
it makes you laugh. It’s a whole better environment. Sitting at home and
just watching it by yourself isn’t the same thing.”

The megaplexes, says Charles Acland, effectively “re-structured the

landscape of theatres.”

“They really did change where you go and the kind of expectations that one
has of a moviegoing trip,” he says. “Like deciding where you’re going before
you decide what film you’re going to.”

Today, says Acland, “People make decisions about their proximity to a

theatre rather than what they actually are going to see or even whether
they’re going to see it.”

***
Bob Murphy, 55, and Adrian Shuman, 61, have been going to movies
together for years. They too didn’t decide what to see until they got here.

“We got here and sort of spun a wheel and picked a movie,” says Bob.

“We’re both film buffs,” Adrian says. “We don’t want to give in to the small
screen. We still love the experience of being surrounded by the image and
the sound and other people and popcorn.”

Bob and Adrian also use the cinema as a hanging-out excuse. And for
Acland, this may be the most compelling explanation for the persistence of
moviegoing.

“It’s about the appetite for movies and the appetite for the sociality that
accompanies them,” he says.

When people talk about a decline in “film culture,” he suggests, “they’re

always assessing moviegoing in relationship to film culture. What I suggest
is what would it mean if we understood it in relation to a history of going
out?

“It’s not just about encountering the movie at the end. It’s about
transportation. It’s about food consumption. It’s about seeing the landscape
of your neighbourhood. And in a way that might be part of the continued
longevity of what we simplistically refer to as moviegoing.”

***

But the show itself ain’t what it once was. Ask anybody who grew up pre-
megaplex.

Like Atom Egoyan. He, like lot of older viewers, finds the customary
distractions of contemporary moviegoing — talking, texting, browsing
theatres — sufficiently aggravating to make stay-at-home viewing all the
more attractive.

Egoyan began making movies in his early twenties. One of his dramatic
fixations in early works like Next of Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1986) and
Speaking Parts (1989) was the anesthetizing impact of home recording
technology. It was likened to re-making reality artificially, with the result
that people could no longer function in the so-called ‘real’ world.

“That’s not how it worked out,” he says today.

Egoyan is both amazed and mystified by the generation that has, in Toronto
business strategy consultant Don Tapscott’s phrase, ‘grown up digital.’ His
son is one of them.

They’re not alienated, and they’re very social, Egoyan says. And while they
certainly watch movies, it’s not, according to him, with anything near the
concentration, absorption or respect that audiences once did.
Or do they, but differently? As Egoyan points out, his son is every bit as
interested in movies as his father was at the same age, and he’s certainly
capable of absolute absorption. (“Although,” he adds, “his friends find The
Godfather too slow and Pulp Fiction too challenging.”) He also notes how his
own movies, like last year’s Chloe — which has made more money than any
of his previous films — are more widely talked about now than they ever
were. And he talks about how the increasingly participatory nature of digital
media hearkens a decidedly different, maybe even brave, new world.

“Go back to McLuhan,” Egoyan says of the late Canadian media guru.

“We are experiencing the global village,” he says, “but in a way we never
dreamt, because we’re participating in the construction of it as well.”

******

“It’s an odd time,” says author Tapscott. “A time when kids in the schools
know more about the biggest innovation in learning ever than their teacher,
and the kids coming into the work force have at their fingertips better tools
for innovation and high performance than our most sophisticated
companies.”

Now that hard media matter — paper, film, record, CDs, etc. — has been
rendered virtually obsolete there’s no turning back. Like it or not, the future
is here. For Tapscott, this leaves no popular medium exempt from the need
to radically adapt, not if it wishes to remain popular. And the megaplex will
not stem the coming tide.

“The movie industry is next,” says Tapscott. “Sales are at an all time high,
but overall attendance is actually down. You’ve got a few blockbusters —
like Avatar — that are distorting things. But DVD sales are down.

“Ultimately, I think it’s going to be hard to protect movies just like it’s hard
to protect a song. It probably makes sense to move towards a streaming
video model, where you pay a fee for a month for access to all the new
movies plus a library of a bunch of old ones.

“But the movie has a bunch of other things that are happening to it as well,”
Tapscott adds. “I was invited to the Berlin film festival to give the Berlinale
keynote in 2008, and I talked about this thing called ‘The Film 2.0.’ ”

“I asked, ‘What is the new narrative?’ the old one, the full-length feature
film, has been around for a long time, at least as far back as Battleship
Potemkin. But now, as the film becomes bits and becomes something that’s
networked, you get to be in the movie. That’s where we’re going.”

******

By becoming bits, movies are vulnerable to all manner of re-making. This is

their future, whether or not the industry likes it.
Following the collaboratively interactive model of hugely popular websites
like HitRECord, we can expect movies that we can edit to our own liking.
And we can also expect movies made with creative interactivity in mind.

There will be increasingly sophisticated hybrids of movie and game

experiences. Already, games such as Halo, Grand Theft Auto and Call of
Duty have created blockbusting interactive experiences that put the player
in what amounts to a movie. Many movies have already been spawned by
game sources while certain releases like The Matrix and Star Wars spawn
gaming worlds of their own.

Movies will be made by more people than ever before; the recent buzz
around digicam movies such as Paranormal Activity and Monsters suggests
there is may at least be a future for releases that hitch low budgets to high
concepts.

To compete with all this user-generated activity, theatrical releases will

become even more singularly spectacular: 3D is one possible trajectory, but
future blockbusters will boast all manner of you-have-to-be-here attractions
to lure us out.

Technologies may come that let us experience movies as fully immersive

spectacles, replete with smells, 360-degree perspective and multiple points
of narrative possibility. IMAX-sized screens may well become the standard,
and they will likely be filled by the kinds of movies that make size matter:
fantasy, action, science fiction — sensation.

So Saturday afternoon at the movies will stay put for the time being.
Perhaps especially as other technologies skew toward solitary consumption
experiences, we’ll continue to go to the show. Purely digital interactivity
only goes so far.

Tapscott concurs, adding that, for all the interactivity we’ve come to expect,
there will always be an appeal for the kind of story that does the telling for
us: “Sometimes you just want to surrender to someone else’s narrative, just
veg out and watch a movie.”

And, as director Bruce McDonald put it to me, “Sometimes people just need
to get of the f---king house, man.”