Vonnegut would hate Netflix’s Warner Bros. takeover

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There’s a great quote from Kurt Vonnegut where he explains the reason why he prefers to run his errands in person.

The “Slaughterhouse-Five” author explains to his wife why he’d rather hoof it to the store for an envelope than have a pack of them delivered to his house.

“I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope,” Vonnegut said. “I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is.”

Vonnegut ultimately landed on the idea that we’re “here on Earth to fart around.” His hypothetical ramble travels around the internet every few months. Unlike many exhibits in the Hall of Fame for famous quotations in email forwards, this one even happens to be true.

Vonnegut really did hate the idea that the internet was trying to take the friction out of life and said so directly. Those little inconvenient asides, unexpected conversations and unplanned trips to the store are the stuff that makes up a life. The author spent his last years at least somewhat concerned that his fellow humans were trading the moments that give a life color for the promise of convenience and comfort. Given the way that Silicon Valley has tried to take the humanity out of ordering food, staying at hotels and even creating art, he was right to worry.

We can’t actually say how Vonnegut would feel about the rise of streaming services from occasional distractions to Hollywood power players. He died in 2007, the same year that Netflix first offered the ability to watch certain movies online instantly. But we can hazard a guess that he wouldn’t be too happy that company, so focused on drawing people away from the multiplex, just won a bidding war to purchase one of the largest movie studios.

Whether Netflix will be able to muscle in on Hollywood is still an open question. Paramount is reportedly throwing a fit over the potential merger and could gum up the proceedings thanks to his closeness with President Donald Trump. But Netflix’s end-goal in all this is less cloudy.

Already notorious for the short box-checking runs of its original productions in select theaters, Netflix’s ownership of Warner Bros. spells disaster for cinemas. CEO Ted Sarandos has called the exclusive windows in which a theatrical release can’t be streamed “completely out of step with the consumer experience of just loving a movie.”

“They’d like to watch movies at home, thank you,” he said during an on-stage interview in April, going on to call the idea of making movies for movie theaters an “outdated concept.”

Sarandos might turn out to be right in that long-tail way that’s unique to people with money. Their wants and needs are prioritized until the world outside really does start to look like the one in their heads. Amazon does feel necessary in the world where Amazon killed all the stores you would have walked to. But Sarandos’ vision is not true right now.

What we can expect in the short term is a messy, unhappy period where a century-plus of cinema’s visual language and rhythms will fail to connect on smaller screens. The movies as we know them were crafted to take advantage of impossibly large screens and built on the idea of communal experiences. Horror doesn’t shock the same without the violin stabs shrieking out of punishing sound systems. Comedies aren’t as funny without the encouragement of a room full of laughing strangers. Art is cheapened, turned into nothing more than content, if we can’t experience it together. As Vonnegut put it:

“The computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.”

What do you think? Will Netflix finally kill the movie theater? Will killing the movie theater spell the end the movies? Sound off in the comments.

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