This past Sunday, The Artist won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A film about the transition from one style of cinema to another, The Artist starts off in the era of the silent film. It allows its form to follow its content, with black-and-white production, 4:3 aspect ratio and silence persisting almost entirely throughout. And as the film rolls, the growing presence of the talkies starts to figure more prominently, and to take control. In a way, The Artist could not have been named Best Picture at a more appropriate time, for now the same sort of revolution is preparing to take place.
Yes, close to a hundred years after the rise of the talkie, a new specter is haunting cinema—the specter of 3D movie making. Its seeds were sewn years and years ago and, like the talkie, it was relegated to fad-status for much of its still young life; it has, however, picked up steam in recent years (concomitantly, as it were, with growing political unrest in the world—theorists never hesitate to refer to film as a “revolutionary” medium, and so I’m tempted to believe that much of the Arab Spring centered, in fact, on 3D filmmaking). If you’ve seen Avatar, then you are probably as surprised by this rise in popularity as I am.
The rationale for a film like Avatar, as I’ve been told time and time again by the veritable film scholars that walk the earth all around me, is that it’s a film that you have to see in 3D. But this explanation is troubling at best, and intellectually bankrupt at worst, not least of all because it fails to defend the film itself. It more or less concedes the initial point (which was probably something along the lines of “Avatar is an abortive cinematic disaster of unprecedented proportion”) and, instead of responding, simply asserts that a bad film can and should exist merely to justify the use of an invention that is purported to mitigate the negative feelings the film induces. This is like arguing for dinner at Chili’s in order to use Pepto Bismol: if you don’t shove a bunch of garbage down your throat, how else are you going to get s*** to fly all around the room for the next 2-3 hours?
In its early stages, 3D was the diuretic that pushed bad screenplays through the bowels of the major studios. Since then, though, in the second phase of the 3D Solution, it’s been employed more as an emetic, bringing back films of the past that we thought we had digested and been done with. With the introduction of 3D, cinema has issued forth an impressive backwash, including Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace earlier in the year and Titanic in the upcoming weeks. The message behind this is that something must have gone undigested the first time, and it’s worth seeing it all again to take another look, a look that will undoubtedly yield more when fictitious trade federation blockades or turn of the century cruise liners fly toward us in projectile 3D fashion. At the heart of all this is the insistence that 3D has value, that it is worth something, that it is not just the nonsensical upchuck of studio executives looking to turn a buck.
Of course, that subtle suggestion is followed by ticket pricing so aggressive that it suggests that the technique is somehow worth an almost 50% increase in the price of admission. And all this to see movies that often don’t merit viewing in the first place—Nick Cage returns this month with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in 3D and a 14% approval rating to boot. It is such a shamelessly transparent money-grab that the only reasonable conclusion at this point is that the Bilderberg Group is behind it, and that the whole thing is a conspiracy that is ready to be put into its third and final phase: the complete three-dimensionalization of all film, for now and forever.
There will, of course, be stepping stones. We will witness, for example, the rise of the “Best 3D Picture” category within the Academy Awards, until the title eventually just becomes redundant and is changed back to “Best Picture.” Children will scoff for a time at their parents, who will sit and reminisce of the days of plot and character development, until they themselves become parents and the memories of a two-dimensional “cinema de papa” die along with the older generation. And the red diaper babies of the coming years, whose parents used to turn their backs during the national anthem, will sit in the cinemas by themselves, without their 3D glasses on. But this will be a small price to pay, and all in the name of added depth—a word that has never, ever sounded so ironic.
—Chris Bassil
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