The Netflix Paradox: An Impassioned Defense of the Idea of the Movie Theater

(Photo via MarketWatch)

With a business model perfectly tuned to our rapid-fire digital age (i.e., more, more, more; now, now, now), Netflix has been disrupting the film and television industries for several years. On the television front, most were quick to accept them—the company kicked off the dominance of streaming services and the corresponding binge watching, and now the majority of annual accolades are handed out to shows produced by and for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and the like. They call it the golden age of television.

Breaking into the film industry has been significantly more troublesome, and for good reason: their business model is intentionally destructive to the exhibition practices that have been more-or-less consistent since Georges Méliès took audiences on their first trip to the moon. The company is, in a sense, responsible for the financial struggles Hollywood now faces (if not the cause, they are at least the primary symptom). With more options at their fingertips than any one person could ever hope to watch in a lifetime, audiences are overwhelmed with content that they don’t even need to leave their couches to access. Pair that with ticket costs that, in many cases, are pricier than a single month’s subscription to Netflix, and it’s not difficult to see why movie theaters are becoming endangered. It’s why the only films major studios seem to churn out now are blockbusters based on pre-existing IP. Sequels, prequels, and reboots are the name of the game in modern Hollywood—at least with those there’s some glimmer of hope that enough people will show up to turn a profit.

This article has been simmering inside me for the better part of a year. My grudge against Netflix isn't new, but it wasn’t until 2018 that it felt so necessary to voice. It began in March when the company scooped up distribution rights from Paramount for two notable pieces of science fiction cinema—the J.J. Abrams-produced The Cloverfield Paradox and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (internationally, at least). It was troublesome indeed that a genre that had been a relatively safe bet for the last few decades was suddenly deemed a potential liability. It was surely a sign of changing times, and with Disney acquiring 20^th Century Fox, I’m still betting that Paramount will go under in the next few years, pushing us ever closer to a complete media oligopoly.

But for whatever reason, I never got around to writing this piece. And then came Roma.

Alfonso Cuarón has always been a favorite filmmaker of mine. Gravity taught me the wonders of visual storytelling when I was a sophomore in high school while Children of Men dominated my academic studies from February to May. If there are only a handful of filmmakers who consistently make cinema of the highest form, whose work not just benefits from but outright demands the big screen, one of them is Cuarón. So when I heard that Netflix had acquired his latest film, I had only one response: “Shit.”

For those unaware, Netflix operates under a policy called day-and-date release. To translate, it means that they insist on releasing their original films for streaming on the same say they arrive in theaters. (And that’s if they are given a theatrical release. When they do, it’s a measly one-week run in some LA theater in order to meet the minimum qualifications for awards consideration.) It’s a policy that has gotten them serious criticism from voices as towering as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (aka, the Oscars) and France's Festival de Cannes. To some, it’s a petty dispute; to others, including myself, it’s a war that must be won.

The movie theater is not just a fun bonus but an essential element of cinema itself. Before now Netflix wasn’t as much of a threat—their slate of original films largely consisted of a pile of duds. Sure, there were some small-scale critical hits (e.g., Beasts of No Nation, Okja, First They Killed My Father, etc.), but most of them were no better than direct-to-DVD movies (e.g., Bright, The Ridiculous Six, Mute, and a long list of others that you may or may not have even heard of). The through line was that none of the films really seemed to matter all that much.

But Roma is a different story. Here is a genuine masterpiece from one of the greatest living filmmakers that has rightly been labeled the best film of 2018 by seemingly every critical voice of even remote importance. Other filmmakers champion it (Guillermo del Toro placed it among the five best films ever made; Barry Jenkins seemingly spends more time on Twitter praising it than promoting his own If Beale Street Could Talk). I confidently bet my sister money that it would receive at least five Oscar nominations come January. Yet Netflix remains a dark cloud that will likely mar a small part of the film’s legacy.

See, Roma will always be inferior on your 4K TV, laptop, or cell phone (*shudders*) than when projected in an auditorium—all films will, for there is a psychology to the movie theater. We don’t go because bigger means better (it often doesn’t); we go because it is fundamentally different from the small screen.

I want to preface what follows with a few notes to prevent my words from appearing elitist. I recognize that the movie theater is a privilege. Movie tickets cost money, and unless you live near a major city it can often be challenging to locate many of today’s greatest films. Roma is only playing in 100 theaters across the U.S. (To give that number perspective, a typical wide release plays on anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 screens.) So while I champion the person on Twitter who took a train from Indiana to Chicago just to see Roma the way Cuarón intended, it is okay that not everyone has that kind of commitment. In terms of economics and convenience, Netflix has an undeniable appeal that, in several respects, has given more people the opportunity to access independent, foreign, and documentary cinema. The title to this piece is more than a riff on the third Cloverfield entry—it is an acknowledgment that, despite all my frustrations, Netflix is at once destroyer and savior.

Chicago's Music Box Theater, one of several movie theaters working tirelessly to keep great cinema alive.

But I digress. Like all things in life, academics have dedicated countless hours to explaining how cinema works. To summarize, there are two core ideas behind the movie theater: scopophilia and voyeurism. Scopophilia is simply pleasure in looking—the pleasure of the image, of watching. It is not unique to cinema, for we derive the same pleasure from paintings, photographs, plays, and all other visual media.

Voyeurism is a different beast. It is what separates the theatre from the cinema and what, in my own opinion, makes the latter superior. It is pleasure in looking and not being seen. There is no risk of this with a painting or photography, for they are static and pose no threat of returning your gaze. But with the theatre, you are watching live events and real people, and deep in the recesses of your subconscious, you know that you are not safe. The actors on stage can see you. Your gaze can be returned, and that is frightening and deeply uncomfortable. (A brief aside here to note that this is not a criticism of theatre per se. Like apples and oranges, the theatre is very much a different medium and comes with its own unique benefits, namely its impermanence.)

In the cinema the events also play out “live” (not in the truest sense of the word, but there is a progression of time and space that gives off the illusion that events are happening in the here and the now). However, the actors and actions exist in a realm separate from our own. We get to gaze upon them, but they are unable to do the same.

Movie theaters are completely designed around voyeurism. Auditoriums are constructed to encourage it, engulfing viewers in darkness where they are to remain hidden while the singular light of the screen demands all attention. It is sheltered viewing that leaves the film itself as the sole party responsible for generating emotions.

However, that voyeurism is unfortunately not guaranteed. And like a Peeping Tom being exposed, the disruption of a voyeuristic experience (i.e., anything at all that makes you, the viewer, feel seen) has an extremely negative impact. This is where human distractions come into play. It’s the difference between one person laughing in a crowded theater and the entire audience laughing. When one stranger in the dark cackles, it is annoying. It disturbs your voyeurism by reminding you that you are not alone in that theater—the people on screen might not be able to see you, but that doesn’t mean you are completely removed from the gaze of others. But when everyone laughs, it goes unnoticed. What’s more, it can be euphoric, and it speaks to the collective potential of the moviegoing experience. An audience working together in perfect harmony enhances a film—it creates an incomparable high worth risking the security obtained from watching a film in solitude.

Voyeurism is a fragile thing; it only takes the slightest intrusion to make that high come crashing down. That’s why talking to your neighbor, kicking the seat in front of you, or pulling out your phone are appalling crimes against your fellow moviegoers. They utterly and fundamentally destroy the effects of the movie theater by bringing attention to the very reality that the cinema attempts to transcend.

But when it works, wow, does it work. For me there is nothing like it. And when Netflix refuses to recognize and respect the sanctity of the movie theater they are effectively normalizing principles that oppose it. They are harming the cinema itself.

Our homes are comforting, but they are breeding grounds for distractions. Cell phones; housemates; outside noises; lights. There are so many things that can prevent you from truly experiencing a film to the fullest. I do my best to replicate the theatrical experience in my home. I turn off all the lights and leave my phone in another room, but it’s still not the same. And I'm not naïve enough to believe most people go through the same efforts, nor do I expect they ever will. They gladly check Snapchat and Instagram, exchange text messages, and add their own commentary. Applied to a film like Roma—cinema at its purest and most immersive—these distractions become violent attacks on everything it stands for.

(Netflix)

Roma is not a light piece of entertainment. It demands (and absolutely rewards) patience, dedication, and quiet introspection. Cuarón carefully crafted the film to be a slow, meditative burn. Scenes of Cleo, the film’s protagonist, working in the kitchen or slowly shutting off the lights for the night recall the then-revolutionary mundanity of Vittorio de Sica’s neorealist stunner Umberto D., while its overall tribute to the domestic work that so often goes unrecognized is akin to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (the cinema’s ultimate exercise in patience). In short, the film is not conventional in either content or pacing.

All of this is to say that the average person watching Roma outside of a movie theater will, I imagine, fall prey to some of those household distractions (I haven’t even mentioned that the film is subtitled and photographed in black and white to boot). I don’t believe it’s inaccessible—the film creeps up on you in unexpected ways until it suddenly and surprisingly unleashes a moment of emotional devastation more powerful than anything most films could even dream of. But if people don’t give themselves to the film, the film cannot give back.

And the sad truth of the matter is that Roma loses a lot without the enormity of the movie theater. I know I said earlier that bigger doesn’t always mean better (emphasis on “always”), but this is a case where it absolutely does. Take the moment where Cleo and one of her surrogate sons lay together on their roof as Cuarón’s camera slowly pans up to reveal an entire neighborhood of domestic workers like Cleo routinely completing the day’s laundry. It’s a shot that situates the film’s narrative within a larger world, but on a smaller screen, suddenly that larger world doesn’t feel all that large. Then there are the countless shots of crowded streets where the eye darts around, trying to take in each piece of the frame until it finally spots Cleo’s familiar presence amidst the other strangers. Again, it takes the deeply intimate elements of the film and reminds us that stories just as breathtaking and urgent as the one at hand are happening everywhere around us. But when the viewer can’t differentiate between any of the faces in the crowd? These themes become lost.

Theater screens are meant to dwarf you, to make you feel insignificant, to assert that you have no control over what you’re about to watch. You are not its master. You cannot pause it whenever you like. In that setting, you should be at the complete mercy of the cinema. The size of the screen is a subtle way of constantly expressing a simple truth: movies are bigger than us. The stories told and the people seen on that screen have implications that extend far beyond the two hours you spend with them. When asked why he opted for a theatrical release for Eighth Grade, a film that, in all honesty, plays just as well on the small screen, Bo Burnham replied that to project a middle school girl on a 50-foot screen is to say that her story is worthy of your attention. It is to say that she matters.

With the greater availability of technology (anyone with a smart phone can shoot and edit a rudimentary film and share it via YouTube or Vimeo), some might argue that we have effectively democratized the moving image and that the movie theater’s power has become redundant. The opposite is true. When anyone can share videos, suddenly none of them seem to make that much of a difference. People only have so much time and attention to offer—a world overwhelmed with voices is a world where the marginalized ones that need to be heard the most get lost in the crowd.

And so the cinema is once again given the great responsibility of serving as a cultural gatekeeper. It’s why representation in film continues to be such a vital concern even when we have more power than ever to chose what to watch and what not to. It’s not enough that anyone has the option to engage with videos made by members of minority groups on the Internet. These people deserve the power of the movie theater to demand our attention and to remove the audience’s ability to look away.

It’s bad enough that Netflix continues to resist the importance and beauty of the movie theater (the brief theatrical release they granted Roma was an attempt to boost the film’s credibility with awards voters and a gesture of good faith to Cuarón for delivering them their first real shot at Oscar gold). As if to rub salt in the wound, the Netflix software intentionally disrupts the intended playthrough of a film. End credits serve a couple purposes—they primarily acknowledge the hundreds of people who dedicated a part of their life to creating what you just witnessed, but they also give you a chance to reflect on it and let it settle with you. So when a film cuts to black and Netflix immediately shrinks it into the upper right corner to bombard you with an advertisement for something else, I get more than a little agitated. But such is befitting a company whose entire business model favors instant gratification and the promise that there will always be more rather than respecting the purity of the present and the accompanying emotional and intellectual reactions.

Everything here is complicated by the fact that Netflix has also done good for cinema. They liberally hand out money to fund passion projects from established filmmakers and newcomers alike, then they step aside and let those artists get to work. Cuarón didn’t hand Roma over to Netflix without good reason—he wanted his quiet foreign language film to touch the hearts of as many people around the world as possible, and sadly, the traditional avenues of film distribution are often prohibitive of this.

The theatrical windows Netflix gave Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs this month were steps in the right direction for the streaming behemoth. Nevertheless, it remains painfully obvious that these were petty attempts to appeal to a wider industry that largely views them with contempt and not an indication of a philosophical one-eighty. If the day ever comes that Netflix genuinely does have a change of heart and begins to respect the timelessness of the moviegoing experience, I will gladly praise them for their mid-budget efforts (competitor Amazon Studios has a business model to aspire to). Until then, however, I will not settle on this issue. 

To respond to Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos’s claim that viewers will enjoy Roma just as much on their phones as on the big screen: No, Ted, they absolutely will not.

Roma is now available for streaming on Netflix. The film is also playing in select theaters nationwide, and I implore you to make every attempt to catch it on the big screen. Chicago's Music Box Theater will also be presenting the film on 70mm film from January 9th to January 13th.