The Old Masters Don't Want to Look at Screens. Really?
Why are our greatest filmmakers afraid to make movies set in the present day? Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, etc - a lot of the directors who are household names appear completely disinterested in telling contemporary stories. Paul Thomas Anderson had his first iphone appear in a movie only this year with One Battle After Another. This is perhaps an over-discussed issue in certain film communities as different Film Twitter pundits each posit their own reason for why some of the most respected artists in the medium do not want to make work about the time period we are currently living though. One Reddit user, u/sonar_y_luz, goes as far as to say that it's because we stare at our phones too much and “there is nothing entertaining about watching people do it in a fictional setting.”
One of the most popular beliefs to bandy about on this subject is that these filmmakers just don’t want to have to worry about how many screens are in our daily lives. There’s some truth to this. We spend a disproportionate amount of time these days looking at screens. Modern life is frequently occupied by time spent watching events occurring on our phones, laptops, or tv screens. Perhaps these directors, like u/sonar_y_luz, find looking at screens to be uncinematic and they know that they would have to wrestle with this problem of the screens were they to set a movie in the present day. This is the opinion many express online as a way of explaining their favorite directors’ most recent output. I don’t find that reasoning compelling at all.
That reasoning ignores that the act of “watching” has been one of the most well-explored ideas throughout the history of film. From the confusing use of perspective in Un Chien Andalou to the replayed home security system recordings in Weapons, people watching each other has never been declared before as inherently uncinematic. I find it hard to believe that many of the most celebrated filmmakers would dismiss our present moment because they’re disinterested in depicting people watching each other, especially when there are some of the most gifted individuals at depicting the act of watching.
A moment that this conversation always puts me in mind of is a small moment within Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas. The film, which covers the life of mobster Henry Hill, has many scenes that take place in the iconic club the Cobacabana. One of these scenes has a singer doing a ballad at the club as the camera pans over each of our main characters as we see how they react to the act being performed on stage. In their private reaction to the music, the characters display a level of vulnerability which is not allowed in the rest of their violent and hectic lives. This very short scene captures the significance of being in an audience and the transformative nature of watching. With a scene like that, I do not believe that Martin Scorsese does not want to make a movie in the present day because he is not interested in people being watchers.
Even in their recent output, these “old masters” have shown a deftness at depicting an audience. In Steven Spielberg's loosely auto-biographic The Fablemans, there is a set piece where everyone at Prom watches the film the young Sammy Fableman has made about their senior skip day. Thanks to the film’s incredible editing, the emotional changes experienced by each of the characters who watch the film can be tracked and understood. This scene is essentially a group of high school students watching a “film” that was made about them, therefore making them both audience and character for that film. Given that this is basically what the social media age is, I think it's foolish to say that the reason Spielberg doesn’t want to make a modern movie is that he doesn’t want to comment on people watching each other through screens as he has already demonstrated remarkable skill at depicting that exact topic.
So, if I don’t think that’s the reason, what do I think the reason is? I’ll posit an alternative - these filmmakers, as they age, more and more want to make movies about the things they were interested in when they were young. Steven Spielberg's last two movies were a remake of one his favorite films when he was a kid (West Side Story) and a movie about his actual childhood. Martin Scorsese grew up adjacent to Italian American organized crime, so he made a movie about the aging ecosystem of the most infamous gangsters from when he was young (The Irishman). Quentin Tarantino fixates on the New Hollywood era he idolizes, so he makes a movie about Hollywood in the ‘60s (Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood). Paul Thomas Anderson comes of age in the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, so he makes a movie about coming of age in the San Fernando Valley of the 70s (Licorice Pizza). These filmmakers aren’t allergic to screens, they’ve just become more interested in the time periods they were young in.
In short, I don’t believe the argument that says that our greatest older filmmakers are not making movies about the present-day because they don’t want to make movies where people watch each other through screens as they believe that the act is inherently cinematic. Their work on the same subject, despite different settings, reveals that they are particularly suited to depict watching. What’s more likely is that they want to make movies about when they were young, and who can blame them. In 50 years young people will probably be complaining that there are too many cell phones in movies.