Authenticity is one thing, connection is something else.
I was thinking about this recently when I saw Harrison Ford discussing the importance of seeing movies in the cinema with a crowd of strangers and forming a human connection that’s not possible when watching streamed content alone in your home. It occured to me that throughout history, entertainment has evolved in ways that are progressively less reliant on human connections, and we all have a different cut-off point when deciding how much is too much. Consider:
Real-life confrontations, romances, battles, intirigues involve first-person interaction between the “players,” which is we, ourselves.
Stage dramas recreate those interactions for us to witness as onlookers; we’re not involved personally, but we’re there in the room with the players and our presence influences their performances. There is a dynamic at play which is unique to that performance and which may never be precisely repeated again. So in a way, we are participants. They are on stage, we are in the audience, but we are all together in the same room in that same moment.
Movies recreate the same human interactions, but the performances happened at some point in the past, and the places we see on the screen are not the place where we are. We are removed from the action. No response on our part will affect the performances at all (sorry to break it to the geniuses who yell at characters on the screen or applaud at the end). We may, however, feel some connection to all the strangers sitting around us who are also crying or laughing or screaming, so there’s that.
Streaming at home, we don’t even have the connection to other strangers. The action on screen is just as immutable and indifferent to our input as in the cinema, but now we’re not even a captive audience in the sense of having to watch on someone else’s terms. We can pause to go to the bathroom, take a call or find a snack, we can back up for a second chance at dialog we missed, we can freeze on that flash of flesh, we can stop the whole thing and come back later. It’s all just “content” at our disposal, director’s “vision” be damned.
Now we’re getting into AI Vals and Carries, so at no point in the process was a human involved at all. No performer gave anything of him or herself even on the front end of the process, so even if we were willing to give undivided attention to the resulting work, we’re still not making a connection to another human being, because there was never one there.
Some folks are sticking with cinema because they don’t want to give up the connection they feel to strangers in the room. Some avoid cinema in favor of live theater because the movies are already too impersonal by nature. I just wonder how much of an audience will be left for movies when they’re 100% generated in a mainframe. If entertainment involves commenting on the human experience and connecting us to each other, how is that possible without human performers?
I wonder if the outcome of all this “progress” won’t be a resurgence of live theater.
