TikTok, Cannes and the Future of Film

The main feeling I have in Cannes, at the Festival, is nostalgia. 

I won’t say there isn’t some excitement, of course. In the chemical process of the film market, the producers and filmmakers and the money and personalities and the party at the Hotel du Cap and the Majestic (with the champagnes and film ideas and bon mots proceeding like a kaleidoscope of fireworks and dancers) … and photographer Greg Williams there still adding to the repository of glamour that is the festival … are all like chemical reactants that sometimes do indeed produce beautiful explosions. 

But the main feeling. Is nostalgia. I have a sense the top festival in particular (and to a lesser extent Hollywood in general) is weighed down by the glamorous burden of its history.  That it just can’t get away from the incandescent memory of Brigitte Bardot who encapsulated some ineffable and perfect combination of sophistication and glamour never to be entirely reproduced in the same way. 

The enduring image for me of Cannes, not that I’ve ever literally seen it, is a group of people, with the men sockless and in loafers, staring out to the sea, wondering when Brigitte Bardot would finally make her way back to them.

Où es-tu passée Brigitte ?

And this is not just, of course, about Brigitte Bardot, but in fact, includes or rather captures the moment when films were important in a different way. When if you hadn’t seen the Godard film and if you weren’t up-to-date on Cahiers du Cinema, or perhaps the latest Pauline Kael review, then you were just not up-to-date. And to some extent this persisted or was reinvigorated through Raging Bull, Pulp Fiction, and somewhat more recent films and times. 

That time has passed. But for a large part of the film community (perhaps epitomized by the Sight & Sound Top 100), it has not passed. There is a kind of nostalgic hanging on to the old film culture. And indeed who would want to let it go? Many great films came out of it, it was a rich culture, it was a beautiful culture. It just isn’t our culture now. It isn’t what we talk about now, and the things people thought about those movies simply aren’t contemporary ideas.

Some large part of the problem with many of the latest high-end, or arty, or prestige, or whatever you want to call them, say, specialty, films is, in my view, that they are stuck in this nostalgic sockless-loafers-by-the-sea mindset. Many films are being produced for an audience of ghosts, for some screening room, some theater that existed in Manhattan, or Berlin or Paris, in 1995, whose attendees have long since moved on and have not been replaced.

T.S. Eliot once spoke (in his letters) of his love, late in life, not for Emily Hale herself, but for his memory of having being in love with Emily Hale back in 1914, as “the love of a ghost for a ghost.” And perhaps these films are not unlike that. 

The dialogue about art, memes, jokes, and — in general — what is interesting, has severely diverged I posit between the world of high-end film, and perhaps the New Yorker too, and some other islands of culture there in that specific village of the mind hard by St. Ambroeus and Toscana Brentwood, and, on the other hand, contemporary online culture. Occasionally there are films that are arguably “specialty“ and yet that seem to speak with a more contemporary voice. I would point particularly to Everything Everywhere All at Once but I would also point to most interesting contemporary films out of Asia. Not having been part of the sockless loafer thing much to begin with, they have little to be nostalgic about and are full of contemporary feeling and verve! To EEAAO (and Parasite for that matter), audiences responded very well. That success shows us that there is indeed an audience for truly contemporary, exciting, independent film. 

It’s not the audience. It’s the films! 

I think the problem is fairly simple. I think there’s a large part of the Hollywood establishment around the world, or at least at the highest levels in the United States in Europe, are basically technically illiterate, and are totally out of touch with online culture and with the cutting edge of where the culture is and what people think is cutting edge and interesting.

I have said before that the key to developing things that work, in film and TV, where you are developing things that are not going to be publicly available for two years, is to understand where the edge is; to understand what is too conservative or irrelevant, and to understand what is too far over the edge, or ahead of its time. Some people think that sounds pretentious, but whatever word you want to use, you have to be able to find something that is going to be relevant, fresh, and new and fun and not passé even 24 months later when something 24 months old is almost by definition passé. In order to do anything like this, you have to be in touch with what is happening. Not just what is happening in the establishment New York Times, but what is happening on the edge, on the fringe, in the draft folders of the cultural explorers, and you have to be able to get enough of that to have a true sense of it and be able to interpret it. If one is totally detached from probably the most thriving cultural forums of our time, which I would say include Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, other forums, and certain more cutting edge, and often dissident publications and substacks, then how can you possibly be capable of identifying the next next thing? (And, no, reading the occasional Taylor Lorenz article will not suffice.) How is it not inevitable that you are going to wind up green lighting lengthy bien pensant movies that feel like a memory of some film once seen and long forgotten? How does this not guarantee that sockless loafer syndrome will continue to blight the industry? 

I will see your Fabelmans and Empire of Light and raise you a dank cryptodickbutt meme. 

My view is that a real hard look needs to be taken at the who of filmmaking — who is choosing the films and who is making the films. The ancien régime is not serving the industry and, this year, is at risk, with almost every indie film being a complete disaster (almost all of them being either tendentious or nostalgic), of destroying a critically important segment of the industry. 

To be clear, in the films that have failed this year, I see two major flaws, not dozens. Almost all the films that haven’t worked, which is almost all the films, are either making some boring, tendentious and obvious political point that no one wants to see in a theater expressed as a movie when it could’ve been a tweet, or the film is nostalgic about something that the audience isn’t nostalgic about. Don’t do either of those things. That’s not what people go to movies for. 

As immediate and relevant as Reddit and Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and Substack, are, film, nevertheless, has a major advantage, which is that it can be deep and moving and transporting and profound in a way that these others simply cannot be. The audience and the people have not lost their desire to be moved or to laugh, and they want to be transported. Everything on TikTok, almost everything on Twitter — I mean I love it, but — is some combination of analytical, chuckleworthy, and/or superficial. It just … can only go so far. This is a tremendous advantage for film, especially theatrical film, that cannot be overcome and that film must press in its comeback. The new films must be moving, must be hilarious, they must be cinematic. They must be now, they must be the edge, they must speak with the voice of today, and they must be chosen by and made by people who understand today’s voice. There is hope. There are the Daniels. There are others. And as Ted Hope recently pointed out, perhaps there are green shoots in that this was a promising year for first features. If we take a hard look at our process, this can be just the beginning of something new and amazing. 

But it must indeed be new. We can never, in anything, have what we once had and loved in the same way. That is the love of a ghost for a ghost.

It is time to build anew.