Occams Razor said:
I am not a movie-fan or expert, but I think the entertainment factor weighs heavier for cinema than for literature; it is easier for a book author to display "higher" ambitions such as criticism and information of his audience and be credible than for movie makers - films, especially from mainstream institutions like Hollywood, can hardly shake of reproaches of being superficial and pretentious - even when trying to be profound.
I do not think that this is inherently the case. It would be foolish to argue that this is not the way things have turned out to a certain degree, but if you dont seal off particular sections of the written word with the term literature then the contrast is really not present. There are scads of novels written with no other goals than to titillate, entertain and sell by eliciting a visceral and vulgar response from consumers and their wallets.
The Hollywood film industry is in a serious state of disrepair for many reasonsthe search for a formula that will generate a quick hit, producing remakes of previous movies and adaptations of television series to capitalize on the nostalgia factor and make the entire process cheaper and the endless stream of action-packed blockbusters with shallow dialogue made in order to take advantage of the international market (because of language barriers, not the need to dumb things down for a foreign audience)but the culture has become much more commercial and venal, and the film industry reflects and contributes to the process.
There are now a good 10 minutes of commercials (not trailers) before a movie begins in cinemas in the States and the audience sits passively or laughs at the follies centering around a product or comments approvingly on the car, body wash, or paper towels being hawked. Fifteen years ago or so, the industry attempted to insert commercials before films, and had to withdraw them because of a hostile audience reaction that was vocalized through booing and hissingno marketer wanted his product associated with such a negative feeling. But in this day and age, a new generation or demographic who is less sensitized to the boundaries between art and commerce is the target audience that drives the industry and many movies have become vehicles to generate cross-marketing opportunities.
They just dont make movies like
Starman (1984), for instance, as often anymore. Asimple story that had no pretensions of changing the world, ripping down the barricades, or fashioning a piece of high modernist art, it merely touched the heart in order stir the minds of people from all walks of life in way that was entertaining and intellectual.
Despite Marshall McLuhans claims to the contrary, I think that the divide between a movie and a book is not unbridgeable. In the early days of television, there was a show called
Playhouse 90 that presented an hour and a half drama written by some of the leading playwrights of the day. It was sponsored by companies, but the notification of their role in funding the tale was brief and unobtrusive. However, television executives and advertisers began inserting commercials in the midst of programming and a continuous hour and a half of drama tackling serious questions that could make the audience intellectually uncomfortable was not something conducive to selling products no matter where the advertisements were placed. One of the best screenwriters of the
Playhouse 90 cohort was Rod Serling, and the growing commercialization of the medium did not allow him to get his real, gritty and bleak visions on the small screen anymore, so he created the
The Twilight Zone, where he could tackle serious issues in half-hour stories that were not viewed as being as trenchant as his plays, because the Zingobeians from Gaptropton 9 provided some distance from the import of the what was flickering across the tube.
Films and novels can be crass or uplifting and both forms of media can evoke emotions and increase understanding by placing us in another time, place or persons shoes, but you are right in some ways, since the visual medium is much easier and more profitable to commercialize in the end, so it has grown like a cancer and pushed everything else to the margins--but it did not
have to come to this sorry pass.
