The Current Cinematic Paradigm

     American historian Thomas Kuhn's most influential theory holds that when we chart the developmental course of science we aren't tracing a steadily rising line of progress, but rather that we are chronicling a series of paradigm shifts. Essentially, the story of scientific thought is the story of an evolving set of models against which all science is judged. For example, the current paradigm of science is the theory of relativity. I won't pretend to understand that theory, and you don't really need to in order to grasp Kuhn's ideas, you just need to know that if a scientific hypothesis or test or experiment doesn't conform to relativity, the test is discarded rather than the paradigm. 

     There's more to this theory, and I'd encourage you to read more about it yourself if you're interested, but I've recently become increasingly convinced that a similar kind of view could be applied to the evolution of narrative, stylistic, and technological shifts in movies. I think if you look at movies over the years there are clearly dominant themes that rise and fall as the medium grew and changed.

     Take silent movies versus so-called "talkies". From our historical perspective it seems like the jump from silence to sound was a logical next step in the progression of the art form, but there was legitimate pushback from filmmakers and audiences at the time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin believed that silent films had more artistry than talkies, that the inclusion of dialogue would reduce the complexity of movies that had heretofore relied on acting, action, and the occasional title card to convey information. Some audiences, too, found talkies to be garish and annoying, and it wasn't until a few years after the successful merging of sound and picture that the paradigm of sound supplanted the paradigm of silence and silent films became a niche interest.

     We've seen paradigm shifts in narratives and styles as well, perhaps the most prominent example of this paradigmatic fall from grace is found in the western. Westerns were once the gold standard of movies, host to Hollywood's biggest stars and directors, but they actually fell out of favor with the advent of sound. Their popularity enjoyed several resurgences over the years, but by the 90s and into the early 2000s the genre had all but collapsed into, again, a more niche area. 

     These are just two examples, but there's plenty of others to be found as you poke around in the dusty archives of Hollywood. War movies, color films, non-linear storytelling, and more all once dominated the film industry before falling out of favor and being replaced. The point of all this inanity is that I've been thinking about how I would define the cinematic paradigm in which we are currently living, and I would actually say that what we're experiencing is a crisis period. 

     You see, Kuhn's theory didn't hold that paradigm shifts happened abruptly, or that a new paradigm was proposed and radically revolutionized science overnight. Instead, as scientific activities increasingly accumulated results that contravened the paradigm, a scientific crisis would begin to foment. Eventually more theories and experiments than could be dismissed would produce so much contradictory evidence that the fault could no longer be attributed to the theories and experiments themselves. The paradigm would succumb to a crisis and from this period of uncertainty would rise a new theory that would supplant the old model. 

    That's basically what I see happening in movies in the year 2023. For the past decade we've been living in the paradigm of the shared universe spawned by the epic success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The ascendency of those movies spawned legions of pretenders (anyone remember the dark universe that was supposed to host all the classic monsters like Dracula and the Mummy?) as filmmakers and studios scrambled to get a piece of the pie and the business model was defined by expanding universes all anchored to the same property. They tried this with G.I. Joe, they're trying it with John Wick, and, of course, DC gave it their best with their own pantheon of superheroes. The problem is that that's all failing. Many shared universes have already died, and the ones that spawned the paradigm seem to be on their last legs as well. Marvel has suffered a series of high-profile box office blows, Star Wars' expanding universe has all but petered out, and DC likewise has been afflicted by chronically falling returns for their universe. 

    The paradigm, in my view, seems to be in crisis. Filmmakers seem to be losing interest in making them, and audiences definitely are losing interest in seeing them. To be clear, I make no value judgements on this process. For as much as Marvel movies aren't my thing, if they're yours and you would be sad to see them relegated to a chapter in cinematic history, then I join you in mourning. For me personally, I just find the meta narrative of how narratives evolve interesting to observe. At the moment I don't see anything emerging as a new model for movies, but I'm honestly okay with that. I wasn't big into shared universes, and for the moment I'm content for filmmakers to experiment and hope to hit on the next style that will define a new generation of movies.