The film blogger as Wingless Thrush

Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

We film bloggers don’t get a lot of comments these days. Some, but not a lot.

So it’s especially great when not only do you get a comment, but the comment actually gives you a new perspective on the thing you wrote about.

A week ago I published my ten-year anniversary post for this blog, and I actually got two comments, bless my readers’ hearts. (And I feel bad that it took me five days to carve out the time to reply, though I did take care of that just a few minutes ago.)

In that post, called “Stumbling to ten years,” I talked about how the anniversary arrives with me running out of steam in a major way. As an aside that ended up running longer than I thought it would, I mentioned the frustration of no longer getting many comments. I actually don’t think it would matter all that much to me whether I got comments or not if I were happy with what I was writing, but since I’m not, it caused me to play the “lack of comments” card.

As a response to this, my commenters opened my eyes to a big change in the blogging landscape dating back to about five years ago. That probably is around the time I experienced a dropoff in the comments I once got, and they pointed out that this corresponded directly with the time that YouTube channels really took off as the way people expressed their thoughts/opinions on the internet. Writing of any length became too much or too lengthy for readers to consume. Around that time, even the blog – once considered a form of “new media” – went the way of its forebears, like the handwritten letter, the newspaper, even email in some respects. Many active and dedicated film bloggers subsequently closed up shop.

This was really useful insight for me. It wasn’t just me losing steam. It was the entire blogosphere.

As often happens, a film corollary came up only a few nights later when I rewatched the Coens’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I’d had a strong response to the film the first time, but it wasn’t currently holding a spot in my top ten for the year. I suspected it might move up on a second viewing, and whether it did or not … well, it’s only 12 days until I release my rankings in total, so I’ll make you wait until then for the answer.

However, I did realize that that poor armless, legless man in the third short, Meal Ticket, is me.

He’s called the Wingless Thrush on the posters we see Liam Neeson hanging around various municipalities and other isolated outposts they visit through the cold and wintry west. He’s played by Harry Melling, the actor people never tire of telling you once played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies. And yes, he has no arms or legs. (The character; Melling is fully limbed.)

The Wingless Thrush is propped on a chair on this small stage, lit by foot candles (though scarcely protected from the elements). His act consists of oration of great passages from Shakespeare, Shelley, the Bible and Abraham Lincoln, in a show that seems like it must run for about 15 minutes. The sheer fire and commitment of his performance is enough to keep audiences rapt, at least initially, though most of them appear to be frontier types incapable of grasping the finer details of the literature spewing toward them. At first, the performance is enough, and the hat passed around by Neeson at the end comes back clinking with coins.

As time goes on, though, audiences dwindle. The Wingless Thrush is still committed to his work, for the most part, though the sheer repetition of his routine can’t help but crush his spirit, particularly when he is physically unable to engage in other activities of his choosing. But audiences of a couple dozen drop to a single dozen, then just two or three. And tose two or three either don’t have any coins, or they haven’t been sufficiently inspired by the show to part with them.

Neeson sticks with his meal ticket as long as he feels like he can. But certain financial realities start to rear their heads. It’s at this point that he notices crowds of people hooting and hollering around a show whose star he can’t quite make out. As he moves in, he sees it’s a chicken that appears to be skilled at mathematics.

Before long, Neeson has bought that chicken and dumped the Wingless Thrush over the side of a bridge to drown in the icy waters.

I’ve heard speculation that this piece is the Coens poking fun at themselves for selling out to Netflix, and that may be true. However, it has clear resonance for anyone who feels like they’ve become obsolete, replaced by something shinier but of clearly lesser value.

A grumpy author who thinks movies and TV ruined the book industry might be the most obvious comparison, given that it’s the literature the Thrush shares that’s become devalued. But it works really well for the decline of the film blogosphere as well. There are still a number of us Thrushes out here, shouting away day by day. But increasingly we are shouting into the void.

Meanwhile, shiny objects that compress and devalue our primary output, the written word, are the counting chicken. That’s YouTube, but it’s also Twitter. It’s any place where someone can present a thought or an opinion with the kind of extreme economy of words that’s anathema to blogging. Or where the content can come at you passively, without you having to do the work (like watching a chicken do math). Much easier than having to listen carefully and at all moments, to make sure you haven’t lost any of the meaning (as with the Thrush’s ornate literary passages).

And in making what is a useful comparison, I think, I’ve also outlined the very problem we film bloggers have. I’ve written a thousand words on this when 500 surely would have sufficed. In fact, perhaps even the headline would have sufficed. Yet I had to include a lengthy preamble, as well as a plot synopsis of Meal Ticket, to get to my point. Which I have now likely belabored.

Once a Wingless Thrush, always a Wingless Thrush.

Netflix devours the upper echelon of great directors

When it was announced -- ages ago, it now feels like -- that Martin Scorsese's next film was going to call Netflix home, it seemed like kind of a one-off. It probably shouldn't have, as things like this often indicate trends. But at the time I thought "Why would someone like Scorsese cede the biggest cinematic stage in order to tell his larger-than-life stories? Surely others won't follow suit."

Well, they're following suit.

Steadily since then we've seen films debut on Netflix by other highly acclaimed directors, such as Noah Baumbach and Joon Bong-ho. The list starts but certainly does not end there.

However, the extent to which this is indeed a trend -- an alarming trend -- did not occur to me until this past week, when I learned for the first time about the Netflix debut of Alfonso Cuaron's new film, and about the very existence and Netflix debut of Joel & Ethan Coen's new film.

When two directors (or directing units) have directed a film you've named your #1 film of the year, and you learn in the same week that their next project is on Netflix, it tends to capture your attention.

Technically speaking, the Coens have never directed a #1 movie of the year for me since I've begun keeping track of such things back in 1996. But they've directed my #1 movie of all time (Raising Arizona), so yeah, I think I can just barely justify squeezing them into this conversation.

I knew that Cuaron -- director of my #1 film of 2006, Children of Men -- had made his long-anticipated follow-up to Gravity, Roma, and that it had done well at Venice. I didn't know about its Netflix associations until just reading an article on this year's Oscar hopefuls. The writer wasn't sure if the Academy would be willing to honor Netflix with its first best picture nomination.

The case of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was a bit more alarming in the sense that I didn't even know the Coens had a new movie coming out. So I learned about the existence of the movie, and the fact that it's debuting on Netflix in November (with the same nominal theatrical release Roma is getting, of course), in one fell swoop.

It could be argued that Netflix is an appropriate platform, in some respects, for these films, or at least less inappropriate than some of their other films would have been. Roma is a semi-autobiographical black-and-white film about a year in the life of a Mexican family in the 1970s, so it's not like it requires the same type of platform as Gravity. It's the first Cuaron film since Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban not to be shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (Cuaron himself is the DP), so that's another reason it could possibly more easily slide onto the small screen. As for Buster Scruggs, about which I know less, any Coen movie is visually dynamic and would best be seen on a big screen, but it's not like they're making movies about astronauts floating around in space. It's not like this is a Christopher Nolan film debuting on Netflix (that'll never happen, even if both Nolan and Netflix live to 100).

But then there's the more dominant argument, which is that any film, regardless of its scope or ambition, should be seen on the big screen. And those who are best at making films are therefore all the more likely to demand a big screen viewing of their films.

I haven't looked into the finances behind these, whether Netflix cut a several-movie deal with these directors (God I hope not) or whether their financing was the only thing that allowed the directors to make the films they wanted, the way they wanted (a lot more likely, especially in Cuaron's case, with a film less likely to find a big commercial audience). If I were being a journalist I would have to do that. But for now, I'm wearing my internet curmudgeon hat, so I'm not doing it.

Besides, the details of these agreements are not the point. The point is that Netflix is increasingly likely to entice the very best at what they do into marginalizing their own products on the small screen. You can say that the films wouldn't even be made if not by Netflix (which is a shame and I hope not true). You can say that these films will have a moment on the big screen, for people who seek them out. But the reality is that most people (including me) will probably see them on a TV, and that's a disappointing outcome for cinema's best.

There is one clear advantage I can see, and it relates to those #1 films I was talking about earlier. Both directors will indeed qualify for my #1 movie of 2018, as their movies' availability on Netflix guarantees I will be able to see them before my ranking deadline in late January. I've never missed the chance to rank a film by either of these directors, but I had to see Inside Llewyn Davis on the very last day before my list closed (which was the day it opened here in Australia), and Roma seems like just the type of film that would have a limited Christmas release in LA and New York and not open in Australia until late February.

But if I'm seeing the films on the small screen, what realistic chance will they have to be my #1 movie anyway? In my entire history of naming my favorite movie of the year, only three of them have come from movies I first saw on the small screen. Only three.

That could just be due to my diligence in seeking out the movies I'm most likely to love on the big screen.

Or, it could be that the big screen really contributes in some meaningful way to a film's power to envelope you in its world.