A Film Still Has to Survive One Room Before It Survives a Queue
Cameron Winter walks out alone under the gold ceiling of Carnegie Hall and starts playing before the audience has quite finished arranging itself in its seats, and Paul Thomas Anderson's camera holds on him long enough that there is nowhere left for anyone in that room to look away to. That is the whole premise of the thing, and it is also the test: a few hundred people, in the dark, together, deciding minute by minute whether to keep giving a stranger their attention.
A film festival audience grants or withholds that attention audibly. A seat creaks, a programme rustles, and the room tells the screen exactly how it is doing before the lights come back up. That real-time verdict, delivered by bodies that chose to be there and could just as easily leave, is the oldest piece of technology in this business, older than the projector.
Nothing requires a title to pass that test anymore, and this week's news said so plainly: Fincher's decade at Netflix is ending, and the account of it is a tally of titles rather than of rooms. A catalogue entry does not have to hold anyone's attention against the pull of a phone on the other cushion. It only has to be clicked once, autoplay into the next thing, and get counted as watched whether or not anyone's eyes stayed on it past the second act.
That is not a complaint about the work itself, some of which was very good. It is a comment on what the work was spared. A decade of films that mostly arrived through somebody's queue never had to prove, on one particular Tuesday, that a room full of people who could have gone home at the interval chose instead to stay in the dark and keep watching. That proof is not a nicety. It is a different craft, aimed at a different kind of attention, and a filmography can rack up impressive numbers while never once having to pass it.
After the credits at Carnegie Hall the house lights came up slowly, the way they do when nobody backstage wants to admit the evening is over, and for a second the whole room was still facing the empty stage as if Winter might come back out. A platform does not have rooms. It only has numbers, and numbers never stay facing anything once the screen goes dark.