> As a fan of cinema, I've noticed that there is a clinical deadness lately when it comes to representing real people.
> I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling.
Last year I got ahold of The Munsters, the black-and-white TV show from the 1960s, and noticed something odd one day when I watched an episode back-to-back with a modern unrelated show: What you describe with people also applies to props. In the Munsters' dinner scenes, the whole set - including the food - was significantly more interactive than anything modern I've seen possibly ever. It made the modern shows rather suddenly feel much more fake than I was used to.
> I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling.
Last year I got ahold of The Munsters, the black-and-white TV show from the 1960s, and noticed something odd one day when I watched an episode back-to-back with a modern unrelated show: What you describe with people also applies to props. In the Munsters' dinner scenes, the whole set - including the food - was significantly more interactive than anything modern I've seen possibly ever. It made the modern shows rather suddenly feel much more fake than I was used to.