Film Is In Its Own Existential and Material Crisis, Timothée

Timothée Chalamet’s comments about opera and ballet are condescending. But there’s an anxiety underneath the surface — about the film industry’s future — that deserves scrutiny.

My king, Mikhail Baryshnikov mid-flight during his 1970s-80s ballet career, and on the right, Chalamet in a ping-pong scene from the overdetermined exercise in empty anxiety known as Marty Supreme (2025).

Over a lush dinner and delectable dirty martini at a steakhouse in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, I spoke with a good friend and fellow writer about Timothée Chalamet’s recent flaunting of his own artistic and intellectual deficiencies. In a conversation with Matthew McConaughey¹, Timothée continued his swaggering plea for Best Actor Oscar glory. Between bits of self-satisfied laughter, the 30-year old actor said in the quote going viral, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘hey, keep this thing alive even though it’s like no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. Damn, I took shots for no reason.”

Timothée’s comments are dismissive and condescending. They’re also far from his previous remarks earlier during the Marty Supreme press tour, “I grew up backstage at the New York City Ballet. My grandmother danced in the New York City Ballet, my mother danced in the New York City Ballet, my sister danced in the New York City Ballet. I grew up dreaming big at the backstage at the Koch Theater [at Lincoln Center] in New York…I’m like a Venn Diagram of the best cultural influences of the 21st century and 20th century.” Moving from ballet, and dance more broadly, into acting has created indelible screen performers who carry a keen understanding that the body is a form of storytelling within itself. It’s also understandable why the actual artists in these fields and the wider public would rankle. The arts are not getting funded in this country. The wealthy no longer participate in cultural and artistic philanthropy. Instead, they’re committed to peacocking their terrible style, yearning to be seen as culturally cool and literate.

I noted to my friend at dinner that Timothée’s comments were bold considering even a passing glance at the film industry reveals an existential and material crisis that speaks to one thing: Decline. The kind of decline that spells extinction. This isn’t just a problem within the country I call home. I think the medium itself is facing a host of issues informed by technological shifts and the financial dynamics of mounting a production. But let’s keep it focused. Hollywood, and yes, American independent cinema as well, is staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

If you know your film history, you understand that Hollywood has been perpetually in crisis since the first half of the twentieth century. It has been threatened by crises both within and without: Hays Code limitations, the end of the mighty classic studio system business approach due to antitrust decrees in 1948, McCarthyism, the popularity of television, the popularity of video games, the popularity of television again, the popularity of streaming sites like Twitch, the mounting encroachment of AI, and the public’s growing disinterest in the kind of stars Hollywood props up most fervently. The panic about the industry and its future is baked into its very foundations. As a medium tied to evolving technology and egregiously to the whims of capital, these modern threats, while not wholly unprecedented, are dangerous in ways that are genuinely alarming.

John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Ring Twice (1946). The actors of classic Hollywood have much to teach the stars of Hollywood today about the nature of labor in film workforce. Garfield’s life and career were deeply harmed by the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

But it’s vital to consider what Timothée says just before the viral quote, “I admire people and I’ve done it myself to go on a talk show and go, hey, we got to keep movie theaters alive. We got to keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like if people want to see it like Barbie, like Oppenheimer they’re going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it.” I do think Timothée is unintelligent in terms of how he engages with art but smart in how he has shored up his career and functions as an actor. But there is anxiety at the root of his grating delivery that is worth excavating. Timothée may not fully realize it but he is expressing a fear that exists in Hollywood about its own demise that is definitely not being reckoned with by him and his ilk. American filmmaking — Hollywood and independent — is poised at a crossroads.

Actors like Timothée and filmmakers like Christopher Nolan wax poetic about the importance of movie theaters. Yes, they’re vital to the industry and the medium’s strength of creating an intimate communal experience that regular ass people can afford to attend. (Or at least should be able to.) I would pose a question to such film-workers, why should audiences still support American films when so few of them are worth the time it takes to watch them and these works refuse to engage with the idea(l)s various audiences genuinely care about? Timothée’s energy is better spent preparing his peers for another demonstration of labor action than publicly dunking on other art forms he has neither the skill nor interest to participate in.

Witnessing Timothée’s anxiety underneath the shots he fired, led me to think about the nature between the arts and the public. What happens to an art when it is funded by and made for the wealthy? What happens to an art form when common men and women, within major cities and beyond them, can’t engage with the art due to access and financial limitations? How should we support and understand art that doesn’t engage with people anymore and instead chokes on its own rarefied air? I don’t want movies to become so niche they no longer engage with the public. When an art form is only viable thanks to the good graces of wealthy benefactors it will eventually curdle and die: aesthetically, existentially, and finally, materially.

When I look at this picture of Paul Newman and Robert Redford playing in 1968 all I can think about is how boring, how aesthetically rote all the stars we’re being offered from Hollywood today are. Can the young folks study their history? Come on y’all. I need more effort and artistic big swings. I want personas, not brands!

That note about engaging with the public is an important one. Timothée’s recent press tour is as much about Marty Supreme and award season glory as it is about arguing that the idea of the movie star is still alive. But what does that matter when the films themselves do not engage meaningfully with the concerns, pleasures, and contradictions of modern humanity? What does it matter when the movie stars we’re being offered have tweaked their faces and bodies into a startling sameness that hews toward the most fascistic markers of beauty (extreme thinness, whiteness, whilst weathering no sign of the passage of time)? It is possible for all manner of films — from gargantuan blockbusters to quiet dramas — to have texture, take genuine risks, and trust their audience instead of condescending toward them. Hollywood is in a crisis. And yes, that is a crisis motivated by studio heads who believe you can eliminate risk from moviemaking leading to ruinous decisions. But Hollywood is also in an artistic crisis of the industry’s own making.

In thinking of Timothée’s comments I found myself picking up Otto Friedrich’s tremendous 1986 book City of Nets. The scholarly book is most transfixing in how it charts Hollywood in the 1940s through its business and political practices that influenced the art made. After the blockbuster success of 1939, Hollywood found itself in decline by the end of the next decade. Anticommunist hysteria disrupted the careers of many talented folks; while a 1948 antitrust decree ended the business practices that made the studio system so powerful and financially viable. The Hollywood film industry — and American film industry as a whole — has convulsed in various periods of strife. But this moment we’re living in feels particularly dire and instructive.

Deep in Friedrich’s book — it is page 628 of my copy — he paints a picture of Hollywood’s cyclical points of decline and the continued worries of the medium’s future with an anecdote involving David O. Selznick, who produced films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Picture Oscar-winning adaptation Rebecca (1940). Selznick — who died in 1965 — spent the bulk of his career not bound to any single studio, he was an independent producer.

“Hollywood’s like Egypt,” David Selznick once remarked morosely to Ben Hecht as they walked through the deserted streets at dawn. “Full of crumbling pyramids... It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” First, though, everything must be torn down and rebuilt into something else.

The mansion that Billy Wilder found for Sunset Boulevard was demolished in 1957 to provide a site for the new Getty headquarters office building. The Spanish hacienda built on Sunset Boulevard by Alla Nazimova in the early 1920’s, with a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, gave way in 1927 to the Garden of Allah Ho-tel, with bungalows occupied by Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, John O’Hara, and other serious drinkers, and that gave way in 1959 to a bank. The former livery stable that Bette Davis turned into the Hollywood Canteen is now a four-story parking garage. The Mocambo nightclub on Sunset is a parking lot, and all that remains of the nearby Trocadero are the three steps that used to lead to the front door.

On the other hand, the nostalgia business has become very profitable in Hollywood.”

This book was published before I was born so I can only imagine how these landmarks have changed numerous times since. Friedrich’s concluding statement about nostalgia is as instructive of Selznick’s dire quote. Hollywood loves to terraform its own past to make a buck. This approach is always ahistorical. In regurgitating a simulacrum of its own history, the modern industry misunderstands the glories and sins of Hollywood’s past. In many ways, the film industry as it currently stands in this country is confirming and solidifying its own obsolescence. Film will survive as a medium even in the face of modern overwhelming terrors. But I doubt Hollywood, as it currently functions, can.

1. Notably the fellow actor agrees with Chalamet. I find all this funny given how it comes across that people in working Hollywood don’t really give a shit about film itself anyway.