I was reading this article in The Nation about the movies and was struck by one line:

Since, moreover, the mass audience is so calculatingly considered in the actual making of film—and since any one film is put together by so large a number of people—the films reveal more about society as a whole than any other works of art except literary masterpieces.

The comparison of the anthropological aspects of the greatest works of literature to cinema. Specifically, to the mass (or, as Dwight McDonald might say, ‘masscult’) cinema, as opposed to the cinema of the auteur.

It rings true, doesn’t it? But what should we think of it? That it takes an army of producers, writers, and marketers, as well as a hundred million dollars, to reproduce the reproductive/reflective (see what I did there? ‘reproduce’ and ‘reproductive?’ I didn’t need to use ‘reproductive’ and ‘reflective’ but it just seemed too cool an alliteration/repitition to pass up) of a Roth or a Zola. One assumes that Ulysses or The Brothers Karamazov could only be matched by the complete and combined ouevres of Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg.

But still, we haven’t properly answered or addressed the question of what it means if popular and frequently mediocre constructs like the year end box office top ten can perform a major function (? ) of literary masterpieces?