Twitter Killed Woody Allen

The man himself in New York magazine :

NY: Do you have a theory about why the culture keeps getting coarser?



WA: The country has, over the years, moved to the right. And it’s possible that accompanying that move to the right, you also get a lessening of taste. But I don’t know if what I’m saying is true, because I have shown some very good films—Bergman, Fellini—to kids from good schools like Yale. Bright kids. And they were not impressed. You know, it wasn’t as though I picked out some kid from the Midwest who’s a churchgoing barbarian. Those same kids that you see in the movie house doubled over with laughter over fraternity toilet jokes are very often kids from Columbia and Yale.

Being so lately from Eli’s ivied halls, I could confirm Woody’s assessment of Yalien philistinism, but I won’t—except maybe to say that I know no more symbolic illustration of my generation’s allegiance to the Internet than the sad fact that, of all the movies I saw at Yale’s film center, the one that turned out the most students by far was a documentary about Deep Throat . I can’t define a porn-saturated generation, but I know it when I see it.



No, the better question is more optimistic, which might be why Woody Allen didn’t ask it: how can we produce film-loving young people, even a dedicated minority of them? (As readers of this site will know from Ivan’s recent posts on 1968, they can be an important demographic. Free Langlois!) Allen suggests that he’s onto the answer . . .

I was raised on those movies that gave you an image of Manhattan, and that was the image of Manhattan that I fell in love with. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I wasn’t privy to the parties and the people at the Stork Club with their ermines over their shoulders coming in at four in the morning and calling people on white telephones next to the bed. Where I lived, we ate on linoleum. So when I moved to Manhattan, I wanted the actual Manhattan to be like that.

. . . and then proves he doesn’t with the line about backward Midwesterners. It’s true that, generally speaking, people in New England like Fellini and people in Tuscaloosa don’t, but no one loves smart movies more than kids from Tuscaloosa who’ve escaped to New England. Who is more likely to dream of a romanticized Manhattan than a smart, alienated kid from nowhere with a deep and aching conviction that life is bigger than his own experience lets on?



But, to return to the main question, what’s the real reason for my generation’s indifference to cinema? The old equation "ambition plus painfully ordinary upbringing equals cinemania" falls apart when everyone’s life has the star-quality that comes from being held up for public view, which is just what social networking sites do.  It used to be that movies made Manhattan (and Paris and Brazil) seem glamorous; now, online self-publicity makes our lives glamorous. From Facebook to IvyGate, everyone’s name is up in lights. Twitter that .



The decline in filmgoing probably ranks pretty low on the list of problems with the voyeuristic MySpace-Facebook-Livejournal axis, but the two are related, certainly moreso than the decline in filmgoing and Bush’s presidency, which Allen elsewhere inexplicably blames. If he wants to stage a Bergman revival, I suggest that Allen consult the Midwestern kids first. The more tech-savvy elites already have a romanticized reality: their own.