When Netflix launched around the turn of the millennium, it was received as a godsend by many American cinephiles, especially those who lived nowhere near diversely programmed revival houses or well-curated video stores. A quarter-century later, it’s safe to say that those days have come to an end. Not only does the streaming-only Netflix of the twenty-twenties no longer transmit movies on DVD through the mail (a service its younger users have trouble even imagining), it ranks approximately nowhere as a preferred cinephile destination. That has to do with a selection much diminished since the DVD days — especially as regards movies more than a decade or so old — but also with a brand debased by too many bland, formulaic original productions.
Unlike the platform’s various acclaimed multi-episode dramatic series, the “Netflix movie” commands no critical respect. But it can, at least if you trust the company’s own viewership data, command a large audience, if not an especially attentive one. The general semi-engagement of Netflix viewers, as argued in the Nerdstalgic video at the top of the post, is reflected in the quality of the “movie-shaped product” now served to them.
Far from the slapped-together approximations of Hollywood we once expected from films made for TV, the stream-chart-topping likes of Red Notice and The Electric State are mega-budgeted productions brimming with big stars and large-scale visual effects. They’re also tissues of algorithm-approved narrative elements, borrowed imagery, and third-hand quips, all of them forgotten as soon as the next piece of content begins auto-playing.
On the latest Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon turned up to promote their own Netflix movie, The Rip. They don’t take long to open up about the distinctive challenges of working for that platform in this era. Damon mentions that, whereas action movies once saved their explosion-intensive set pieces for after the story gets in motion, Netflix asks, “Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” According to the filmmakers who speak about it, the needs of these so-called “second screen” viewers have assumed great importance in the studio notes offered by Netflix — which has, at this point, become a major studio in itself.
Satisfying the apparent demands of Netflix’s metrics results in what Nerdstalgic calls “visual muzak,” geared to hold out just enough familiarity and prestige to get users to press play, without ever calling so much attention to itself that they press stop. This makes the studio pictures of the nineties, when Affleck and Damon broke out, look like the stuff of a golden age. “There were a lot of really good independent movies that were being made,” Damon remembers. “They were making daring movies, and everyone just got way more conservative.” On one level, streaming platforms have greatly widened access to film in general; on another, they’ve stifled artistic individuality and risk-taking on the part of actual films. As Quentin Tarantino has pointed out, technology and economics put mainstream cinema into periods of creative retrenchment every so often: the fifties, for example, or the eighties. Whether another seventies or nineties lies ahead, today’s cinephiles can only hope.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
