Six Damn Fine Degrees #198: Ch-ch-ch-choices

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Choice is a blessing. I grew up in a place and at a time when only a handful of TV channels were available, and you were at the mercy of an antediluvian evil called the “TV programme”. You were bored on a Wednesday afternoon after school? Well, though, there’s nothing on. Wait an hour and you might get some anime adaptation of a European kids’ classic, with a black-haired moppet running around the Swiss Alps – and that’s if you were lucky. As a child, I watched a lot of TV, and usually not what I wanted to watch but what was available – so I’d will myself, not always very successfully, into thinking that what was available was also what I wanted to watch. And sure, as I grew older, my choices grew alongside me: more TV channels, plus there were the video tapes sent to us by my uncle in the UK – but especially TV remained this wasteland of non-choices: it’s Friday evening, the parents are out, I can watch whatever I want… as long as it’s a stupid Italian action comedy, or a French film about a couple of parents whose child dies, or perhaps, if I’m lucky, Ghostbusters or Raiders of the Lost Ark… dubbed into German. And that was one of the good evenings!

These days, TV channels still exist, but do people still watch them? Do they still follow the TV programme, and go, “Oh, look, The Godfather Part III is on, let’s watch that – or would you rather see that movie in which Idris Elba and his daughter are stalked by a lion they’re showing on Film Four right now?” More likely, people grab the device of their choice and go, “Hmm… Is it a Netflix evening or a Disney+ one?” And there, at their fingertips, are hundreds of films and TV series, and these days even games, that all come with the subscription to the streaming channels. All that choice – and it’s a curse. When you can pick from a hundred things what to watch, how can you pick? It’s a miracle that more people aren’t found dead in front of the streaming device of their choice, their finger forever poised to scroll further down on the feed.

This will reveal, once again, that I’m in my late 40s, and I approach media and culture as the Gen X cliché that I am. It’s not just about how my brain is hard-wired in ways that make it difficult to deal with this surfeit of choice: it’s that, a) I interpret this not as my own failing but a failing of the world at large, and b) I express my opinion on this on the internet! (Be grateful that I’m not making my co-baristas at A Damn Fine Cup record a podcast on “My Cup Runneth Over: The Tyranny of Choice in the Age of Ubiquitous Streaming”. Or should I? Hmm…) But whether the current surfeit of choice is better or worse than the half-dozen of channels of my childhood, it definitely changes what we watch and how we find the things we watch. Let’s take all of those films that I’d consider classics, the ones I grew up with: when I was a kid, one of the smaller channels would always be showing some Hitchcock movie or something by Frank Capra, a romantic comedy by Billy Wilder, a western by John Ford, a film noir by Nicholas Ray or an epic by David Lean, because compared to newer fare these were cheap. Or take any of the greats from the ’70s, the modern classics by the likes of Scorsese or Coppola or Altman. Same with the great filmmakers from other countries: Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, to name just a few obvious examples. For most of my life, I’d only ever seen these films on a TV screen, not at a cinema, but I did have the chance to see them – and because, for the first two dozen years of my life, I was at the mercy of TV programmers, I’d watch things because they were available, not because I chose them from a well-nigh infinite list of content, with the nugget of gold hidden underneath a dozen lumps of coal.

These days, when I talk to my (younger) colleagues, they tend to be much less into cinema (or TV, for that matter) than I am. Whatever they watch is usually streamed, and it is rarely older than a couple of years – unless it’s something they’ve already seen, Friends or The Office or Breaking Bad. If they talk about what they’ve been watching, they tend to talk about what’s available on Netflix and Sky and Disney+. They watch what’s on the feed, and what’s on the feed is usually what the streamers are pushing: shiny new content, with dragons and guns and explosions and a couple of recognisable names. I’m not saying that this needs to be bad: a lot of what the streaming services release is dross, but I’m with Sturgeon, in that it’s always been true that 90% of everything is crap. (I imagine that nine out of ten caves 20’000 years ago had the equivalent of bad reality TV painted on their walls, a badly drawn Ugg carrying on with Uggette from one cave over, or that perennial classic, dick drawings, and only the very rare cave would have the caveman art equivalent of a Terrence Malick film on display.) But my colleagues can watch some pretty good (or at least fun) stuff even if they just stick to what’s current.

What I do wonder, though: how many of them will dig a bit deeper? If they don’t live next to a cinema that shows the classics, how will they catch films and series that are ten years old, twenty, fifty? Most of the present-day media landscape is built on choice, lots of choice, and only the bluntest instruments to deal with this choice: want to see something animated? Something crime-related? Something with Keanu Reeves? Netflix will tell you what it has on offer with the appropriate tags. But what happens so much less in the world of streaming is curation. Sure, there’s Criterion (if you live in the States… or know how to appear like you do), there’s Mubi with its rotating selection, and there are smaller services catering to a more niche audience, but they’re the exception, and most likely they don’t make nearly as much money as the big sharks in the stream. Curation, sadly, doesn’t sell as well as buzzwords about The Widest Choice Ever. But choice, once it reaches a certain size, can easily paralyse.

In most respects, I don’t want the media world back that we had 40 years ago. Even when it comes to just the small world of “Things Matt watched when he was growing up”, we’re better off today than we were in the ’80s in many ways. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that’s done on Twitter (shut up, Elon, I’ll keep calling it that), many films and TV series are more accessible these days than they were back then, including classics and more nichey fare. It’s there if people seek it out. But in order to find the things you like, an algorithm is often much worse than simply a lack of too much choice. And while I’ve watched a lot of unmitigated crap while growing up, the lack of choice was in no small part responsible for my palate being broadened. I wonder how many kids in 2024 grow up watching films by Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks and Jean-Pierre Melville because, some evenings, that’s all that’s available.

So, film geeks, when you tell your friends and colleagues about the wonderful world of films and TV series that are older than ten, twenty years: play it cool. Don’t be that wild-eyed guy or gal telling them about Lubitsch and Murnau and Curtiz and Powell and Antonioni and Varda and all the others, because chances are that they’ll back away looking for the closest exist. But perhaps there are ways of becoming a modern-day equivalent of the minimal TV programme of the 1980s: do the occasional movie evening for them where you programme something other than the hits of the last decade. You don’t have to hit them with, say, Bresson or Muratova or Akerman right away. Start with the more approachable fare: American Graffiti, perhaps, or Amadeus, and if they like it, perhaps spring something black and white and non-English on them, say Seven Samurai or Yojimbo, and from there see where you can go. You can become their very own, personal repertory cinema. You provide the culture, they provide the snacks. It’s a win-win scenario, if you ask me.