It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments
which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.
If you were watching quality material, you wouldn't be scrubbing through it...
Eg I've just finished watching Andor for the 3rd time, normal speed.
Not really.
Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end.
But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content.
Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.
I miss when episodes were episodic. Watched Deep Space 9 recently, and it was such a blast: Characters developed and had arches, but there were no episodes where nothing happened! In more recently produced tv series there are so many episodes where nothing happens. There is no story, just vibes. In DS9 every episode was a story with a beginning, middle and end, exploring some idea.
TV has always been about characters - they couldn't do a plot well because they well knew regular viewers would once in a while not be able to watch an episode and so they can't found on your knowing what happened last time - people would miss. TV needed a way to get people to watch as many shows as possible, and that meant getting you involved in the characters, and write stories that could be watched in any order.
Movies meanwhile had a long time between the next one and so you couldn't get people deeply involved in the characters. However you had enough to pull off a slightly complex plot and so that is what movies did.
> It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series
Short form video on YouTube, TikTok, and various AI short form video apps are also spiking in popularity.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
Definitions vary for sure. I just mentioned them because they did well at the box office, which is what will keep "cinema" alive.
No True Cinephile would enjoy a movie like Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession or Project Hail Mary.
/s
A friend at the gym raved about Top Gun: Maverick when it came out, and against my better judgement I watched it on a streaming service. It was essentially Top Gun, again. Absolutely uninteresting and completely predictable. And I rather enjoyed the original.
I liked Maverick a lot, but I've never seen the original or any of its other sequels :P
Even accepting that Project Hail Mary, Obsession, and Top Gun are "good movies" (which I completely reject), you're cherry-picking. The top three films of the year are Super Mario Galaxy, Michael, and The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
Cinema is dying? Hollywood is on track to have its best year since 2019. Where do people come up with this stuff?
Is that inflation adjusted?
Apparently the peak year for Hollywood was 2002, with $9.2b domestic box office (16.1b inflation adjusted).
Inflation adjusted outcomes and overall ticket sales down 30-40%
Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000.
Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.
Ticket prices seem to have increased slower than general inflation
I'd suggest you do the same. You may want to believe that cinema is "dying", but none of the numbers support that argument.
Buddy, I just laid out the exact numbers that show less people go to cinema by almost half. The defintion of dying.
And beyond that if you go deeper, the revenue growth is almost entirely attribured to higher prices in ticket sales while attendance in real terms continues to decline.
What are you struggling with here?
The number of people who buy tickets to sit in theater to watch movies is not a good measure of people's interest in watching movies or the success of the medium. Most people are streaming films and while streaming services continue to suck at very basic things you'd expect from a media player they're still very popular.
So what? Revenue is price times quantity. One can offset the other, in fact, you just explained how.
I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.
I read novels voraciously, all of them on my phone. I haven't bought a paper book for myself in maybe a decade.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.
> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
>> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
> Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.
I read while lying on the couch, my head resting on a pillow. Is that not passive enough?
You are good at reading so it is passive. Someone who doesn't read much is not good at it, and so no reading is passive. Get that person to read some more and eventually they get good and it can become passive, but for most it is not.
I could watch TV passively (I don't watch TV, but I could). However if you switched my TV for one that received only Spanish - I have enough Spanish that I could understand, but it wouldn't be passive for me, it would be hard work to understand.
> Someone who doesn't read much is not good at it, and so no reading is passive.
How did people get worse at reading, other than choosing to spend time on the alternative activities that I listed? You may be reversing cause and effect.
> I read while lying on the couch, my head resting on a pillow. Is that not passive enough?
Obviously I meant mentally passive, not physically passive.
I wouldn't call social media relaxing. After all, it's known as doomscrolling. I think reading is actually more relaxing. Social media is addictive, like a drug. Nobody calls cocaine relaxing.
> I wouldn't call social media relaxing.
Neither did I.
What exactly does "mentally passive" mean? I doubt cocaine is that either.
Anyway, I don't buy the "energy" story, that doomscrolling is somehow low-energy, or even that people can't muster the energy for any activity other than doomscrolling.
> bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
This is one of those very common ideas that cannot survive a ten second encounter with the facts: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
How does this viewpoint account for the times when "capitalism" was, by all objective measures, worse for laborers? I.E. the early industrialization period when laborers worked 14-16 hour days alongside children in factories and mines, risking life and limb?
The brief nightmare where workers had enough power to demand better conditions is thankfully ending, and we can return the happy days where workers would slave away for just enough compensation to sustain themselves, and they'd be happy to do it because they had no better options.
We're even bringing child labor back https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/labor-shortage-child-teenage-...