Film Is in Its Own Crisis, Timothée

Over dinner and dirty martinis at a steakhouse in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, I spoke with a good friend and fellow writer about Timothée Chalamet’s recent flaunting of his own artistic and intellectual deficiencies. In a conversation with Matthew McConaughey for Variety, Chalamet continued his swaggering plea for Best Actor Oscar glory. Between bits of aggrandizing awards-season interview questions and self-satisfied laughter, the 30-year old actor said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive even though … no one cares about this anymore.’”

He quickly added, “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there … Damn, I took shots for no reason.” But the damage was done. Chalamet’s comments were dismissive and condescending, and far from the previous remarks he made earlier in the Marty Supreme press tour: “I grew up backstage at the New York City Ballet. My grandmother danced in the New York City Ballet, my mother danced in the New York City Ballet, my sister danced in the New York City Ballet. I grew up dreaming big at the backstage at the Koch Theater [at Lincoln Center] in New York … I’m like a Venn Diagram of the best cultural influences of the 21st century and 20th century.”

So many indelible screen performers have moved from ballet and other forms of dance into acting, bringing with them a keen understanding of the body as an instrument of storytelling itself. So it’s understandable why the actual artists in these fields and the wider public immediately rankled at Chalamet’s comments. The arts are not getting funded in this country. The wealthy no longer participate in cultural and artistic philanthropy. Instead, they’re committed to peacocking terrible style, yearning to be seen as culturally cool and literate. But Chalamet’s comments were bold for another reason. Even a passing glance at the film industry reveals it’s in its own existential and material crises. It reeks of the decline Chalamet gestures at, the kind that could spell extinction. This isn’t just a problem within the United States. The medium is facing a host of issues informed by global technological shifts and the financial dynamics of mounting a production anywhere. But let’s keep it focused. Hollywood — and, yes, American independent cinema — is staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

If you know your film history, you understand that Hollywood has been perpetually in crisis since the first half of the 20th century. It has been threatened by issues both within and without: Hays Code limitations, antitrust decrees, McCarthyism, the rise of television, the rise of video games, the rise of streaming platforms, the mounting encroachment of AI, the public’s growing disinterest in the kind of stars Hollywood props up most fervently. As a medium tied to evolving technology and the whims of capital, film has panic about its future baked into its very foundations. But the industry’s modern threats, while not wholly unprecedented, are dangerous in ways that are genuinely alarming.

Chalamet’s entire awards season campaign has been as much about Marty Supreme as it has been about arguing that the idea of the movie star is still alive. And his energy is probably better spent preparing his peers for another demonstration of labor action than publicly dunking on other art forms he has neither the skill nor interest to participate in. But there is shrewd anxiety at the root of his public fumbling. Consider what Chalamet says just before the part of his quote that went viral: “Because I admire people, and I’ve done it myself, who go on a talk show and go, ‘Hey, we got to keep movie theaters alive. You know, we got to keep this genre alive.’ And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they’re going to go see it and go out of their way and be loud and proud about it.” He may not realize it, but he is expressing a fear that is not being reckoned with by his ilk.

Yes, Hollywood is in a financial crisis motivated by a host of knotted issues, including studio heads who believe you can eliminate risk from moviemaking. But Hollywood is also in an artistic crisis. So many films fail to engage meaningfully with the concerns, pleasures, and contradictions of modern humanity. Meanwhile, movie stars have tweaked their faces and bodies into a startling sameness that hews toward the most fascistic markers of beauty (extreme thinness, whiteness, no signs of the passage of time). I don’t want movies to become so niche they no longer apply to the public.

Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan wax poetic about the importance of movie theaters and their ability to create an intimate communal experience that regular people can afford to attend. But I would pose some questions in response: Why should audiences continue to support American films when so few of them are worth the time or money it takes to watch them? What happens to an art form when common men and women, within major cities and beyond them, are unable to participate in it? Is its only recourse, then, to be funded by and made for the wealthy? If an art form in our current late-stage capitalist hell becomes viable thanks only to the good graces of moneyed benefactors, it will eventually curdle and die: aesthetically, existentially, and finally, materially.

In thinking of Chalamet’s comments I found myself picking up Otto Friedrich’s 1986 book, City of Nets, which charts Hollywood after the blockbuster successes of 1939 and the decade of decline that followed. Anti-communist hysteria disrupted the careers of many talented folks, while antitrust decrees ended the Golden Era studio system. Deep in Friedrich’s book, he recounts an anecdote involving independent producer David O. Selznick, who produced movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Picture–winning adaptation Rebecca (1940):

“Hollywood’s like Egypt,” Selznick once remarked morosely to Ben Hecht as they walked through the deserted streets at dawn. “Full of crumbling pyramids … It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” First, though, everything must be torn down and rebuilt into something else.

The mansion that Billy Wilder found for Sunset Boulevard was demolished in 1957 to provide a site for the new Getty headquarters office building. The Spanish hacienda built on Sunset Boulevard by Alla Nazimova in the early 1920’s, with a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, gave way in 1927 to the Garden of Allah Ho-tel, with bungalows occupied by Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, John O’Hara, and other serious drinkers, and that gave way in 1959 to a bank. The former livery stable that Bette Davis turned into the Hollywood Canteen is now a four-story parking garage. The Mocambo nightclub on Sunset is a parking lot, and all that remains of the nearby Trocadero are the three steps that used to lead to the front door.

On the other hand, the nostalgia business has become very profitable in Hollywood.

This book was published before I was born, so I can only imagine how these landmarks have changed numerous times since. But Friedrich’s concluding statement about nostalgia is as instructive as Selznick’s dire quote. Hollywood loves to terraform its own past to make a buck, and this approach is always ahistorical. When actors and directors regurgitate a simulacrum of history, they misunderstand their industry’s triumphs and sins. The film industry that includes Chalamet is doing little more than confirming and solidifying its own obsolescence. Film will ultimately survive as a medium even in the face of overwhelming terrors. But I doubt Hollywood, in its current form, will.

A version of this essay was originally published on Angelica Jade Bastién’s Substack, Madwomen & Muses.