Gary C. Woodward | The Perfect Response

The digital ‘siloing’ of a piece of a recorded performance is a far cry from the days when even a local book, video or record store would carry thousands of physical copies to be purchased on the spot.

In addition to the release of his powerful recent film, Oppenheimer (2023), one useful public service director Christopher Nolan has provided is to make the case for preserving media products in physical copies that can be easily accessed. Having shot his movie on film, it’s clear Nolan likes the idea of physical media. His concern is a familiar one among seasoned Hollywood directors. Films are now held by companies and licensed to streaming services where—if a copy can be purchased at all—they remain offsite in a corporate computer farm. A physical and usually analog form of a performance that has been duplicated has a much easier pathway to enthusiasts and collectors.

Soon it will be difficult to purchase a DVD of a film. And it is also getting more difficult for musicians to achieve a run of CDs, a digital form for sure, but easily accessible when it appears as a physical copy. The same accessibility quotient applies to digital books and streamed audio in all categories. In some cases we can own a download. But even those must be channeled through a corporate gatekeeper. That’s the price of losing the chance to be a collector who curates their own copies of books, films and music.

Film directors want their work to live in the world. Nolan is happy to share his films on a DVDs, though the format can’t do justice to the 70-millimeter Imax prints of Oppenheimer he made for some theaters. He knows that cinema is a more public thing when it exists in physical media outside of what is euphemistically called “the cloud.”

Alarmingly, as access to films and music moves to streaming and premium cable, it is clear that some license holders for individual titles are withholding products from audiences. For example, a person who would like to see Apple’s award-winning film, Coda (2021), can view it only on Apple TV+. If a person is not a subscriber, they are left to find used copies of the DVD, or perhaps a copy at a library (alas, not mine). Incredibly, this is the fate of a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2021.

This ‘siloing’ of a piece of art—a strategy that Apple has perfected—is a far cry from the days when a good local book, video or record store would carry thousands of physical copies to be purchased on the spot. The purchase was your copy for as long as you wish. By contrast, if you download songs or albums from Apple Music, you don’t own it. Instead, they grant you only a license to use it.

To be sure, no one would know what to do with the mammoth 600-pound reel of film that is the Imax form of Oppenheimer. But the DVD and its advanced cousins are compact and easily played on home players that are, incidentally, also on their way out. We could not have known it, but the late 1990s were a high point for easy access to performances that were available on physical media. The DVD was new, but picking up supporters, and CD sales were only starting their slow decline in the face of digital copying and streaming. In those few years just before the new century consumers and collectors could build and curate huge personal libraries. In addition, content providers and talent had the satisfaction of sometimes significant sales revenue, and the added advantage to know that a third party had not put their work out of reach. It has gotten so bad lately that studios like Warner Brothers and Netflix are even shelving some finished films with no intention to release them: the rough equivalent of completing a painting and then locking it in a closet. We should have pity for the talent whose work has been captured. Film especially is a collaborative enterprise; many professionals in various departments count on building their careers by having their work seen widely.

Media Extensions of Ourselves

Finally, the denial of purchase and ownership of a performance affects what one media analyst has called the “association factor.” When we take ownership of a specific performance, in some small way we may well incorporate it into our identity. It can be an extension of our world in a more precise sense than if we are witnessing a streamed item controlled by another source. Our homes and children’s rooms are filled with performances of various types we are usually proud to have and display. The humble bookshelf was among the first ways to express media extensions of our sense of self.

Without question the internet, cable and streaming have greatly expanded our access to wonderful and sometimes obscure performances, many on YouTube. But the cost of turning over content control to a service looking for big audiences means that a great deal of Hollywood’s output has been sold to corporations with little interest in keeping it available to the public. For the moment set aside the butchered slice-and-dice display of films on “free tv.” It is more worrisome when classic Hollywood movies, especially from the last century are not easily available from any traditional source. For example, if a person wants to see some of the classic films of the popular American playwright Neil Simon, they will probably have to pay to be an Amazon Prime member, in addition to paying an additional charge for a specific title. And by the time a person becomes a “member” of Prime, a film may have moved to a lock box at another pay-to-watch provider. Making art is a precarious business: all the more so when we know that some media companies like MGM and Warner Brothers have not always been good stewards of the performances they once supported.

Language is frail and easily weaponized in a brutal struggle.

The current war in and around Israel is another reminder that how we describe conflict to ourselves and others usually falls far short of representing the complexities on the ground. Even those on the scene have reclaimed the phrase “fog of war” to note that soldiers may not have a sense of what is even going on even in the next block.

The Greek dramatist Aeschylus gave us the important aphorism that “truth is the first casualty of war.” It’s a familiar but timely reminder that our verbal attempts to grasp the chaos of conflict will usually be framed by what individual parties need to believe. In addition, the natural economies of language—“they” and “us,” for example—work against discovering and noting the sprawl of state players, many of which believe they are fighting to preserve different goals and values. Add in the modern requirement for journalistic brevity, and the resulting language will do us few favors.

Examples of the problem are easy to find. The claim by Israeli leaders that they want to “wipe out Hamas” applies a singular label to an enemy that is, in reality, made up of active fighters, writers, sympathetic neighboring states, equipment merchants and sympathizers, in addition to their families and friends. In fact, there is a kind of Fascist logic in talk of “wiping out” any class of residents in a given area. The phrase may have rhetorical power, but it is also brutal and blind, misrepresenting a group as a single entity. Even beyond the moral myopia of the idea, attempts at genocide of an entire class of people rarely succeed, and usually boomerang by producing more sympathizers.

This pattern of neatly labeling the enemy produces a kind of two-sided view of conflict that is, again, and closer to reality, more like at least a six-sided conflict. Current parties include parts of the Israeli government, Israeli citizens who oppose their leadership but support its military objectives, those who don’t, Gazans and others in the West Bank who do not support Hamas, a large cadre of other nations that have disowned the violent tactics in both Hamas and Israel’s response, neighboring states-including Iran and the United States–lending support to different parties in the conflict, and NGOs who want to restore peace and provide for the needs of displaced residents. An expert on the region’s tensions could undoubtedly add additional players, as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman did in noting that there were really many sides. The widespread talk of two factions thus fails to see a multidimensional scene better characterized by polygons with as many faces as a pair of dice.

Two-sidedness also feeds the easy and lazy charges of anti-Semitic and anti Muslim bigotry. Such negative characterizations leveled against a critic may properly apply, but they can also be misused and difficult to refute, since slurs can be characterizations of unknowable intentions.

To be sure, journalists can only do so much under sometimes harrowing conditions. News producers usually set tight limits on reporting from any location. And the questions asked by studio anchors mostly seek simple answers that implicitly ask an on-site correspondent to set aside important but subtle points. Then, too, many covering wars are flown to the scene on short notice, without having sufficient time to gain the insights that came more naturally when news organizations maintained resident foreign bureaus.

A counterargument to the problem of inadequate language often concludes that images will offer details that can only be clumsily named. Scanning details of a scene of combat can be illuminating. But these kinds of pictures have their own problems. An important limitation is that any well-placed image online or in a new account usually takes on the role of being a synecdoche, meaning we tend to do a mental sleight-of-hand to let an image stand for the whole. We typically see the total destruction of apartment blocks, or victims who have had their whole world has been turned upside down. To be sure, we need the images. But a camera pointed at any place or cluster of victims will do a better job of revealing physical and expressive conditions more than a dynamic view of the conflict that we must understand. Images personify feelings and effects; they are not primarily about ideas. The best discussions of a conflict include elaborate chronicles of the motivating ideas and grievances that have led to the breakdown of civil life.

There is no question we need to communicate to get ourselves out of wars. But the talk and the riveting images will fail us if they further weaponize the oversimplified “sides” in a struggle.

The Perfect Response

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

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