The NYT has some interesting analysis of how movies have changed in the last number of years, using the Star Wars franchise as an example.
EXCERPTS:
[V]ery little of the new film [Episode III] makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What’s interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don’t understand. What gives?
Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal – and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.
The first "Star Wars" movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs – the purest kind of vegging-out material – to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.
All such content – as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes – was banished in the first of the prequels ("Episode I: The Phantom Menace," 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don’t even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.
The author then suggests that America may be in danger because it’s national culture is becoming dominated by a veg-out attitude that wants to enjoy life rather than digging into the geek-oriented details needed to sustain the good life.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)
This is excellent. I *knew* there had to be something wrong with the theoretical foundations of “SW” episodes I-III!
You think that only applies to entertainment? Another term I here often is “PowerPoint Engineering”. The bullets often miss or gloss over the important stuff that managers forget exist. I’ve suffered this myself a few times.
Nonsense.
The notion that people watching Episode III “don’t understand” it is completely nuts. A five-year-old child can follow Episode III (in notable contrast to Episodes I and II, there are no abstruse disputes about the taxation of trade routes or unexplained references like “Master Syfo Dyas”).
We’re not talking about Spirited Away or even Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within here. Episode III is about as obvious and linear as moviemaking gets. Sure, it’s creatively flawed, introduces new continuity problems, etc. But there’s a difference between saying “This part doesn’t add up” and “I don’t understand this.” You do understand it — you understand that it doesn’t add up.
Notice how the author qualifies his claim that “very little” of the film “makes sense as a freestanding narrative” — as if the “millions of people happily spending their money” on a film he presumes they “don’t understand” have probably never seen a Star Wars movie before now.
Nor does the author’s contrast between Episode IV’s tense, silent Rebel war room shots and the supposed lack of such scenes in Episode III hold up to scrutiny. Did he miss III’s wordless, elegiac sequence with Anakin and Padme silently staring out their windows with the light of the setting sun on their faces, a sequence that a number of Episode III reviews have pointed to as one of the film’s best?
The author’s conclusion, too, seems highly dubious. It’s one thing to claim that the “geek material” has been taken “offline” (i.e., online) and the movies suffer as a result of not having to tell the whole story. I buy that to an extent (certainly the part about the movies suffering).
But the notion that this somehow leads to an all-veg-out, no-geek-out culture makes no sense. Does he think that no one actually does go “offline” (i.e., online) to get the geek-out experience? Does he actually think that geeks are a declining population in our civilization??
I think the author needs to spend less time in the armchair and more time in the real world.
To respond to armchair psychology in kind, I thought that line about resentment towards techies and scientists was a particulary disingenuous display of geek self-pity.
And I wrote that comment before I learned the piece was written by uber-techie geek Neal Stephenson!