LITTLE ROCK — “I am big,” the faded actress Norma Desmond says in the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. “It’s the pictures that got small.”
The pictures literally have been getting small during the decade that’s winding to a close. We are moving from movies on cinematic screens to movies on TV screens to, more and more, movies on mobile phone screens.
This is fine, because most of the top-grossing films of the decade were sequels, made not out of artistic inspiration but because the first one did well and the second or third then became that much easier to sell. Does Shrek 2 really demand a screen bigger than an iPhone’s?
And isn’t Shrek 2 really just Shrek run through Auto-Tune, as happened with, seemingly, 94 percent of the decade’s hit songs?
Music got smaller. At the beginning of the decade it still appeared on vinyl records, for those many of us who were holding out. Then it went to CDs, then to occupying almost no physical space whatsoever, as an MP3 file.
The top downloaded single of the decade? Flo Rida, singing “Low,” followed by Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.” Bonus points if anybody can name the albums they came from. Yes, they still make albums, though the logic for doing so is fading.
But the decade’s biggest musical influence was an old-fashioned talent show, American Idol, judged by marginal talents who liked to hear people sing other musicians’ songs, but with lots of extra notes.
The breakout musicians - as sales of recordings diminished and concert revenues became the primary income source - were the ones who could transcend the medium.
Think Justin Timberlake, establishing himself as a Saturday Night Live sketch player extraordinaire and soda pitchman. Or John Mayer, a soft-rock superstar also becoming a superstar in social media and in flirting with the tabloids.
Earlier, in 2004, Timberlake had performed with Janet Jackson at a Super Bowl halftime show, that reflector of middle-of-the-road American taste. She showed a personal part in a moment of apparently calculated naughtiness.
Jackson was, it turned out, entirely correct in staging this for mainstream America. By the end of the decade a mere nipple slip was passe, as feeble as the Federal Communications Commission thinking it could close the floodgates on the coming wave of licentiousness by fining a network. And a network was becoming not a collection of TV stations, but that thing in our house that lets us connect to the Internet with our laptops,on which we could witness all the decade’s more egregious celebrity sexuality displays.
Ah, the Internet (everything in parentheses is, it is easy to forget, a creation of the Naughts, as the decadeshould be called).
Source of all wisdom (Wikipedia), repository of all teenage skateboard crash videos (YouTube), chronicler of all famous-person misbehavior (Perez Hilton). In the Naughts, we no longer had to go buy groceries to find out what stunt Angelina Jolie was pulling now.
Right on our screens at work, we saw Britney Spears drive her baby in an unsafe fashion and chop her hair off. We peeked through our fingers as Lindsay Lohan turned a promising film career into a blur of club-hopping.
“I am big,” one imagines Lohan thinking. “The pictures don’t matter.”
But most of them, by the end, seemed to settle down. Spears, for one, is back to her specialty, dancing in raunchy costumes on elaborate stages while lip-synching to recorded tracks of her digitally improved voice. (Note to self: Go back in time to beginning of decade, buy stock in AutoTune maker Antares.) And the tabloid celebrity of the end-of-decade moment is - are you in the napping position? - a professional golfer.
The TV pictures are trying to get smaller, despite all the sales of giant LCD screens.
Suddenly a vanguard of people is ditching cable for the cheaper but uncertain joys of finding their shows on the Internet where viewers, generally, watch in smaller windows, in smaller rooms, in smaller mind-sets. Small pictures have given, for better or worse, new life to Saturday Night Live, which many people think is still good because they’ve seen a sketch or two out of context on YouTube. (The reverse is also true: People seeking out the “Lazy Sunday” SNL video are credited with making YouTube mainstream.) Does The Office play as well on your computer in a Hulu window? Meh, to use a word of the decade.
But maybe I’m just the retrograde type, preferring my TV on the LCD in the living room, my Harry Potter or Stephenie Meyer books in ink, rather than on the Kindle.
Besides, quality of experience isn’t the point, access is.
The Office on Hulu, on iTunes, on Amazon is emblematic of a transition we’re making to the on-demand life.
Culture is more widely disseminated and instantly accessible. So we are building ourselves little cultural islands, turning its consumption into a more personal, smaller experience.
Just don’t try to find Sunset Boulevard on iTunes.
Style, Pages 44 on 12/27/2009