Last week, Timothée Chalamet told Matthew McConaughey, in an actor-on-actor discussion at University of Texas at Austin, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’”
Also last week, a theatre student in my department vented to a visitor, loud enough for me to hear, that our School of Theatre at LSU had become too film-focused. The visitor I’d invited is a film producer; he is also a film actor, and a theatre actor, the founder of a film festival and the founder of a theatre group. He nodded apologetically to the student, then later told me, “I expected to hear a lot of that.”
As a film degree within a theatre school, our program could be mistaken for an effort to fight irrelevancy of the performing arts. And yet, as interest in our film program grows, interest in theatre (and opera, and ballet) has grown in tandem, with students producing compelling original work and going on to fulfilling industry jobs.
If no one cares about ballet and opera anymore, these zoomers haven’t gotten the memo. Like the visitor to my class, this generation of students embraces the multi-connectedness of all artforms; like the student, they understand the asymmetric pressure on some of them.
Chalamet referenced a tidy narrative in which older artforms like opera and ballet die as newer media like film and television replaces them. But I think the reality is more uncomfortable: We are all at risk of dying amid the ascendancy of a media that none of us control and all of us consume: our feeds.
Going to the movies is, to some, just as passe an activity as going to a play (see the recent Atlantic article, “The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films.”) Box office returns are flimsily hanging on by comic book tentpoles; AI threatens to consume the entire film industry. Film people are in no position to talk.
For Chalamet in particular to make the distinction between these artforms is itself misguided and ironic. His movie Marty Supreme, for which he may win a Best Actor Oscar this weekend, is the highest-grossing movie from the indie-darling studio A24, earning more than $147 million in global ticket sales.
Vanessa Uhlig
Provided photo
This is an unarguable success for a film that had a $70 million production budget. But of the ten highest-grossing movies of all time, generating over a billion dollars each, eight are sequels or fall within established franchises, and the two that were original intellectual property (Avatar and Titanic) each cost over $200 million to make. Through this lens, Marty Supreme could be seen as the opera of the mainstream film establishment.
Because what is Marty Supreme? An original, provocative character study; a period piece about a niche sport.
Nonetheless, on top of its nine Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture), it has swept critics associations’ awards primarily for Chalamet’s performance. It has become a poster child for the bankability of original content versus established IP.
It might be the vehicle to Chalamet’s first Oscar. In referencing zero current events or issues, its raw energy and tight storytelling have anchored a cultural moment: The defiant antihero goes against the odds and the big bad world. And it’s beautiful. It’s art; it’s theatre. We need all of it, Timothée. It’s human, like you.