Nathan Schiller

If you were hoping for a breakdown of specific books and movies, my apologies. This post is about the concept. It’s about how and why motion pictures beat written books, but also about why that might not last forever.

Photographs changed everything

It’s a discussion, and it starts with the invention of the photograph, a visual artifact woven so intimately into every aspect of modern life that we forget how new it is.

The first photograph was produced in 1826 or ’27. It frames a view from an upstairs window in France’s Burgundy region. There’s a window, a tree, some structures, the sky, but it’s all metallically smudged beyond recognition. It might as well be Impressionistic smog.

Photos laid the groundwork for motion pictures, moving images, movies, films. Let’s use all these terms interchangeably. But it took fifty years. The first film, The horse in motion, was made in California in 1878. Created by Eadweard Muybridge, commissioned by Leland Stanford. Just 12 shots on cards that show, indeed, a horse in motion.

The cards look like a Warhol. But I’m more interested in the timeline of the technology. Two centuries ago there lived a generation of humans who, growing up, had only one method for two-dimensional visual reproduction—a drawing by hand, the same art that had existed for tens of thousands of years. Those same people could have died in a movie theater.

But they probably didn’t. Hollywood brought movies to the masses, but not for another fifty years. This was the time of my grandparents. They watched movies on a huge screen, in a theater, as someone worked the projector. By the time they had kids, movies had moved into homes. By the time their kids had kids, movies were playing in pockets, a fingerprint away.

Writing is an incredible technology

Now consider writing.

Writing has been around long enough to obscure the fact that it’s not biological. As of now—because archaeologists are always digging deeper—the first written texts are from 3200 B.C. That’s a really long time ago. A blink geologically, but long enough to swallow civilizations whole.

4,600 years then passed before humans invented a machine to reproduce a printed piece of writing. For that we thank Johannes Gutenberg, whom some have called the second most influential person in Western civilization. It was his and his contemporaries’ fifteenth-century printing press that ignited the spread of knowledge and ideas that sparked our modern world. All it took was a relatively cheap and easy way of putting books in pockets.

The decline of trust

When we talk about the decline of trust in the systems and institutions that buttress our social, cultural, political, and economic systems, we don’t dwell on the fact that movies were invented thousands of years after books and pictures, but innovated from lumbering contraption display to pocket display 25 times as quickly.

We don’t interrogate how odd it is that suddenly our species can create movies with our hand-sized cell phones and post them in public venues, for an extremely low price, at will and within an instant. We don’t think about how our own systems—our fingers and throats and brains and psyches—are adapting to this opportunity. Some of us do, but most of us don’t.

We don’t interrogate this because we know and accept that it’s warped us, but it’s happened so quickly that we can’t really process it, and anyway what’s there to do about it? It was inevitable. When we say: “Pics or it didn’t happen,” we absolutely, unquestioningly mean it, and never remember that two decades ago such a demand would have been insane. None of us want a world without the screen and its stream. But we can’t say we need it, and so we can’t say we trust it.

Millennials are unique in one way

Like every self-centered American, I by default consider my generation special and unique. By birth year, I’m an old Millennial. If I think about this supposed identity at all, I think only that my individualism transcends the hokey label, a label that only exists to serve decadent capitalistic ends. Being an “old Millennial” is to me simply the most straightforward way to perpetually convey my environmental externalities.

Growing up, that was a world awash in screens: TVs, VCRs, cable, video games, computers. But not the internet, not entirely. It and I came of age together. Email and instant messaging in middle school, ethernet cords and Web 2.0 in college, the iPhone and social media upon entry to early adulthood.

It’s all rather mundane, until you realize my cohort was the last in human history to straddle a significant divide: the last to make it through the high-octane, hormone-raging social spheres of ages 14 to 24 without movies and media on the go.

Our movies were rooted in location: a home, a library, a theater. Our early cells had cameras, the BlackBerry had a browser, but there’s an obvious reason they were innovated over. The utility of those devices and their promises never aligned. The iPhone was what unlocked the power of movies and sharing. This meant my entire development was devoid of sitting on the toilet watching digital excrement float between my fingers. Life back then was good.

Reading takes work

The printing press and the iPhone may seem equally cataclysmic in the evolution of our species, but the communicative art they automate engenders different baseline emotions. Put simply, motion pictures are not as trustworthy as written texts.

Here is what I mean.

Texts and movies need to be consumed. Reading is a quiet activity you do with your eyes. The words are imprinted on the page, at that point powered only in the negative—the coffee you don’t spill on them, the marker you don’t use to cross them out. They are set in stone, so to speak, but as you read them, they become unique, elastic, conveying in aggregate thoughts and ideas and scenery, imagery that fills your mind and stretches your imagination. Hence the sensation of disappearing into a book.

Movies demand our sense of sight foremost; films were silent for decades. But this sight is instinctive. The majority of humans have been visually able since very shortly after birth. When we see something happen, we understand its raw elements, the who-what-when-where, without thinking about them.

Writing, on the other hand, must be decoded. Reading generally starts as early as age four. That is to say, children experience thousands of waking hours hearing words, babbling them, imbuing them with their own meaning, creating their own languages, before they can read a simple piece of writing and demonstrate comprehension. It’s only once you’re literate that it’s automatic. But reading remains hard. Even entry-level prose demands concentration. A novel demands that plus time. Lots of time.

Movies are deceptive illusions

Books and movies both rely on illusions to tell their story or state their case. But the tricks of writing are less deceptive. The value-add of a written story, the thing that makes the communicative mode truly unique, is the going into characters’ heads to tell you what’s on their mind, a technique available in three voices but often best achieved in third person.

Going into characters’ heads—it’s a charade, yet the reader accepts it uncontested. They have to—it’s the medium’s premise. In fiction, for instance, you know the story did not happen in any identifiable or materially authentic way. None of non-fiction’s ethics apply. So you don’t spend the story questioning whether the character really thought this or that. Well, you might, but only if you’re reading a rough draft, or studying the craft, or for some reason hate-reading.

Movies are always in first person. The camera is always the main character, but a myopic one. Even wide angles and fisheye lenses have tunnel vision. The camera does capture something visually rawer, realer than what words can express. But we all envision a brown jacket on a slim, dour-faced person differently, until we see that person wearing that jacket under certain conditions of lenses and lighting. The page is a canvass. The screen’s a slab of concrete. The camera forecloses imagination.

Editing is the magic of movies

The motion picture’s unique contribution to artistic storytelling is editing. Edited writing is about modifying text, omitting or including certain words and sentences. Even when editing is polishing, it’s still purely creation.

Movie editing is manipulation. De- and reconstructing the sequence and time of disparate clips of moving images. Making actions that defy physics (or would be prohibitively expensive to stage) appear to have occurred. Piecing together fragments, many of them deeply uninteresting in isolation, to influence emotional responses. It’s dirty work collecting the fragments. Movie sets would bore most moviegoers. The magic happens in the editing studio.

When moviegoers get squeamish during the grossest, most paralyzingly gripping moments, they ought to imagine all the people standing around the camera. Normal people wearing normal clothes, holding heavy equipment, working with weird electronics. The counterbalance to the glamour of the final cut.

It’s an exercise that reveals the artifice. A way to remember the depth of the construction. That’s where movies achieve depth—in their relationship to their audience’s understanding of the overhead. All that labor, much of it vastly undercompensated, so we have infinite material for passive consumption. Our country couldn’t just export the moving image. We also had to sell licenses to laziness.

No one reads anymore

Reading words and watching movies—these are two-dimensional interactions. But reading requires you to grab words and scope meaning. We may not be able to look at our imagination, but we can do much more with it than we can with a series in our binge-watching bank.

The problem is that everyone watches movies and no one reads books. Social and streaming wars are 24-7 buffets catered by the most valuable companies in the world, companies that also facilitate scraps of books and blogs and publications for power grabs and niche culture cred.

And true, we continue vomiting words such that arguments about a literacy boon sometimes surface. Any reading is better than no reading, yes. But posts and threads and comments and emails rarely get optioned for the screen.

What this word “explosion” does show us, though, is that writing remains perhaps the most trusted and efficient means of communication. One recent example: the media’s mid-2010s “pivot to video” failure. That disaster was not only a super shady mega lie about eyeball metrics. It was a prime example of misplaced faith in the moving image. Facebook thought it could command publishers into making movie content. But users wanted more intimacy. Words on a page, whether reporting the news or commenting on it, offer readers freedom: volume off, proceed at your pace, interpret at will.

Short movie clips have actually proliferated anyway, but chiefly in the realm of user-generated content. So yeah, we want video, but on our terms. And that means attention. Press record, do something, post, pray for likes. Build your brand, paint over your insecurities. Get your 15 seconds. You know it’s all a lie. Too insular to forge real connection. For that, you’ve at least got to talk with someone.

We will read again

Maybe it’s ironic that the effort to record and monetize every second of human existence is what gives me hope that the abundance of movies at the expense of books will tamp down naturally.

But the strongest case comes from 3D technology. It’s been around for a while. But it’s never really caught on. And virtual reality devices haven’t done much better. Consumers can be tricked to a point. We like our flat screens. We see through the hologram. We also prefer not to get sick.

If video is hopelessly solipsistic, if it cannot ditch the camera and break through the screen, then it cannot cannibalize our physical space, and so it is stuck. We may have no choice but to start reading again.