TikTok feels like a harbinger of the death of cinema.
Actually, I don’t know if this is a death per se so much as a reorientation of our expectations, shrunken into bite sized snippets of trickery, banality, and nonsense. We’ve devolved an aspirational art form into a reflexive plaything that preys on our need for constant stimulation. We traded story and art invested with the power to awe and inspire into a mere passing amusement. A disposable widget of time filler. One of the thousands we abuse on a daily basis. Hard wiring our addled minds to always be seeking the next dose of short-from stimulation – a laugh here, a smile there, then on to the next fifteen second nugget of happiness.
It feels like we’ve surrounded ourselves with giant mirrors, reflecting our worst impulses. We’ve traded the artists of cinema past for the narcissists of tomorrow. The relentless force of time churning towards the inevitable.
