"Let's crunch some hypothetical numbers. Take a media-aware person of, say, 30 years of age. Call him Ollie Overwhelmed. When Ollie's great-grandfather was 30 he had perhaps seen 2,500 hours of audio-visual narrative (plot). His grandfather, age 30, had seen about 10,000 hours. His father had seen 20,000 hours. Ollie in 2009, age 30, has seen approximately 35,000 hours of audio-visual narrative. These are not hard numbers. I've read no polling to this effect. But this seems about right.
That's 35,000 hours of plot. Movies, television shows, cartoons, streaming video, YouTube clips. Storylines long and short: teen comedies, soap operas, love stories, crime shows, historical dramas, special-effects extravaganzas, horror, porn, highbrow, lowbrow, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. That's a lot of narrative. It's exhausting."
Selon l'auteur de Taxi Driver, Hardcore ou Raging Bull, l'originalité qui a toujours été une denrée rare deviendrait encore plus précieuse et le boulot de scénariste une véritable sinécure. Comment surprendre quand tout est déjà raconté, sous 45 formes différentes? Et surtout, comment espérer que le cinéma se sortira indemne de cet appauvrissement généralisé? Mais l'attaque de Schrader laisse songeur: trop d'histoires peuvent-elles vraiment tuer les histoires? Ou faut-il tout simplement admettre une bonne fois pour toutes que le langage cinéma a sa propre langue et qu'il nous faut apprendre à l'écouter?