National Post (National Edition)
The channelled reel
IS THERE EVEN A DISTINCTION TO BE MADE ANYMORE BETWEEN TELEVISION AND MOVIES?
Debate among critics tends toward the unfathomably arcane, and rarely rises to the attention of actual readers — for which they should be grateful. But through the din of inter-critic year-end bickering this season cuts a question of distinctly broader appeal: What is cinema? And what’s TV?
It began as a semantic dispute: does O.J.: Made in America, the 467-minute documentary miniseries produced by ESPN Films, which aired on cable over five evenings, but which also premiered at Sundance and opened theatrically in Los Angeles and New York, qualify as one of the best films of 2016, or is it merely venerated TV? Which soon inspired a mass reassessment of the mediums.
At first glance the distinctions seem obvious. Television is broadcast by wire and satellite from network studios to 40-inch boxes in our living rooms; it sprawls over dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds, single stories stretching out across weeks, seasons, years. Its hour-long instalments arrive predivided by commercial interruption; it’s budget-conscious, thrifty, shot on meretricious sound-stages before the clamour of a rowdy live audience. Well, not movies. The movies loom over us imposingly from the multiplex’s glittering 100-foot screens; they span an undiluted 90 minutes, excluding the overtures of the concession counter and ads for attractions to come; they command our full attention in the theatre’s isolating dark. They’re prodigal, irresistibly extravagant, blockbuster spectacles of unprecedented scale.
The movies and television: they could hardly be any different.
Equally obvious, on closer inspection, are the reasons each of these distinctions don’t apply. Some are casualties of changes in habit: we tend to enjoy movies at home now, on those same 40-inch boxes, at least as often as we venture out to the neighbourhood multiplex. Without that colossal screen bearing down on us, and with light from window or lamp keeping us aglow, our attention isn’t quite so exclusively fixed, straying every now and again to attend to the beeps of our unsilenced phones. Some differences are obsolete in television’s so-called Golden Age: The mainstream network sitcom may still reign, cheaply thrown together without much care, but marquee cable dramas spare no expense. The budgetary gulf which separates, say, Assassin’s Creed (US$130 million) from Westworld (US$100 million for the season) is really not so vast.
Still other distinctions have been soundly trounced by technological advance. Television as it’s traditionally been conceived — that is, as blocks of programming beamed into the home and arranged by channel — no longer resembles television as it’s presently experienced, and taken in by young audiences in particular. Many people, this author included, have never subscribed to a cable service at all; we subscribe to Netflix, or to one of its competitors, or download shows a la carte from iTunes, or the PlayStation Store, or else pilfer whole seasons of television illegally online. This fundamentally changes how the material is seen. As with movies, we actually choose what TV programs to watch and when to watch them; as with movies, we watch these programs without commercial interruption; as with movies, we can delve into a marathon and pause when we please.
From this we can conclude that movies and television have never been more alike. Or rather, the experience of watching a movie has never been more like the experience of watching TV. But does that mean that movies and television are one and the same? Or is there in fact something about Mad Max: Fury Road that distinguishes it in a meaningful way from Mad Men, or Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones? We often speak of such shows as though they are aspiring to be cinematic. But if that’s true, what is it, precisely, that they are aspiring toward? What does the cinematic mean?
It’s complicated — and increasingly so. Serialization, some critics have suggested, may be one characteristic of television which makes it particularly unlike cinema: movies are by their nature self-contained, designed from conception to completion to stand alone. Television, by contrast, tends toward longevity, designed from episode one to look ahead to Season Two (and beyond).
But even this has been lately muddled. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, though an epilogue to a seven-season series, certainly feels self-contained, to such a degree that one could call it a six-hour feature. O.J.: Made in America, too, does not exactly leave room for a second season. And what about Hollywood’s current deluge of interlocking superhero epics? Iron Man leads to The Avengers leads to Infinity War. Is this anticipatory procession really so different from multi-season serial? By that standard isn’t the O.J. doc more like a movie, and Marvel more like TV?
Which is not to suggest that the latest Netflix Original is nothing more than a long film. We can well understand, without defining stringent boundaries, the significant ways in which Breathless or L’Avventura or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari differs from a rerun of Dallas or Friends.
Important to remember are the economic pressures that frequently bear down on questions of this kind. In the 1940s, when the ascent of television began to affect the movie industry’s bottom line, Hollywood swiftly endeavoured to emphasize its unique features as a ploy to draw audiences back: aspect ratios widened, colour supplanted black and white. Making clear how movies and TV differed was not for them a philosophical exercise. It was about money.
Whatever its merits as longform cinematic nonfiction — and many are the arguments on its behalf — O.J.: Made in America, we can safely presume, would not have enjoyed this kind of scrutiny had its producers not courted programmers at Sundance or booked a week-long theatrical engagement in L.A. and New York. And this they did, we can safely presume again, in order to pursue exactly the awards and prizes whose consideration as a feature film motivated all the fervent debate. It’s now eligible to compete for an Academy Award and an Emmy; it’s landing on year-end best-of lists for both television and film. The producers are not, I would think, much inclined to resolve the matter of whether Made in America qualifies as TV or cinema.
It’s in their interest that it’s both.