Stop Including Me!

It’s hard, really, to know what will become of the movie industry, the recording industry, and the entertainment business in general, considering the ubiquity of piracy and the increasingly splintered target markets for products. As Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher noted in his blog last week, “The economics of the new model are uncertain . . . Goodness knows nobody pays for content anymore.” This uncertainty isn't really new, though; businesspeople have always been dismayed at the unpredictability of audience tastes. Nevertheless, there is true reason to be concerned when scarcely anyone can provide a logical reason to believe people will continue to pay for music. And movies won’t be far behind. Again, although there’s always been deep uncertainty in pop culture economics, it feels like something new is afoot. As the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote recently in New York Magazine, “Perhaps it was ever thus; it’s just more thus than ever.”

Enter the movie studio test audience. These have been around for decades, but I had my first experience with one last week, when Katherine and I went to see The Darjeeling Limited at the AMC on 42nd Street. Test screenings are usually conducted at malls in suburban California with a group of people who’ve been told beforehand that their input on a yet-to-be-released film is being solicited. At the AMC last week, though, we simply showed up for the movie and a group of fresh-faced marketing interns (I’m guessing) thrust index cards in our hands as we took our seats. On the card were printed a series of questions to be answered about the film, basically designed to determine whether we liked it or not.

This is nonsense and it should be illegal. First of all, we didn’t go to the movie as arbiters but as patrons who wanted to be entertained. We didn’t come to judge, we came to be delighted. The minute we switch caps—from audience member to member of the committee—we fatally diminish our capacity to be delighted. Doubts are introduced where no doubts would have been. We are no longer enchanted; we are instead critical, and as such, seeking to prove our worthiness, we seek out fault whether it exists or not. It is like being in a relationship and being told, “I love you,” and then being asked, “How does that make you feel? Do you believe me when I say ‘I love you.’” “Well,” you might say, “I did until you started asking me these inane questions.”

David Mamet, in his eloquent screed of Hollywood mores, Bambi and Godzilla, writes devastatingly of test audiences. “The audience,” he writes, “is invited to replace its capacity for amusement with the right of sitting in judgment.” He continues:

“These invited test screeners never engage that portion of the human mind that loves a story; no, they have become enmeshed in a fantasy of business, and they now work to imagine (as did those folks in the committee/audition room) what some notional other groups might just like. And they vote accordingly, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, in self-congratulation at having suspended that obviously now puerile, wide-eyed state of enjoyment of the unlicensed, unschooled, and mere ‘member of the audience.’”

The pernicious effect of such a fallacious system of “testing” is easily guessed at: rampant mediocrity. It other words, it takes the weirdness, the delightful eccentricity out and replaces it with, as Mamet puts it, “uniformity.” Mamet:

“For each human being is different. And the idiosyncrasy of the artist, this supposedly (by the executive) divisive tropism, is actually an ability to compel—to compel a disparate group of people not into a jury capable of consensus but into a group willing to suspend its rational capacity—into an audience.

“We may note further that the executive, in forming a lay and random group into a committee supposedly capable of forecasting dramatic success, indicts, and in fact unsays, his protestation of his own possession of superior financial or mercantile powers. For if a regular person wandering in a mall somewhere may be shanghaied into watching a test screening, and if his opinion, and the opinion of his like, are the basis upon which executives determine how to place their bets, why not eliminate the executives entirely and proceed directly to the mall wanderer?”

Why not indeed? Well, it’s what happened to me last week and I didn’t like it. Not one bit. Not because I was being put upon in some way; I can look out for myself, and I tossed the card I was given into the bin the minute I figured out what it was for. Rather, I disliked it because I dislike the idea of consensus in art, and because I felt gypped of the experience of watching a film with an unprepared, “real” audience.

It was a good movie, though, and I highly recommend it. Keep an eye out for Barbet Schroeder’s cameo two-thirds of the way through the film. He underplays his role and endows an exceedingly small part with pathos and believability. His performance is disarming. Perhaps I should have filled out that card after all and simply included a note in praise of Mr. Schroeder.