The End of Cult Movies

Matthew Belinkie on Overthinkingit.com has written this piece about the end of cult movies. Specifically, Belinkie writes about the way Generation X experienced cult movies: mostly through video stores and interpersonal networking. Today, with online streaming sites, a lot more films are available, but the effort to find them is a lost art. An excerpt:

I love movies, and I love having them at my fingertips. But something has been lost. Part of being a movie geek is priding yourself on seeing the obscure stuff that lesser geeks and mere mortals don’t bother with. This used to be challenging. Today, a movie can have cult status because only a small group of people like it… but not because only a small group of people have access. Finding the movies is never a challenge (finding the time to watch them is another story).

But what I really miss is the sense of community. Back in the day, the best way to expand your movie-going horizons was to find friends with the same passion, and borrow, trade, and share each other’s collections. There’s even an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse discover Comic Book Guy’s secret room of bootleg videotapes, and make serious money by charging admission to screenings. I have totally been to parties like that. The episode aired in 2001. Less than five years later, it was completely obsolete. Nowadays, Comic Book Guy’s random clips wouldn’t be on VHS tapes--they’d be all over YouTube. And the people of Springfield would watch them at home, alone.

There is some irony in this. In the early 1980s, when home video first appeared, cinema owners and some theater-goers bemoaned the end of the midnight movie and the drive-in. And while there are still a few drive-ins and midnight screenings that survive on nostalgia and curiousity, it is unlikely that the same kinds of copy-and-swap networks will continue, at least not in person.

At the same time, there has been a resurgence of interest in cult films from Killer Klowns from Outer Space to episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. There is also the deliberate attempt to manufacture cult films (with mixed success) in movies like Grindhouse and Repo: The Genetic Opera. It's fitting that a culture that has embraced irony would find joy in films that are often poorly made and enjoy them specifically for that reason. I think it speaks to a resistence to the very polished but often soulless product of the digital age.

There is a further consequence that has yet to work itself out. The major directors that came out of the New Hollywood era (from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s) were products of films schools and had experienced cinema in a theater primarily viewing Hollywood studio films and European New Wave cinema. The major filmmakers from this period--Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas--reflect the films they were influenced by and how they watched them in the work they produced: The Godfather, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Taxi Driver, and Star Wars. The next generation of filmmakers, coming into directing chairs in the 1990s--Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky--had been educated about film through the video store market and their films reflect that influence: Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, and Pi.

As filmmakers of the Millennial generation take their place behind the camera, they will have consumed films in theaters and on DVD (which has its own peculiarities of deleted scenes, alternate cuts, commentary tracks, and other extras), and over the web. They will also have experienced the fragmentation and mini-storytelling that began in the 1980s with music videos and has now been extrapolated into short pieces on video tube sites. And the means of filmmaking have been made so accessible that these videos can be shot on their cell phone and edited on a laptop.

I don't know if any of this is good or bad, although I can identify with Belinkie's nostalgia. Film is a medium in constant motion; its tools are ever evolving. Hopefully the result will be an increase in the richness of cinema as it becomes a much more democratic artform.