Every place is the same now
- sciart0
- Jun 4
- 2 min read
Excerpt: Those old enough to remember video-rental stores will recall the crippling indecision that would overtake you while browsing their shelves. With so many options, any one seemed unappealing, or insufficient. In a group, different tastes or momentary preferences felt impossible to balance. Everything was there, so there was nothing to watch.
Those days are over, but the shilly-shally of choosing a show or movie to watch has only gotten worse. First, cable offered hundreds of channels. Now, each streaming service requires viewers to manipulate distinct software on different devices, scanning through the interfaces on Hulu, on Netflix, on AppleTV+ to find something “worth watching.” Blockbuster is dead, but the emotional dread of its aisles lives on in your bedroom.
This same pattern has been repeated for countless activities, in work as much as leisure. Anywhere has become as good as anywhere else. The office is a suitable place for tapping out emails, but so is the bed, or the toilet. You can watch television in the den—but also in the car, or at the coffee shop, turning those spaces into impromptu theaters. Grocery shopping can be done via an app while waiting for the kids’ recital to start. Habits like these compress time, but they also transform space. Nowhere feels especially remarkable, and every place adopts the pleasures and burdens of every other. It’s possible to do so much from home, so why leave at all?
Over the holidays, my family trekked to a suburban Atlanta mall to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It’s the closest theater to offer Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, and we decided that increased color gamut and floor-rumbling sound justified the 25-mile sojourn.
Seeing new movies is one of the few entertainment activities left that you really can’t do at home (unless you’re wealthy, of course). Even so, U.S. theater attendance reached a 25-year low in 2017. There’s so much on cable and streaming services, moviegoers need not leave the couch. With Netflix, Amazon, and Apple competing with major studios, television shows now enjoy the prestige, not to mention the budgets, previously restricted to film.
Today, “event movies” such as Star Wars are the best way to lure people to the cinema. That partly explains why so many current movies are huge action flicks. It’s not that the moving image has deadened itself as art, as Martin Scorsese infamously worried last year, but that most people have shifted their attention to smaller screens. Scorcese’s latest film, The Irishman, only proves the point—it started streaming on Netflix less than a month after its limited theatrical release.