Blahbusters

As in recent summers, the blockbusters of the next few months are likely to leave us feeling like kids who awaken on Christmas morning to find the toy they'd dreamed of is a shoddy spit-and-paste job, tossed aside and forgotten before the week is out.

If there's an irony to the way disposability has taken over movie culture, it's how TV is still blamed for the junkiness that most contemporary blockbusters embody. TV is still accused of being juvenile, and contributing to shortened attention spans. But watching TV, even when I'm just grazing from channel to channel, I'm often struck by how much of what I see is better than most mainstream movies. I'll be lucky if I see a movie thriller this year with the craft or suspense or the punch of the recent "Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness." And that's not even the most ambitious thing out there. Since series are no longer self-contained episodes but long narrative arcs, it's harder and harder for the casual viewer to join them in the middle. Viewers who follow a series are sometimes committing themselves to four or five years of devoted attention to one narrative; it's even more of a commitment than the one made by a reader who picks up a 19th century novel.

To watch a show like "Alias" or "24" (at least the first two seasons), viewers have to be able to follow a sophisticated level of narrative complexity -- and often visual complexity -- that movie audiences seem no longer able or willing to. "Alias," like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel," shows that the best pop entertainment is taking place on the small screen instead of the big one. These shows proceed from silly pop premises -- a teenage girl who fights to save the world from vampires; a coed who's a double agent working for the CIA -- that, because of the level of emotion packed into them, seem anything but silly. They're emotionally and narratively satisfying in the way that great detective movies or horror movies or noirs can be.

I sometimes think that the only people who pay attention to all those spam e-mails about how "size does matter" are the people running the studios. Summer blockbuster season seems to have become about increasing the size of the product, the size of the hype, and, of course, the size of the process -- all the while reducing the time anyone has to savor or respond to what they're putting out. The effect on movies seems to be similar to the ones steroids are reported to have on genitalia -- as they become bigger and bigger spectacles the movies themselves are shrinking. And when it comes to quality pop entertainment, TV is making the biggest screens look puny.

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