What Does It Mean For Something To Have Cultural Value?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | December 7, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | December 7, 2023 |

There are certain conversations that we seemed doomed to have for the rest of our days on Twitter (or at least for as long as that site exists before Elon Musk completely drives it into the ground.) Like clockwork, we get the same cycles of discourse on issues like the necessity of sex scenes in movies, Martin Scorsese’s perfectly reasonable takes on superhero films, and how big an age gap has to be before it becomes Problematic. We don’t seem to get anywhere whenever we’re forced to regurgitate the same handful of talking points on a platform designed to create bad-faith ideas. Lately, I’ve seen a new concept enter the fray in a rapidly prominent manner: the concept of cultural footprints and value.

We’ve all seen this conversation unfold. Does a film have specific value if it doesn’t meet a certain set of standards for success? Did it leave behind a tangible impact that will have people talking about it for decades to come, and how is that even decided by the culture at large? It seems as though we’ve been debating the cultural impact of the Avatar films since the first one was released in 2009. I’ve fallen into this trap myself on more than one occasion, perpetuating the well-worn tropes that the highest-grossing film of all time is somehow a non-entity in entertainment despite much evidence to the contrary. Recently, one tweet claiming that Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story stirred up a lot of opinions, while the discourse found its way to everything from Marvel to recent Oscar winners to Nirvana versus the Foo Fighters.

The phrase ‘cultural impact’ has started to feel like ‘cult movie’ or ‘visionary filmmaker’, a filler buzzword for when you have no idea what else to talk about. The goalposts for defining it are also in constant flux. It didn’t make a lot of money? No cultural impact. It made a ton of money but didn’t spawn sequels or a big fandom? No cultural impact. No Oscars? No memes? And so on. The intention often seems to be to dismiss or insult a piece of work based solely on this intangible concept of impact, and whoever is dictating the rules can change them as they please. It’s gotten exhausting, especially since online cultural discourse isn’t exactly designed for nuance and many fans see art as a competition based on Spotify streams or box office records.

This issue isn’t exactly about the impact or influence of single works of art but of how an increasingly corporate and monopolized industry prefers to define its products. You can argue until the Na’vi come home about whether or not the critics were right about Avatar: The Way of Water, but the studio that released it were never especially concerned about such matters once it made all that money. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner once infamously said in an internal memo from 1981, ‘We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.’ The way this has mostly taken form over the past decade in Hollywood is through the push for (yes, the worst word ever) content.

In his Harper’s essay on Federico Fellini and the current issues of the entertainment industry, Martin Scorsese noted how ‘content’ had become ‘a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode.’ Every CEO in Los Angeles is repeating the word ‘content’ over and over to describe everything created and distributed (or deleted from existence) from their behemoth companies. The Irishman is content. Star Wars is content. Twitter memes from the Netflix account are content. TikTok trailers are content. And so on. And on. And on. This is a deliberate maligning of art from a bunch of multi-billion dollar brands eager to destroy labour rights and further devalue the creative process. We had a ton of strikes this Summer in part to push back against this problem, but it’s a tough fight because the entertainment world has thrown everything into the #content shift.

The demand for Content in this fashion is a money-hungry agenda to make the basic act of creation into something that is, to steal an Errol Morris reference, fast, cheap, and out of control. By design, it’s intended to be quickly consumed and disposed of with nary a second glance. Sure, if it spawns a few sequels and a theme park ride, that’s an added bonus because it reinforces the brand, but that only further emphasizes how little the art itself matters to the wider demands of corporate greed. Consider the live-action remakes of Disney’s beloved animated classics. These aren’t made to add cultural clout to the original but to expand its brand potential, if only for long enough to gross a billion dollars and sell some polyester costumes.

This is how we end up with the smothering drops of original shows, documentaries, films, and so on from Netflix. When you release literally dozens of things every month, you can’t exactly argue that quality is winning over quantity. I cover pop culture for a living, and I have a trouble keeping up with all these premieres, and that’s just on one streaming service. You hear about something getting cancelled then wonder when it even started showing because it was such a non-entity for its own distributor. One of the reasons many filmmakers working under streaming powers campaign so vigorously for a theatrical release is because we’ve seen how undeniable its impact is on getting a movie seen, discussed, and understood. Alas, that counts for such a small sliver of Netflix and company’s intentions. How can this glut of content and the wilful disregard for access baked into its being not immediately sap something of its chance to obtain cultural value?

I think it’s important that we take art on its own terms, and derive pleasure and understanding from it well past the tedious boundaries of capitalism. Personally, I find it pointless and pretty insulting when, for example, people respond to a nuanced and deeply emotional review of a film with its Rotten Tomatoes rating, as if to prove some mighty point about its actual worth versus the critic’s perceptions of it. Moreover, anything we can do to not replicate the tech CEO mould of content-ificiation matters. Fighting that battle is sadly easier said than done, since the studios have doubled down on this model and opposing it can feel like a full-time job that not even us critics have the time to commit to. Art for art’s sake is its own form of pushback to the system, regardless of how many memes it inspires.