Before last Wednesday, I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen a film on film. I am what David Denby calls “platform agnostic,” willing to “look at movies on any screen at all, large or small.”[1] I’d recently enjoyed Brick (Rain Johnson, 2005), About Alex (Jesse Zwick, 2014), and Clouds of Sils Maria (Oliver Assayas, 2014), each on a different streaming platform. I’d also recently seen Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015) at a local cinebistro, where 4K digital projection gave the movie the same glassy perfection I observe on my monitors at home. Then I happened to screen an old 16mm print of Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) for my university. A bad transfer to begin with, the print was faded, dusty, and scratched. Students were charmed by the kitsch value of watching celluloid, but I was deeply frustrated by its flaws, at least until the movie’s conclusion: a series of still shots that commemorate the death of the protagonist. While the image froze, the film itself remained vital, shimmering with dust and abrasions. The contrast between static images and moving film brought out the metaphoric potential of living death, complementing the movie’s political critique. Denby contends that platform agnosticism leads viewers to have less respect for the cinema, and by extension for film qua film, but I believe the opposite. Platform agnosticism denaturalizes the relationship of media genres and exhibition formats, and it thereby forces the critic to rethink how platform matters in each particular situation.

An agnostic is “a person who is not persuaded by or committed to a particular point of view; a skeptic.” [2] Applied to media platforms, skepticism requires one to doubt received notions about how platforms matter and to look instead for evidence of their mattering. When medium, platform, and genre are no longer automatically equated, the critic is freed to observe surprising things about media genres. These observations may challenge cultural presuppositions about the differences between “film” and “television,” for instance, or about common narrative affects such as suspense.

As we all know, films don’t rely on film anymore, and many “television shows” are never broadcast on television stations. Feature-length and serialized narratives appear right next to one another on iTunes, Hulu, and many other on-demand platforms. Netflix lists “TV” as one of the many genres it offers, but that category includes original programming that was actually developed in response to television’s industrial limitations.[3] The short, narratively complex seasons of Netflix’s house series (e.g., House of Cards and Orange is the New Black) build on the conventions of quality television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, shows whose reputations benefitted immeasurably from DVD distribution and DVR time-shifting.

So if film, television, and video can no longer be distinguished by exhibition platform, how are we to understand—to elucidate, which is the task of criticism—their respective genres? Well, precisely as genres. Take, for instance, Wes Craven’s Scream franchise (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011) and MTV’s new Scream: The TV Series (2015), both of which revive the slasher genre through postmodern acknowledgements of its rules. Their narrative structures—the franchise and the series—engender and reward very different logics of suspense. In the Scream movies, killing matters more than the identity of the killer: as John McCarty has explained, splatter movies “aim not to scare their audiences, necessarily, not to drive them to the edges of their seats in suspense, but to mortify them with scenes of explicit gore.”[4] Narrative momentum is built through the pacing and violence of the attacks, not—as is the case in Scream: The TV Series—through a process of discovery. The series tantalizes its viewers with small revelations and red herrings; it uses episodic cliffhangers to create intrigue and keep viewers interested in Ghostface’s eventual unveiling. Revealing the killer in a slasher movie only leads to the end of the killing spree, the end of the fun. Franchises vanquish that disappointment by introducing new narrative situations or new killers—more “carnage candy,” as one of Scream 2’s pundits puts it. So when one young man in Scream: The TV Series observes that “slasher movies burn bright and fast,” and therefore “you can’t do a slasher movie as a TV series,” he is right but for the wrong reasons. Serial narratives couch their rewards in revelation’s slow burn, but that convention has no intrinsic relationship to platform, as radio and early film serials also show us. The operative distinction is not film versus television (or on-demand platform or torrent stream) but serial versus franchise storytelling.

Divorcing genre from medium—a process otherwise known as platform agnosticism—can change how we think about these foundations of film criticism. In 1971, Stanley Cavell noted, “media are not given a priori”; they are defined by the art forms created from them and by the meanings artists and critics attach to them.[5] More recently, Lisa Gitelman has observed that media are shaped by “both technological forms and their associated protocols.”[6] Platform agnosticism is one such protocol. It denaturalizes the connection between technological forms and narrative genres, which helps the critic see their historic imbrication. Thus, and seemingly against all odds, platform agnosticism can make us better historians, theorists, and critics.

Author Biography:

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Director and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (University of California Press, 2013) and Remote Control (Bloomsbury Press, 2015). She is currently working on a book project on the political lives of media technologies, tentatively entitled Platform/Medium/Politics.

Notes

    1. David Denby, “Big Pictures: Digital Technology and the Future of Movies,” The New Yorker January 8, 2007, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/08/big-pictures-2. return to text

    2. “Agonistic,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.oed.com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/view/Entry/4073?redirectedFrom=agnostic#eid.return to text

    3. Alex Ben Brock, “Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Explains Original Content Strategy,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 7, 2012, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-ted-sarandos-original-content-309275. return to text

    4. John McCarty, Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 1.return to text

    5. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 103, 107.return to text

    6. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press), 7.return to text