If Nobody Talks About A Movie Can It Still Be Good?

A look at the discourse, the zeitgeist and what really matters.

We have a Discord here, and it’s full of funny and smart people. Recently someone posed a question on the Discord, and a terrific discussion has grown out of it - really erudite, incisive stuff. Sadly this is not about the erudite responses, this is about my thoughts on the question. But I can’t recommend joining the Discord enough.

The question was posted by Robert Downey M (you gotta listen to the podcasts to get that one),and this is what he asked:

I have a question I would like to put to this group! How do we all feel about the idea that we should evaluate a movie based on whether or not people talk about it anymore?

…

This argument really irks me! Nobody talks about Moonlight anymore but we don’t call the worthwhileness of that film into question - really, how many films do get talked about regularly? Do we really need The Discourse to determine the worthwhileness of art? Nobody talks about Noah, Straw Dogs or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon anymore either and all of those movies fucking rule.

I edited out a bit about Avatar, which is a very good example of what Robert Downey M is talking about, but which has a kind of argument gravity so I want to avoid it.

This is actually something I have been thinking about; this week I tweeted that Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs is underrated, and that I don’t hear people ever bringing it up anymore. It feels like the movie has fallen out of the cultural consciousness, and that’s too bad. This is a movie that we should be recommending to folks, that folks should be discovering and watching.

But there’s something different about Steve Jobs when compared to some of the movies that Robert Downey M brings up, movies like Straw Dogs or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Those movies (not so much Noah) were in the conversation, and have become kind of staples. You should be able to tell a smart movie person that a film is like Straw Dogs and they should know what you mean; it’s a movie that we kind of expect to be part of a basic cinema education (for nerds, not for the regular folks). Steve Jobs never quite penetrated the cultural conversation in the way that Crouching Tiger did.

Now, those movies are old. It may not feel right to call Crouching Tiger old, but it is (and so am I). And old movies fall out of the discourse. It’s the nature of things. Just because Lawrence of Arabia has fallen out of the discourse doesn’t mean it’s lost its place in the larger discussion. I think Crouching Tiger is a movie that still stands as a reference point in the world of movie talk, at least among the people who love movies.

So if we accept that some movies fall out of the discourse while maintaining their status as touchstones, we have to move to the question of what it means when some movies simply don’t seem to make it to the zeitgeist. Is their presence or lack thereof a way to determine the quality of a film? Here we run into another problem, which is defining what it means for a film to be in the zeitgeist, and just what the zeitgeist is. A movie like Boondock Saints had its own zeitgeist for many years, but would we say it was part of the larger cultural consciousness? Probably not.

One of the reasons why this feels so tough to define is because the internet has fundamentally destroyed the idea of a cult classic or a niche film. The availability of movies has changed significantly in the past ten years, and so movies that were once badges of honor because they were tough to find are now things that play half-ignored on a streaming service while someone tweets. And the center of zeitgeist gravity is currently shifting as well - the 70s movies that were obvious touchstones of my prime cinephile years are now fading away, being replaced by films that were made in the 90s. And in the mainstream world it seems like the MCU, which had an iron grip on the pop consciousness for a decade, is becoming less prominent.

Worth noting: some movies slip in and out of the zeitgeist. If you were a film dork in the 90s and 00s you were probably a fan of Rolling Thunder, a mean little movie written by Paul Schrader and starring a claw-handed William Devane and a baby Tommy Lee Jones. Millennials would be less likely to have found this film, but with Paul Schrader somehow becoming an internet It Girl, Tarantino referencing it for his next (and maybe final) film and showing it this week at Cannes, I expect the Gen Zs to suddenly be all about it, especially because it’s on Tubi, a service they love (it’s owned by Fox, by the way). So even the discussion of what is or isn’t in the zeitgeist is a slippery one because the zeitgeist simply does not stand still.

But we’re here to talk about new movies anyway. Like I said, I had been thinking about this in terms of Steve Jobs, not quite a new film but recent enough. And I’ve been thinking about this in terms of a bunch of recent releases which seem to have made absolutely no impact at all on the world at large.

If we’re going to talk about new movies and about judging them based on how much people talk about them it’s important to note that there are simply too many movies. And there are too many TV shows. I know that I said there were no niche movies anymore, but that’s sort of not true in that there are so many options that some of them must go unseen by the mass audience. They may be quite good but they get swallowed up in the great sea of content. They’re not meant for niche audiences, but they simply can’t compete in a crowded marketplace. I think there are going to be some pretty incredible rediscoveries in a few years, not unlike the way my generation rediscovered a lot of drive-in and exploitation pictures that kind of got lost in the glurge of the 70s and 80s.

So this is our first conclusion - you can’t really judge a movie based on how much people are talking about it because it’s simply too plausible that nobody has seen it. Once upon a time film critics could move the dial on these things, but I think that’s no longer the case; an individual critic might have a small influence over a small group of readers, but there is no individual who could do what Pauline Kael did for Bonnie & Clyde, turning a panned movie into an accepted classic. In fact going back to Tarantino and Rolling Thunder, I think he might be one of the few individuals who can really move a movie into mass consciousness, but he only does that with old ones.

Moonlight is kind of a good example of a movie I wouldn’t judge based on chatter about it. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, and it should be mentioned that this is a hard film to talk about if you’re not in the identity groups that form the heart of the movie. We live in an era where folks are - rightly or wrongly - afraid of stepping out of their identity boundaries and can get into some trouble for doing that. When a movie is universally praised there’s simply not much to talk about with it; to get a discussion going you need something to discuss and on some level disagree about. It’s a sensitive era, and this beautiful queer Black movie isn’t always the best one to disagree over, because too often the disagreements get turned into referendums on the person who has the out-group opinion. I’m not passing judgment on whether this is good or bad, but it does seem to be a guardrail set up on discussions of films like this.

The counterargument might be that no element of Moonlight has entered the pop culture lexicon, that we don’t talk about the characters as shorthand. But that feels wrong to me because this is not the kind of movie designed to do that, and that brings me to what I think is the really important factor when we have this conversation: what is the function of the movie itself?

Moonlight is an art film, and it’s not meant for the mass audience. Sometimes the mass audience does find their way to these things, but the fact that they don’t has no real bearing on the film itself. And on the flip side of the “people don’t want to overstep their identity boundaries” argument is the fact that the world of art/indie movie discussion is usually driven by white people. That’s changing, and I think this world is already less straight than it once was, but it feels to me like the whites remain big movers here. This is why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese are the general topics du jour on “Film Twitter” but Spike Lee, who has an entertaining online presence and who has made some of the greatest movies of all time, doesn’t pop up as much. White people don’t talk about films by people of color as much as they talk about films by white people. The whiteness of the space cannot be overstated with Moonlight, which is an A24 movie and we all know that A24 movies usually come with a guarantee of Discourse on Film Twitter and yet here we are using it as an example of a less-discussed picture.

What we have to be looking at are the down-the-middle movies. These are the films that are perhaps ripe for this question, because they’re meant to be seen by a lot of people. That’s everything from action movies to studio Oscar bait - basically movies your mom has heard about. Here is where I want to pull away from the world of Film Twitter and talk about the larger world in general, and I want to divide all mainstream movies into two categories.

One category is movies that are engaging. They’re movies that invite discussion, that have hooks that get into the pop culture consciousness, that people like to talk about. And then there is the other category, the disposable movie. These films are designed to distract you for two hours and then never be considered again.

Netflix is the current reigning king of the second category of movie. Red Notice is like the platonic ideal of these films, a movie that a lot of people saw and nobody cared about. I don’t think most people hated it or anything, it just didn’t leave much of a mark. It’s a movie that barely exists. If you met someone who told you Red Notice was the best movie of the year you’d be baffled, you’d have no idea how to relate to someone whose brain works like that. I think even the people who made it would be confused; they never intended for you to think about the film even one second after Netflix began autoplaying the next piece of forgettable gray fluff.

The difference between these categories is like pornography - you know it when you see it. Red Notice is full of big names but you know that it was never intended to last. The same goes for Ticket to Paradise, a movie that united George Clooney and Julia Roberts that had all of the impact of a gentle breeze on the Empire State Building. This is not to say these movies are inherently bad, I guess, but simply that they are ephemeral and are perhaps ephemeral from the conception. Huge numbers of American movies throughout history have been like this, just a nice way to spend a little time not thinking about work and life.

And this is where I find my answer to the original question, asked so many words ago. I think that the first distinction has to be what we’re evaluating the film for, before we even get to figuring out if people talk about it. Nobody talking about Red Notice does not seem to indicate anything about Red Notice to me except that it has been seen as entirely disposable. But people not talking about The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, for instance, indicates that there’s something pretty wrong with the film. After all, it’s a sequel to a trilogy that people still talk about today; the fact that nobody has anything to say about The Hobbit movies is a strong indicator that we can evaluate them as absolute failures.

To make this very current, this is a question we can ask of Fast X in the coming days. These movies are not meant to be great works of art, but they are part of the pop culture zeitgeist, and so we can evaluate some aspects of Fast X based on how much people talk about it. If they go see it and then forget about it as they leave the theater you know something is off about the film. These movies are supposed to make memes and jokes and we’re supposed to reference them to prove that we are in touch with the filmgoing habits of the hoi polloi. But if nobody is talking about it, there’s a failure somewhere in the system.

This has been what has haunted Marvel Studios throughout Phase Four, this unbeatable sense that people are just not talking about these movies and TV shows. You can go on Twitter today and see an Endgame meme, but good luck finding anything from Shang-Chi. What we’re evaluating is not necessarily the quality of the movie but rather its impact, and this is the second distinction to be made. From a purely artistic standpoint this doesn’t matter, but when we are talking about these kinds of mainstream films it is part of the reason they’re made, especially the big theatrical ones. It’s the question of whether a random person at Target might not only know what this movie is, but also something about the movie beyond its existence.

For me it’s interesting as opposed to defining. I am intrigued by the shifting sands of the culture, and being aware of what the people are into is one way to keep an eye on those shifts. If I were to be deploying the “nobody talks about that movie” argument I would be (I hope) talking about impact as opposed to quality. There are a lot of high quality movies nobody cares about, and the fact that I could not find much discussion about The Northman today does not change the fact that the movie absolutely rules.

So to go to the original question, the answer is “it depends.” That’s such an unsatisfying answer after so many words, but I think it’s simply not binary. No art evaluation is binary, and there is no one way to evaluate art. While I would not say that box office is a valid way to evaluate art, cultural impact might be, depending on the scenario and the art. But it’s not a way to evaluate its quality, it’s a way to perhaps evaluate its effectiveness. This is especially true of a mass medium like film, and much less true of say, performance art. And it’s still depending on the film itself, and what its intended audience might be. The cultural impact of Aftersun and Avatar: The Way of Water would be expected to be quite different.

At the beginning of this I said I wouldn’t talk about Avatar because it creates its own argumentative gravity that might take me away from the thought journey I wanted to go on, but here at the end I feel like it must be addressed. It must be addressed because, quite frankly, Avatar: The Way of Water is the perfect example of the two categories I was talking about before, and it’s kind of both categories at once.

James Cameron does not make disposable films. In fact his films have had enormous impacts on the culture, again and again. Yet somehow the two Avatar movies have not. This has become something of a meme argument at this point, but it’s really fascinating to see how Avatar: The Way of Water made so much money and yet no one has much to say about it. I am not sure I have ever talked to a living person about the movie besides my wife, who went to see it with me. This movie even has elements that should have spawned more conversation/memes/etc, especially the whales. The whales were perfectly designed to hit the pop consciousness… but they never quite did.

I think The Way of Water is a big improvement on Avatar, which is kind of a bad movie well made. And I think Cameron was making a movie that was designed to mean something, to engage, to encourage conversation. He is deeply invested in this world of Pandora and he wants the audience to be as well. Yet they’re not, despite the fact that he is a master filmmaker who has again and again shown his ability to work the crowd with ease. Why?

Because the movie is so experiential it ends up becoming a category one movie - an ephemeral, disposable thing. The movie is a ride, a thing you feel and then step away from. Comparing movies to roller coasters is the oldest hack film critic move in the book, but it has never been more appropriate than with the Avatar movies. Just as we don’t hold on to the experience of the coaster once we’re off and our equilibrium has returned and our heart rates are down, we don’t hold on to the experience of Avatar once we’re in the parking lot.

Avatar: The Way of Water kind of blows up the whole discussion, because it is a hugely forgettable movie that is excellently made. It’s not in the Red Notice category, and yet it has made about as much of a dent in the zeitgeist as that film. In fact The Way of Water is a movie that does what it is doing so well, is so immersive and experiential, that it does not stick with us afterwards. It’s the movie version of the guy who, in a job interview, says that his greatest weakness is that he works too hard. The movie is so good at what it is doing that it sabotages itself.

So can we evaluate The Way of Water based on whether or not people are talking about it? Yeah, on some level we can. It’s the third highest-grossing movie of all time, coming in two spots behind Avatar, and yet you’ll never hear anyone talk about the thing. It’s as if it never even came out. But it’s a pretty good movie! The quality of the movie and the impact of the movie are two fundamentally different things. That's where the "it depends" comes in.

To say “nobody talks about it” is a very convenient way to dismiss a film, but it’s also a perspective rooted only in the immediate moment. Again, the zeitgeist shifts and changes, and just because nobody is talking about Steve Jobs today doesn’t mean it won’t somehow end up becoming much more popular later - maybe some TikToker will drag it into Gen Z’s consciousness. This, I think, is one of the magical things about movies - they don’t change… and yet they do. The movie may remain the same, may have the same images on the frame, but the way it is received and understood changes as the world changes. New context can be applied to a movie, and perspectives on a movie can be completely altered. And it’s always happened - It’s A Wonderful Life, now a canonical great film, was a flop when it first came out. I guess it’s like the lesson George Bailey learns in that movie - it may seem like nobody cares right now, but you never know what the next moment can bring.

Except for The Hobbit. Nobody’s reevaluating those films.