(The hot take would now be against TV who will be our Newton Minow?) Nussbaum’s tweet speaks to a different, equally inexplicable anxiety: that The Film People (those child-snatchers!) will try to Take Twin Peaks Away From TV.
TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 SOUNDS SERIES
TV critics are no longer tasked with reviewing endless disease-of-the week TV series or crummy event mini-series they’re arbiters of The Dominant Medium of Our Time, which wasn’t true 20 years ago but definitely is now. The idea that “scripted, serialized TV” is “not respected as its own art form” in 2017 is not congruent with my reality the last decade of writing on pop culture sites has been dedicated to the idea that “TV is the new movies,” the place where artists go to express themselves in more interesting and expansive ways than the increasingly irrelevant movies - a trope now taken as a truism. I’m going to grab five random movies and call them an anthology series and you can’t stop me.” I imagine grave-faced meetings of the Sight & Sound editorial team and BFI’s board of directors, with austere representatives emerging later at press conferences: “We’re so sorry … we are reexamining our internal culture … we did not mean to cause offense to the television community.” Seitz (friendly acquaintance, at least as of this writing) again: “Why is scripted, serialized TV not respected as its own art form, with its own distinct characteristics & challenges?” Emily Nussbaum, who’s won a Pulitzer for her TV criticism, tweeted, “If the film people are going to list Twin Peaks, we get to take back some movies.
TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 SOUNDS MOVIE
I see people complaining that calling The Return a movie was “denigrating” to the medium of television and visualize a sentient, sensitive child entering its teens that would be hurt not to be recognized for the very special kid it is rather than a little-loved younger sibling. I’m interested in the aggrievement within pushback from TV critics on this particular point. When you think about it this way, it’s pretty simple.
Still, if we’re going to have a thinkpiece-cycle-length argument about this… I do not expect this situation to repeat during this awards season (the Indiewire ballot specifically precludes both voting for TV generally and Twin Peaks specifically), so I guess the concern is of a general paradigm shift in which TV No Longer Gets Respect For Its Uniqueness And Is Subject To Appropriation (or maybe just, All Is Content). Note that the Sight & Sound ballot is unusual for several reasons: as the solicit states, “They can be films seen at festivals or released in your own country, television/streaming series, or artists’ moving image works. Please note that if selecting a television series, the vote will be counted for the series as a whole, not for individual episodes.” (I wonder now if that wording was meant to nip in the bud people who wanted to vote solely for episode eight.) I don’t know of any other poll (aside from the much more tightly curated Artforum one) that operates like this generally, there are parameters about the dates during which eligible films were either released or premiered (sensibly elided for a magazine drawing on a very international roster of writers), and television series as a whole are never permitted. (Minutes after I published this, it popped up at number one on Cahiers du Cinema‘s list as well.) Pedantic disputes about Category Fraud - i.e., if a performance is lead or supporting for awards purposes - have never been my favorite, and I can’t imagine a topic to get less exercised about than whether a TV series is illegitimately occupying a slot that should belong to a Real Movie. I’m always up for an endless debate that paralyzes my Twitter feed into repetitive stasis for 12+ hours at a time, and accordingly braced for one last night upon seeing that Twin Peaks: The Return had landed at number two on Sight & Sound‘s annual year-end poll. David Lynch, TV, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return
0 kommentar(er)
