What’s the story? Mourning glory. It’s the fifth and final chapter of my series on the death of Hollywood and I’m looking pretty dapper in my funeral attire. There’s no body, of course. The cadaver of Hollywood Film lies unrested, dumped and seeping out her poisons, though nobody seems to have noticed she’s missing from her own funeral. I have eulogised her in Remembering Film, and I’m now going to conclude my mulling of her passing over a few triangular egg mayonnaise sandwiches and some sherry trifle.

I spy with my critical eye something beginning with A. Dunno? Ok, it’s Art, Art people, Art! We’ve looked at film as entertainment and the place of imagination within it; today we’re going to be taking a little look at film as art. Now, I’ve touched on this previously, the idea that film is an art form and as such has a duty to be critical. Art is beauty and creativity, but it also functions to be critical of society. True freedom of speech exists within it and the loss of its critical functionality is loss of freedom.

Looking and not seeing. It is not just filmmakers who are guilty of this, but we the audience, too. The lost act of seeing has been surpassed by the unquestioning ingestion of New Hollywood’s puritanical tirade. Filmmakers are failing us in the realm of imagination, lacking in the fulfilment of film’s ability to take us on a journey, to dream, to imagine. But we, as the audience, are not seeing the messages and blindly consuming, sightless, unquestioning. And so it is that our film industry has traded our dreams for a heavily promoted reality benefiting the governing ideology.

Film exists these days not as escapism, but as a form of social control. For film to exist as art, it is not just to be questioning in itself, but it is we who must question. To look and to see is to not alter the meaning of an artform, but to take our own meaning from it. When we are no longer seeing, we are no longer extracting either the director’s meaning or our own. Current Hollywood, though, has done away with any vagueness; if it’s not an analogy for terrorism it’s a lecture in family values. Though we may not be seeing these messages, we are constantly absorbing them, and so, their work is done.

The loss of film as art cannot be underestimated, for it is our last stand in true freedom, and it’s loss as an artform means we have surely now lost our freedom. New Hollywood has lost both its critical and imaginative edge and left us plummeting into a pit of samey, samey crap. However, it’s not just our viewing pleasure that’s suffering, but our individuality as consumers of am artform. Whether we have noticed or not, Hollywood is banding a dangerous and creepy message of conformity. I have noticed. I hope I’m not alone. (All by myself, don’t wanna be all by myself anymore…)