I will not bore or depress you with an explanation of how online media is doing, so you'll have to take me at my word when I say that it's unusual and significant when an 8,500-word essay from n+1 goes as wildly viral as Will Tavlin's essay, about the damage Netflix has done to the concept of "the movies." The story rocks, and is a comprehensive and convincing explanation of both the crisis Netflix represents and the various other crises that created it. Drew and I, who have very different relationships with Netflix, both thought it was excellent, so we were excited to bring Will onto the podcast this week to talk about that story, Netflix's contested history and queasy present, and where all this might be going.
Drew and I both care enough about movies and television, as cultural products and as a business, that we probably could've gone another hour if it wouldn't have felt like pushing our luck. Will certainly could have carried it, as he currently knows more about Netflix than is healthy for anyone. But in my estimation, which is entirely without bias and backed up by a vast store of corroborating data that I will not be sharing with the general public, the hour that we did was pretty good.
Netflix is a successful business and probably the biggest movie studio going at the moment, but it is also ... well, this is where Drew and I differ. I would say "uncanny in gross ways and cynical and generally quite bad," while he might say "a TV platform that has made some very good TV." Either way, there is a lot to talk about. Will walked us through the early Netflix days, from founder Reed Hastings's fake origin story for the business—it involves being mad at Blockbuster for late fees on a forgotten rental of Apollo 13—to the unpleasant industry, grounded in what Blockbuster described as "managed dissatisfaction," that Netflix first disrupted and then replaced. I've written elsewhere about my love for the early days of Netflix, back when it felt like a big video store without walls and had not yet reimagined itself as a bid to consume an entire industry. We discussed those old days and how thoroughly the platform has turned against that old approach. Also I learned that people like me were identified by Netflix in those early days as "pigs," which—you know what, I'm not even going to rebut that. Let's just move into another paragraph.
We sped through the history of Netflix's entry into the movie business, starting with auteur-driven projects and then veering into its current algorithmic avant-garde period, where very expensive movies with big movie stars come and go without a sound. That pivot to shit, and the special degradation of the documentary space, led to me ranting about my beloved Workmanlike Studio Directors and the end of the mid-budget studio movie. Competent video-store shelf-fillers have no place in a world without video store shelves. The misbegotten Oscar favorite Emilia Perez was discussed as a specific type of circa-now Netflix movie, as was the strange but inarguable way in which movies seem less real—not just outside of the zeitgeist, but somehow fake—because they're on Netflix.
You'll find what are admittedly some monologue-shaped questions from me on Netflix's grim attempt to reverse-engineer art from audience data and why that doesn't work, as well as the lost art of finding and the rise of just kind of passively being fed. Thankfully these sort-of-questions got very thoughtful answers from Will and some smart pushback where necessary from Drew, whose enjoyment of Ripley and Stranger Things has not made him any more bullish about the algorithmic reduction of every cultural product into wallpaper. What I liked most about Will's essay was the way in which it pulled together a bunch of impressions and feelings I had that hadn't yet cohered into thoughts. And if this episode gets just one person to watch Jonathan Mostow's 1997 movie Breakdown, it will all have been worth it.
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