Cultural observer and Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott goes medieval on movie’s ass in this Vanity Fair piece. He frames his argument as then-vs-now:

In the 1960s (many of you weren’t around for that decade, but trust me—it was wild), one of the countercultural articles of faith was that you didn’t so much watch a movie as lean back and “let it wash over you.” It was still possible then to believe in the pore-cleansing powers of sensory overload and oceanic bliss, no matter how many Elvis Presley musicals gunked up the drive-ins. The movie screen was sacramental, the wide horizon on which Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lean played God. Compared with the puny portal of the television box, the movie screen bespoke a cool blank inscrutable mystique—a billboard-size tabula rasa ready to burst into tapestry. So much expectation hinged on that tingling moment in the theater when the lights dimmed and the curtains parted, revealing the screen staring back at us, virgin with possibility. “Let us pray,” Pauline Kael would sometimes mutter, not in a religious spirit (she was not a religious person) but in the hope that something wonderful was about to unveil, something that would make up for the lousy film the day before.

Today our prayers fly in different directions. We pray for the movie to finally get started after a face-blasting bombardment of ads and previews cranked up at full volume and, later, much later, after we’ve forgotten our reason for existence, pray for the film to finish already. Please, Mommy, make it stop. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was longer than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a callow affront to all that is holy. And as the film takes forever to burn off its budget, the fidgets in the audience flip their cell phones on to check for messages, gray lights going on and off like little refrigerator doors being opened and shut by obsessive-compulsives, or, worse, take an incoming call and start narrating what’s happening on-screen to the idiot at the other end. For me, the ideal time to go to the movies used to be the dead of the afternoon, when the empty seats outnumbered the lonely wayfarers. Now the ideal time to go to the movies is almost never. With home theaters going big, wide, and hi-def with digital cable, plasma screens, and sound systems, the aesthetic gap between multiplexing and couch-potatoing has never been narrower, but that doesn’t apply to me, since I don’t happen to have a wall-size plasma screen that hypnotizes. It’s content that provides the killer edge, that makes the choice between what’s at the movies and what’s on TV nearly no contest. Strip away the glitter and grandiosity and the truth is that most of what’s on the movie screen runs a ragged second to what’s available on television at a fraction of the aggravation.

If you think that Wolcott’s indigestion with the current state of movies is caused just by bloated running times and viewers’ annoying cellphone habits, think again. He seems to be particularly riled by what he perceives to be the tired thematic material contemporary mainstream movies wallow in:

It’s millionaires telling you that there’s more to life than money. Celebrities telling you that there’s more to life than fame. That for all their quirks and frustrations, there’s no substitute for family, especially around the holidays, when everyone gathers together to knit Uncle Bill a new straitjacket while waiting for the snowflakes to bestow their blessing. That nothing melts a careerist’s selfish heart like having to parent a child who has nowhere else to go—sure, it’s a crimp in your single lifestyle, helping with their homework and wiping away drool, but that’s a small price to pay for learning what it is to care. That a mouthy teenager with attitude knows more about life than placeholder adults who have abandoned their dreams (the Juno effect). That you don’t need superpowers to be a genuine hero, although they help, especially when fending off fighter jets or intergalactoids. That good and evil are two faces of the same flipped coin, kindred spirits embroiled in a terrible co-dependency in which evil gets the best lines, good the last word. That war takes a terrible toll on the joshing innocence of our soldiers in combat and is hell on the nerves, as evidenced by the palsied camerawork. That puking is the highest form of physical comedy, with kicks to the crotch a dandy second. That we are never closer to God than when Morgan Freeman consoles us in a voice-over, never closer to wisdom than when Tommy Lee Jones shares a chawed piece of beef jerky, and never closer to nature than when Matthew McConaughey (“Matthew Mahogany,” as he’s endearingly known) bares his teeth and torso to the salty air.

You should read the rest which includes Wolcott’s praise for several current television series, although not mentioning two of my favorites — FX’s “The Shield” and Showtime’s “Dexter”. It is interesting to note that cable TV nets, even those with no history of scripted shows including AMC (“Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad”), Starz (“Crash”), and A&E; (“The Cleaner”), are expanding viewing options. In fact, at last year’s Real Screen summit, Nancy Dubuc, general manager of The History Channel (now known simply as “History”), was asked if the network had considered scripted series — and her reply was yes, they have and still do talk about it, so the trend would seem to have some legs.

But are movies really all that bad… and TV series all that good? Wolcott may deride The Dark Knight and other films of its ilk as “apocalyptic downers [purveying] a dank, sunless vision of the metropolis in which nature has been uprooted down to the last blade of grass, permanent midnight in the Disneyland of the damned,” but with The Dark Knight’s current worldwide box office gross of $967, 476, 320, evidently somebody, in fact several somebody’s must have resonated with that story and its story world.

And perhaps if I had a critique of Wolcott’s piece, it’s to that point: movies and TV series generally serve different entertainment needs. More often than not, we go to movies to be transported into another world. With the exception of the TV series “Lost,” every show Wolcott mentions is some approachable variation on where we live: the suburbs, a city, a workplace — and all of them contemporary, not a period piece among them. TV series are, by and large, set in ‘our’ world. So more often than not, movies and TV series work off a substantially different narrative ‘canvas.’

There is also, I think, another a different expectation we, as viewers, have watching a movie as compared to watching a TV show: in most movies, characters – and specifically Protagonists – go through a marked personal transformation. They start out in one emotion-state and by FADE OUT, end up in an altogether different emotion-state. Characters in TV series, because of their recurring format, may change, but it’s over the course of seasons, not 2 hours of screen time.

Obviously, there are some types of movies where characters do not change, action-adventure hero movies ala Indiana Jones and James Bond. But in the vast majority of mainstream commercial movies, characters change, oftentimes profoundly and in a compressed period of actual viewing time.

I watch movies and TV series because I love great stories, but at least for me, I enter into each respective viewing experience knowing that the function of the stories is likely to be very different — so at the end of the day, I’m not sure how you can compare the two. They’re fundamentally different forms of storytelling.

Now I suppose it’s possible to say that the quality of storytelling in TV nowadays is better than in movies – or vice versa – but isn’t that like comparing the taste of an orange versus that of an apple?

What’s your take? Do you share Wolcott’s opinion that movies are in a rather desultory state just now, while TV is in the midst of a new golden age?

And do you have the same or different set of emotional expectations when watching a movie or TV show?