Fish in a Barrel, Again

So some Hollywood types are worried because movies don't embed themselves into the culture the way they used to. Even a weekly box-office winner may not be seen by as many people as watch an episode of a popular TV show.

The article touches on a couple of reasons, mostly dealing with the ability to pick up TV content "for free," or at least for being able to watch it at any time in your own home after paying your cable bill. Movies, on the other hand, are initially shown in just a few places and require you to pony up every time you drop in.

Of course the "fish in a barrel" of the post title is the idea that movies don't embed themselves in the culture they way they used to is because few of the movies being released today carry that much weight or have that much depth. Throw The Godfather against the cultural wall and it not only sticks, it becomes a part of the wall. Throw (insert any of 90% of movies released in the last 10 years or any of 99% of Oscar winners in that same time frame) against the cultural wall and you'll be surprised if it even makes it there, let alone sticks.

The item I think the story overlooks is that culture itself is pretty fragmented -- there really isn't a single popular culture or even a dominant one. The writer suggests that if Argo, a well-received movie in theaters today, keeps doing well for a few more weeks it might match the one-night viewing total of Glee. Sounds like a reasonable measure of the two works' relative cultural impact until you check out what some of those ratings are and realize that the TV shows themselves aren't really all that weighty in cultural terms.

For example, on the random date of May 22, 2012, Glee had 7.6 million viewers. Ignore that total lags behind an NCIS rerun and accept the Times writer's thesis that Glee is the show with the larger cultural impact. Really? There are about 310 million people in the U.S., which means just about 2.5 percent watched that episode of Glee. As an "impact," that rates somewhere along the lines of being hit with a really aggressive feather.

In 1983, the series finale of M*A*S*H drew 121.6 million viewers at a time when the U.S. population was only 233 million. Percentage-wise, that's 52.2 percent -- more than half the country. If don't think that "more than half" is a number implying a significant impact, then Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain would all like to talk to you.

There really is no unified popular culture anymore -- there are many micro-cultures. Some larger than others, but none of them displaying the kind of dominance in entertainment choices and styles we may remember from as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. That, it seems to me, is one of the major reasons movies don't embed themselves in the cultural consciousness the way they used to.

And yeah, a lot of them suck, too.