A Greatly Exaggerated Death

If you have picked up a newspaper or magazine recently, your eyes have most likely scanned across, if not actually read, an article predicting the imminent demise of the cinema as we know it. Caught in the crossfire of an interminable onslaught of technologically advanced new media including the Internet, iPods, PSPs, the Xbox 360 and the forthcoming PlayStation 3, as well as the ever-expanding universe of cable and satellite television, traditional theatrical cinema, with its reliance on the 19th-century technology of shining light through perforated celluloid, has never seemed so old, so antiquated, so positively yesterday. Complaints about the diminishing quality of the theater-going experience only compound the problem, and falling box office receipts seem to provide indisputable evidence that cinema as a popular form is slowly but surely drowning in the sea of entertainment that it once dominated. 
Yet, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of cinema's death has been greatly exaggerated. There is a power inherent to the cinema that all other media aspire to, but have yet to fully embody. Take, for example, the response to "United 93," writer/director Paul Greengrass's depiction of the passenger revolt that took place aboard the hijacked airliner that crashed into a Pennsylvania field on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. This event has been deconstructed and reconstructed on television, in newspapers, and on the Internet down to the finest detail, all without incident, with nary an outcry. 
However, the moment the events of Sept. 11 entered the realm of the cinematic, the moment they became fodder for a motion picture -- a movie -- everything changed. Even before "United 93" arrived in theaters on April 28, its trailer provoked such anguish and reaction that many theaters pulled it from their screens. People cried out "Too soon!" as the trailer played, unconsciously suggesting that the realm of the cinematic is a place where representation reaches a potential apotheosis of power not accorded other media. The impact of cinema representing a still-raw national wound is such that viewers didn't even need the nightmare of the film in its entirety on the silver screen to activate their memories; all they needed was a trailer.
The great director Francis Ford Coppola once described cinema as the art form most like man's imagination, but the response to "United 93" suggests a more intimate relationship. It suggests that cinema and the human imaginary are so deeply intertwined that it is enormously difficult, if not impossible, to separate them. Since the mid-1890s, the technology of moving images has been put to every conceivable use -- first to simply document, then to entertain, then to make artistic and philosophical statements. Movies were originally thought of as disposable; then they became indispensable. History and memory colluded with celluloid to produce a visual record of existence filtered through humanity's imagination, which is what makes those larger-than-life flickerings on the big screen so simultaneously enthralling and threatening. 
One need only recall Delmore Schwartz's masterful short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," originally published in the Partisan Review in 1937, in which the young narrator dreams that he is watching his parents' courtship as a scratchy silent film. Seized with a "terrible fear" because he knows their relationship will not end well, he stands up and begins yelling at the screen in a feeble attempt to implore the characters to stop what they are doing, an apt metaphor for the relentless impact of cinema at its most powerful. 
What is great about movies -- the images you can't erase from your mind's eye even years later, the power of great storytelling, the challenge of ambiguity -- continues to enthrall, even as they seep into other media, from television to video games, blurring the lines and expanding the screen's paradoxical potential as both relaxing escape hatch and shocking reality check. 
 

James Kendrick, BA '96, MA '99, PhD '05 (Indiana University, Bloomington) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies.