In one scenario for the pop cultural future, soon we’ll have movies without movie stars. In this scenario, generative A.I. will produce infinite movie-like stories on the cheap, bespoke and tailored to micro-audiences, featuring “actors” created exclusively for the purpose. Maybe some of these creations will be digitally pilfered from the library of departed greats — want to see Humphrey Bogart in a “Star Wars” movie? Here you go! But mostly people will accept that the characters in any given A.I.-generated movie exist only for that story, not as Robert Redford or Diane Keaton once existed as recurring faces in a moviegoing life.
Now here’s an alternative vision of the future: We might have stars without the movies. That is, under A.I. conditions, the equilibrium of popular culture might shift permanently away from long-form storytelling and toward the endless short-form scroll, leaving the traditional two-hour motion picture as one minor archaic option in the infinitely generative world of addictive personalized slop. But in that world, there might still be a deep human demand for identification with real-world people, beautiful charismatic figures who actually exist outside your screen — and so stardom would continue to bubble up from whatever remained of the pre-A.I. entertainment ecosystem, even if hit movies in the old style were gone for good.
The career of Sydney Sweeney seems like a foretaste of the second future. From jeans to memes, Sweeney is a big cultural presence these days, perhaps even a digital-age superstar in the making. And while, yes, she’s famous for her looks and body, she’s not just a supermodel or reality-television creation or online influencer. She’s also had the acting career you would expect from an aspiring star in the 1980s or ’90s, doing widely praised TV shows and then headlining movies across a wide variety of genres, from rom-com to horror to erotic thriller to Ron Howard-helmed historical drama to, this fall, an Oscar-bait performance as a female boxer.
But with this wrinkle: Except for the modestly successful rom-com “Anyone but You,” these movies have had no cultural impact whatsoever (and based on its dismal box office, her new boxing film, “Christy,” will be no exception).
Yet I would still argue that these movies have been essential to her rise, and that Sweeney wouldn’t have achieved the same level of stardom if she had just pivoted from her breakout role in “Euphoria” to a full-time jeans-endorsing career. I think that mass identification with The Actress is still stronger than mass identification with The Influencer, and people still like the idea of a star who appears in actual movies, who presents herself as a character in stories and not a commodified self, even if the movies themselves don’t find substantial audiences.
Maybe this is just a dying cultural reflex and it will be gone soon enough. But as long as it’s there, I hope that would-be stars continue to respond to it and feed it — because the yearning for that old alchemy of larger-than-life artist and mass audience may end up being the only thing that keeps cinema off life support.
Right now that life is clearly ebbing. I wrote an essay three years ago announcing the death of the movies as a central American art form, and there have been moments since then when cultural events like “Top Gun: Maverick” or “Barbenheimer” made my prophecy seem premature. But amid this year’s weak slate of films and this fall’s absolutely dismal box office, the diagnosis seems tragically on target: There’s ferment elsewhere in American life, but decadence still prevails in Hollywood, and the movies have never felt more irrelevant to the culture as a whole.
Yet at the same time, there are still talented people who want something better, and who are trying to recreate the past and shock the industry to life. That’s how we get exceptional moments like the ones I just mentioned — because Greta Gerwig and Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan haven’t given up on the movies. This is why a figure like Timothée Chalamet, with his unembarrassed striving desire to be a great actor of the old school, can be so compelling (even when he’s miscast). You’re watching a young man who may have been born just a bit too late for what he wants to be, trying to will The Movies back into existence.
For the same reason, I hope that Sydney Sweeney really does want the old-fashioned stardom that she has sought so far in her career, and not just the digital dominance and meme magic and endorsement deals that are within her reach. I hope the gulf between the success of her jeans campaign and the failure of her Oscar-bait movie doesn’t inspire her to pivot more to modeling and influencing. I hope she keeps acting and finds scripts that make the most of her charisma rather than trying to work against it. I hope she catches lightning in a bottle. I hope her ridiculous-looking Christmas thriller with Amanda Seyfried is actually great and turns out to be a $400 million-grossing hit.
So long as the public still wants movie stars, maybe the stars themselves can make the public want the movies. Let’s hope they keep on trying.
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