The other thing that bothers me about cinema is that it manages to eliminate itself, to make people think they hate good cinema, and thereby gets itself forced into retreating to the internet or into low-budget productions.
My worry is that for the tableau to be so successful again, it must mean be that there are illiterates of image culture, who will be dominated once again by those who have the power of words. This is why I feel that images are once again produced by words, and why I fear that a premodern blindness is back. Economically, it is not hard to see that feudalism has returned, but every economy is the result of a vision. The current vision holds that the party is over, that the holiday gone on long enough, and it is time to go back from where the poverty came: spending every day of one’s life struggling, gradually forgetting the party.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 2002), 133.