YouTube Reflections: Ruminating on the Future of Film

One of the ways to remember that discussing movies didn’t feel like being sucked into the vortex as it does on a hive-mind based site like Twitter where your opinions are judged and tribal warfare is the name of the game. YouTube, which has been around forever, is, for my money, the best site for thoughtful conversation left. It has its tribal element for sure, and trolls abound, but you can still find some pretty good stuff there and build communities without worrying about having your guts ripped out on a given day for having “the wrong take.”

YouTube offers a safer space for people being honest about what they really think and drawing like minds to that without someone being targeted and hauled out into the public square and shamed back into silence. Where I used to think film criticism and film discussion is mostly dead – since it has to pander to the “strident generation that demands compliance” I have found it exists in its best form, still, on YouTube.

Here are a few videos to watch and think about – first up, my favorite by Thomas Flight:

If you’re asking me, what is dying isn’t CINEMA. What is dying is freedom of thought and expression and that will kill art dead. When you force artists to align to a religious belief or a philosophy, or you hit them with dozens of rules to keep audience “safe” from “harm” you kill art. You kill storytelling. You kill comedy. Unless you think you’re ever going to get anything from, say, Christian Rock than songs that back up one kind of faith or ideology, then you also have to understand how our current wave of — whatever you want to call it — is killing art.

Unless artists are allowed to challenge the status quo, they have absolutely nowhere to go except to prop up the going ideology. Most movie stars, studios, corporations and individuals out there in the world have become their own brand. Because of this, they don’t want to risk that brand by associating with anything “problematic.” But I can promise you – right now – people are desperate for someone, anyone to be brave enough to do just that. If there is one network or studio or publishing house or corporation that is willing to risk Twitter throwing a fit – they will set the standard for what will be an explosion of great art in the coming years. We aren’t there yet. So I expect movies to be fairly ineffectual, meaningless and bland for the foreseeable future until such time as artists are once again supported for taking risks. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

And here are a few of my favorites discussing what is happening with the Oscars.

The opinions, of course, range from they’ve become “too political” (true) to “too insular” (true) to a necessity in the wake of corporatized branded movie products (true) to there is simply too much other content to compete with (true).

The Oscars can and will survive in some form or another. They will never be what they once were because the world has changed. Social media and the internet have changed it. There is no going back. It is my hope that, at some point, we can get a grip and stop with this modern day Black List so that people can feel free to once again express themselves, take bigger risks in art, at the box office and reward those risks in a way that isn’t about micro-managing Oscar campaigns and hive minds on Twitter.

Recently, IMDB dropped the Golden Globes from the top of its awards as a prominent voting body. Either they did that because they were pressured to do so (dumb, if true) or they did it because the Golden Globes have been canceled for 2022 and they don’t see the history of those awards as having an impact. Either way, by now, we’ve consumed our host. Our desire to see people punished has overcome our willingness to stand by and defend art. That’s how I see it anyway.

Anyway, here you are a few conversation starters. Some I agree with, some I don’t, but I like the broad scope of the opinions. I’ve omitted the really bad ones because I know my readers would scream at me if I posted them here. You can find them on YouTube as they are fairly ubiquitous.

The Discarded Image