When Scott Frank was a child, his father, Barry, bought a small Cessna airplane, and on weekends the two of them would fly. This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in Los Gatos, California. Barry was a Pan Am pilot, and he believed that in some lines of work, as Scott later put it, “fear is your friend.” Upon reaching an altitude of two miles, Barry would say, “Scott, if I had a heart attack right now and you had to land the plane, where would you land?” Scott would scan the horizon for a break in the trees, his heart pounding to the rhythm of the ticking clock Barry had imposed: The plane is going down. Scott was a sensitive child with a vigorous imagination, and these impromptu exercises in flight instruction were slightly traumatic. He never learned how to fly a plane himself. Instead, he became one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful screenwriters.
Still, industrial automation did not entirely abolish handicraft. It seems hyperbolic to claim that large language models will swallow up literature. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in November, the literary agent Andrew Wylie said he didn’t believe the work of the blue-chip authors he represents — Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Bob Dylan, among many others — “is in danger of being replicated on the back of or through the mechanisms of artificial intelligence.”
Since his job is to make money for human authors, Wylie is hardly a disinterested party, but history supports his skepticism. Mass production has always coexisted with, and enhanced the value of, older forms of craft. The old-fashioned and the newfangled have a tendency to commingle. The standardization of mediocrity does not necessarily lead to the death of excellence. It’s still possible to knit a sweater or write a sestina.
It’s comforting to hear a handful of film critics I respect say that they’re actually hopeful for the future of movies and moviegoing, but it has struck me that someone has yet to identify one of the main attributing reasons for this mass return to theaters. The Movie™ may or may not be back, but the movie musical certainly is! Quite a few of the most-anticipated and most-successful films this year are musicals, but oddly, the marketers behind these films tried to hide their musical nature from potential audiences until tickets were bought and butts were in seats. This wasn’t just the year of the musical, no—it was the year of the stealth musical.
“Music,” Victor Hugo once noted, “expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” Perhaps as a result, the artform stands, as Jeremy Eichler argues in his absorbing and eloquent book Time’s Echo, as a singularly potent force for channeling collective memory and memorialization.