Quentin Tarantino—who can always be relied upon for a great sound byte—recently delivered a massive tirade, declaring that movies are dead. Luke Buckmater responds.
If the Mona Lisa were taken out of The Louvre and hung in somebody’s living room, would it still be a work of art? Would it still be a painting? That question, of course, is ridiculous. Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait is a masterpiece, irrespective of where it’s positioned. If every gallery in the world closed down tomorrow, paintings as a medium would remain. Which is a roundabout way of arriving at the following truth: cinema is not, and has never been, an art form. That art form is movies.
If this sounds a mite rudimentary, I’m sorry—but Quentin Tarantino got me in a lather. The great auteur can be relied upon for making very good movies, and very punchy sound bytes. The latest of the latter arrived last week when he spoke at Sundance about why his next (and supposedly final) film is currently on ice. Tarantino explained that he’s now “writing a play” and “in no hurry” to commence production. Nothing special about that, but then old QT sprang to life like an angry Jack in the Box, moving on from discussing playwriting to making a spectacular denouement: that movies do not exist anymore.
The tirade
Here’s what he said.
“That’s a big fucking deal pulling [a play] off, and I don’t know if I can. So here we go. That’s a challenge, a genuine challenge, but making movies? Well, what the fuck is a movie now? What—something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns. I mean, it was bad enough in ’97. It was bad enough in 2019, and that was the last fucking year of movies. That was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned, the fact that it’s gotten drastically worse? And that it’s just, it’s a show pony exercise. Now the theatrical release, you know, and then like yeah, in two weeks, you can watch it on this [streamer] and that one. Okay. Theater? You can’t do that. It’s the final frontier.”
Where to begin? The following statement is as good a place as any: 2019 was not the last year of movies; it was the last year Tarantino released a movie. Which isn’t exactly the same as saying “I made the last movie,” and therefore “my absence from this medium has effectively ended an entire art form.” But it’s certainly close.
The narrative around the writer/director/provocateur’s cinematic formative years has long emphasised his time as an employee of Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives, during which he almost literally inhaled dusty old VHS tapes. Tarantino himself has often described the humble video store as his “film school.” It’s a bit sad that this school’s star pupil would go on to take such a blinkered view of motion pictures, pushing aside the home viewing experience as if it meant nothing.
Here’s a little secret: I’ve never seen Pulp Fiction in a cinema. It was released in 1994, when I was 12, three years before I wrote my first film review. I’ve watched it perhaps a dozen times over the years, but never on the big screen. And…who cares? This hasn’t reduced my appreciation of it one bit; I consider the film to be among the greatest motion pictures of the 90s.
The antiquated view that cinema = prestige
For a long time, the cinema has been wrapped up in notions of prestige: the place where supposedly real films are screened. Nowadays this antiquidated view is mostly pedalled by people with skin in the game. Film exhibitors, for instance, who have a financial interest in the cultural prominence of cinema, and filmmakers who love it when audiences gather in auditoriums to watch their work projected on a massive screen (and who wouldn’t?).
The desire for a real, live crowd seems to have fuelled Tarantino’s fire, and helps explain his passion for theatre. He recently told Deadline: “There’s no fucking taping it, there’s no cell phone, you own the audience for that time. They are all yours; they are in the palm of your hand. It’s not just about doing art, it’s about wowing them, it’s about giving them a great night out. This to me is fucking existing.”
Aficionados of the stage will no doubt welcome the enthusiasm Tarantino brings to their medium, which has existed since time immemorial (the final frontier, or the first?). But rather than coming to theatre celebrating the bittersweet nature of its liveness and ephemerality—a beautiful art form for the present, forever dissolving into the past—it’s hard not to conclude that Tarantino’s medium-hopping is more a matter of disgust for what he believes movies have become.
One thing QT does get right, although he doesn’t say it in precisely these terms, is that the nature of mainstream cinema (not movies) has irrevocably changed. Many factors have contributed to the current state of the cinematic landscape, including the rise of streaming platforms and the pernicious, intensely destabilizing effect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which played a massive role in turning cinema distribution systems into a wasteland of—to repurpose Tarantino’s words—diminishing returns.
Cinema has changed, and there’s no going back
I have previously argued, including in a long and widely read essay published six years ago, that the catastrophically influential MCU essentially delivered a form of television, using the big screen to exhibit cloaked advertisements and serialised narratives with no real beginning or end point. Since that piece was published six years ago, it’s become clear that, in terms of quality motion picture experiences, streaming platforms have to some extent picked up the slack, buoyed by business models that rely on retaining subscribers rather than the performance of individual titles. For this reason, it’s possible, in the long run, that streaming platforms might actually help to save movies, if or when the old picture palace eventually crumbles.
What seems to really upset Tarantino, and others of his generation, is that the prominence of cinema isn’t what it used to be; it is no longer at the centre of popular culture. This is the way of the world; all technologies come and go. Cinemas, streaming platforms, DVDs…these are not art forms—they are delivery mechanisms. Tarantino’s once-beloved VHS tapes are now long-dead medium, but the movies themselves remain.
I used to love perusing the aisles of video stores, and am nostalgic about that era. But I also appreciate things I can do now that I couldn’t back then. For instance: using my VR headsets and AR glasses to watch movies projected on massive virtual screens, bigger than IMAX, bigger than any cinema, to an audience of just me, in my choice of environment. I can (and do!) watch movies on the freakin’ moon. Sure, this doesn’t have the same social aspects of cinema—that electric buzz, the energy in the room. But nor does it have the couple talking loudly in front of me, or a whopping big financial outlay just for a ticket and some snacks.
Surely Tarantino, that ever-passionate cinephile, that great geek of film history, loves the medium. The art, not the distribution system. Movies are still here, and often still great. The state—and future—of cinema is another matter.
