What Comes Next?
Can we predict how the digital revolution we're living through will change culture? And can the history of books offer solace to those worrying about the future of cinema?
I have a friend who loves cinema the way that I love literature. When he tells me about some crisis that cinema is going through, we often find an earlier analogue in the world of books. That’s why I see the relationship between literature and cinema as one of older and younger siblings. The written word is cinema’s big brother — actually, let’s say big sister, if only to avoid the obvious literary allusion. The younger sibling often has much to learn from the failures and successes of the older. For instance:
Worried about the decline of the cinema-going experience? Ask your local library how well they’re holding up, assuming it hasn’t already been closed thanks to the short-sightedness of city councils.
Concerned about the relative obscurity of avant-garde films compared to blockbuster movies? Tell it to every author published by an independent press whose book sits forever in the shadow of the Waterstones table piled high with celebrity memoirs and thrillers.
Sick of debates about what counts as “real” cinema and whether a particular genre shouldn’t be taken seriously? In the infancy of the form, novels were seen as frivolous distractions pulling young people away from more serious culture. Today, sci-fi and fantasy (it’s said) are distracting us from literary fiction.
As for the Death of Cinema, every generation going back as far as I can tell has announced that the Novel is dead. It’s like entering puberty: a difficult milestone that signifies maturation. It’s not a real art-form until the culture worries about losing it. (Besides, as I’ve written elsewhere, “crying out at the impending loss of [cinema] might just be a sign of health — the cause has not yet been lost. Better dying than dead.”) None of this is to advocate for complacency about the very real crises the arts are going through. It’s intended to evoke optimism about cinema from the ongoing existence of books.
There is, however, a significant way in which the sibling dynamic between literature and cinema is reversed. The written word goes back about 5,000 years; compared to the history of cinema, this is an incredible length of time. Compared more properly to the history of our species, it’s nothing. It’s not even enough time for our evolution to have been impacted by it. But our evolution has been hugely influenced by our ability to process moving images — the basis of cinema as an art-form. The entire history of text is a mere blink of the eye that’s been witnessing colour, form, and motion for more than 500 million years.
There’s an idea known as the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which posits that print culture will one day be seen as a detour in civilisation. The argument goes that printed text is a grand exception in our history, one we might be leaving behind to return to the primacy of speech. The internet is reversing the print revolution so that (like a sentence resuming after a parenthetical interruption) we’re returning to where we left off around 600 years ago. After all, our digital lives are influenced more directly by the spoken word than the written word.
A number of qualifications (and more than a few contradictions) immediately make this idea less compelling, such as the rising popularity of subtitles. Vox even made a video — with captions enabled — about “Why we all need subtitles now”. More importantly, the Gutenberg Parenthesis deals specifically with the primacy of printed text in imparting information across culture. A post-print world of the internet kind is not a world without writing. The very speech the internet depends on, from vocals in music to a monologue in a podcast, is read from written text. This is what’s called secondary orality: speech derived from writing, so that it lacks the usual filler words and rambling digressions, while retaining the clarity and elegance of words that have been written down and edited. In this futuristic hellscape where no one reads books but everyone watches YouTube videos, we’ll still be writing. That’s something, I suppose.
What about cinema in this post-print future? Its prospects seem brighter for two reasons. The first is that the digital world thrives on audio-visual content. The biggest players in digital culture, from YouTube to TikTok to Instagram, all centre on video and photographs. Substack’s mission is to promote writing, but it has already, in its infancy as a social media platform, enabled video-sharing and encouraged writers to swap their pens for microphones and the page for the camera lens.
The second reason is that cinema uses and appeals to very primal features of our species. If printed text is a parenthesis in the sentence of human culture, moving images are part of its syntax. Over the course of our three-hundred-thousand-year history, literacy has been a remarkable exception. An infinitesimally small fraction of all the people who’ve ever existed could read and write. But the vast majority have been able to see the world in front of them.
For most people, it’s easier to engage meaningfully with a film than with a book. They might not get all the subtext, and most won’t be able to talk about the mise-en-scène or place the film in the context of an artistic movement. They will, however, intuit a narrative structure and derive (or construct) meaning from the story and will learn about themselves, or others, or the world, or all of the above — and all of this in the film’s two-hour runtime. To get the equivalent from a book means spending six hours, or six days, or six weeks reading.
The statistics bear this out: a charitable estimate taken from a variety of studies has the average person in the West reading about 10 books annually. A quarter of people said they hadn’t opened a single book in the last year. It’s harder to find data on how many films the average person watches, but just consider how many films you or your friends saw this year in a cinema, on Netflix, on Prime, on Disney Plus, on Paramount Plus, on Apple TV, on HBO Max... you get the picture. It’s not for nothing that streaming sites gave us the phrase “binge watching”. Almost nobody is binge reading.
Still, the Gutenberg Parenthesis is just another Death of the Novel prophecy, and there are reasons for skepticism. We might be entering an era of extreme distrust in audio-visual media because of AI: when any piece of video might be deepfaked, and there can be no certainty that a clip you watched is what was originally posted because anyone can doctor it at any time, people may turn to physical media and the analogue world. When you buy a book, only its cosmetic aspects can change as pages crease and the cover fades; the important stuff, the words and ideas it contains, will be the same for all time.
In any case, there’s no predicting social trends. Just twenty years ago, nobody would have thought that vinyl records would outsell CDs, as they have for the last few years. The latest fad seems to be for disposable cameras instead of those embedded in our phones. Things come and go; who knows what will come next in the digital revolution we’re all living through, and who can say what will be left behind? Far more important than making predictions is the work of holding on to what’s worth preserving, and bravely facing necessary change. Let’s put aside speculations about tomorrow — the work of today is still to be done.
i work in the book industry and this is a conversation that happens almost weekly, and the conclusion is always to just keep doing the best we can. another great piece!