Cinema has always had the power to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary, captivating audiences and shaping cultural imagination. Over time, it has shifted from an art form into a commercial product, where creative expression is often secondary to market demands. Stories and images that once held meaning are now frequently used as tools for profit, reducing their artistic and emotional impact. The emphasis on spectacle and repetition has diminished the depth of storytelling, replacing engagement with passive entertainment. In a world filled with uncertainty and crisis, people seek escape through media, simplifying complex realities into easily consumable content. Social media and digital platforms have accelerated this shift, blending entertainment, news, and personal life into a constant stream of distraction. The entertainment industry mirrors this fragmented attention, producing content that prioritizes engagement metrics over meaningful narratives. As audiences, we often consume media passively, following familiar patterns without questioning their impact on our perceptions and choices. To break this cycle, we must become more aware of our habits, confronting discomfort instead of seeking constant distraction. By actively engaging with what we watch and consume, we can reclaim media as a source of meaning, creativity, and deeper understanding.
Cinema has since its inception held great sway over common man. The Arrival of a Train
(1896) established film’s potential to transform our experience of the ordinary into the mystical.
Less than a decade later A Trip to the Moon (1902) displayed the medium’s ability to transport us
into different planes entirely - The fervor felt towards the medium is owed no doubt to belief.
Belief in the power of becoming; men become stars, actors gather to manifest cinema as though
constellations forming to embody mythologies; heroes and lovers, horrors and monsters,
innocents and corruptors. Under the dimmed lights of MGM sets become spectacles, scripts
become destiny.
I would Like then, to bring forward questions of destiny – doom, fate, allotment of luck.
What is the destiny of this medium. Just as the noble Snow White was forced into servitude by
the vain and wicked, so too has cinema become a means to impious men’s ends. It continues to
be degraded; reduced from art into product– it will contain no value aside from the monetary and
no purpose beyond complacent consumption. Onlookers will be transfixed, but no longer through
splendor. Plot was once synonymous with story, that connection however, is further eroded with
every new instalment as diegesis becomes little more than the pretense given to assail one with
stimulus. What are we to do when the mythos of our age fails to serve as passageway into greater
lands then these. When our grand dreams become small. When sequencing and montage are
reduced to combinatorics. When the affectation of explosions is all that is available to us. Will
dissemination be our only marker for success. Will we continue to be pacified or will we turn
away, if there is anything left to turn to?
In all respects, the globe continues to hurdle towards uncertainty. Our economies
continue to attack our way of life, our politics allude to the disintegration of society and the
climate seems to predict the collapse of our planet. In light of the oncoming apocalypse, we
retreat. We hope to pacify ourselves. We are increasingly stretched thin, and the world ask’s ever
more of us. In response we reduce the ever-escalating complexity of the world in to bite sized
clips. The 24-hour news cycle created a culture of constant numbing terror. Twitter, Facebook,
and TikTok accelerated the speed of dissemination. Benign selfies, acts of terrorism and celebrity
gossip were packaged into the same swipeable, shareable format. life became intense and
fragmented. Hollywood soon followed.
Our movies are products of us as much as they are products of men in flat suites looking
at pointless charts. We are the swipers, the buyers, the doom scrollers and the rotten tomato
reviewers. When Netflix asks “Are you still watching?” it’s ultimately you who has to get up and
hit yes. So I ask, are you still watching. Is this what you want to be doing with your time? Are
you really deciding or are you doing what’s comfortable? Are you even really watching? If we
are to return to films as art, film as storytelling, film that transports us and ignites us, we must
first turn to ourselves. We must break away from the typical transacting of giving our time in
hopes of pacifying our discomfort. So that’s where I’d like to begin. Sit down, sit with the
discomfort. Notice the irritation, the boredom, and the repetition. pay attention to the time
passing by and the urge to escape, and when you next open Instagram, YouTube, or Tik Tok,
when you next watch a film, continue to notice.
