Today at the baseball game, I noticed the way in which the crowd was prompted to excitement by the electric banners and signs that take up so much space in the stadium. There's something weird and wrong about this; it is a tail-wagging-dog kind of moment. Are we not paying spectators? Is part of what we're paying for, then, is being told when to cheer? Zizek, I believe, spoke cogently about this phenomenon, using the example of the laugh track during sitcoms. He said that sitcoms don't use the laugh track to prompt and audience to laughter; they are, in effect, laughing for the audience. That we have subcontracted out our pleasure to the show. We don't even watch for pleasure anymore; we watch for the comfort of not having to worry about whether something is funny or even pleasurable.
Is this thinking too deeply into the question? The game was still splendid fun. Nina and I had a blast. Milch might say that we (and the rest of the audience, and the players as well) were able to transcend the tawdriness of the commercialism and the machine-cued chants, and perhaps he is right. Certainly it felt, at the time, like our pleasure was authentic. And yet automated excitement is still problematic, and it still has an effect. This wasn't a raucous game by professional standards, but it was nowhere near as febrile and electrifying as a championship High School basketball game. It's unlikely I'll ever attend a sporting event as charged with energy as those games were.
There are some interesting articles in The New Republic, by Davids Denby and Thomson, that seem to be making forecasts of varying gloominess on the current state and likely future of Cinema with a capital C. There's some stuff to be examined and unpacked in there.
