Our great cultural sage has finally arrived and it is somehow Jennifer Aniston

Two small squibs of Hollywood news jump out at us in a week otherwise dominated by election dirge. The first is Steven Spielberg slamming the rise of streaming cinema:

“The pandemic created an opportunity for streaming platforms to raise their subscriptions to record-breaking levels and also throw some of my best filmmaker friends under the bus as their movies were unceremoniously not given theatrical releases,” Spielberg said. “They were paid off and the films were suddenly relegated to, in this case, HBO Max. The case I’m talking about. And then everything started to change.”

“I think older audiences were relieved that they didn’t have to step on sticky popcorn,” Spielberg continued. “But I really believe those same older audiences, once they got into the theater, the magic of being in a social situation with a bunch of strangers is a tonic… it’s up to the movies to be good enough to get all the audiences to say that to each other when the lights come back up.

The second is Jennifer Aniston absolutely savaging modern celebrity culture, albeit in her own understated Anistonian way. After being told by a writer for Allure that “no one’s ever going to be famous the way she [was],” and that she herself is “like a silent-film star among a generation of TikTok dipshits,” the actress responded:

“Whoa. Oh, that just gave me chills. I’m a little choked up. I feel like it’s dying. There are no more movie stars. There’s no more glamour. Even the Oscar parties used to be so fun....” …

Taken together these are rather brutal (and completely accurate) indictments of our modern cultural pathways: “No more glamour,” “no more movie stars,” a shift away from meaningful and gratifying media consumption toward “subscriptions” to “streaming platforms,” the end of “the magic of being in a social situation with a bunch of strangers.” To this last bit: Spielberg not wrong about that and I think this is starting to dawn on our creator class, or at least a few of them. When we saw Smile in the theater a few weeks ago, the film opened with a pointed message from its director and leading lady, thanking moviegoers for coming out to the theater and viewing the film “the way it was supposed to be” viewed, i.e., in the theater. That was nice; it clarified things in a gentle but inescapable sort of way. The theater is obviously better, both for watching movies and for fomenting the kind of rich, communal, mystical aura around cinema that we’ve known and enjoyed for most of the last 100 years or so.

As to Aniston’s claims of “no more movie stars” and “no more glamour,” well, I think she’s absolutely right and I think we all feel it in our bones. She’s right about the Oscars, too; I wrote about this earlier this year. Maybe Jennifer Aniston reads the Piedmont Clearinghouse! Anyway, yes: something fun and interesting and rewarding is missing from our pop culture, something that was there until very recently and is now gone. What is it? What was it?

I actually think the answer is found in large part in something Aniston says later in the interview:

“There are people who say that watching Friends has saved them during cancer diagnosis, or so many people with just so much gratitude for a little show. We really loved each other and we took care of each other. I don’t know why it still resonates; there are no iPhones. It’s just people talking to each other. Nobody talks to each other anymore.”

“There are no iPhones…Nobody talks to each other anymore.” This is it, right? It’s true. Before the advent of the smartphone, people talked to each other far more regularly and more comprehensively than they do now. “It’s just people talking to each other.” There was a lot more of that, years ago. Nowadays if anyone is sitting for more than 30 seconds they whip out their phone and start looking at it. Honestly, even if they’re sitting for less than 30 seconds they do that. I have seen statistics to the effect that people spend upwards of three hours per day on their smartphones; I think this is an extremely large underestimate. I would put it at double that amount. People are on their phones all the time. Those little screens have devoured our attentions and our consciousnesses. The scenes so common to Friends and other TV shows of that era—people hanging around on couches, looking at each other, engaging with each other, their attentions focused not on a small digital screen but on the room, the people, the place, the moment—those are extremely less common today and becoming less and less common as time goes on.

Of course, it’s not like sitcoms these days just feature a bunch of people looking at their smartphones. Most shows are still about “just people talking to each other.” But I think we kind of grasp the implicit lie in that, right? Whenever a TV show is set in the present day, the year 2022, we recognize that all of these people are living in the era of the smartphone and that their lives have been as denuded by the smartphone as the rest of ours have. We see people doing stuff on modern television shows and we recognize, even if unconsciously, that most of these people probably spend hours every day on their smartphones, ignoring people around them, looking down and lost in tiny little worlds. It’s a major bummer.

And it’s unsurprising that in a world like this, there will be “no more movie stars” and “no more glamour.” We have devalued the everyday precious things in our lives—people, friends, family, places, togetherness, attentiveness, in-the-momentness—so of course the once-rarefied class of glittering movie stars will also start to seem duller, less captivating, less inspiring, less interesting. It’s not the same world it once was, and it is objectively worse than the way it used to be.

As ever, the solutions are simple: Get rid of your smartphone. Get off social media. Get rid of your streaming service, too! Discard these awful things that have made your life duller and less interesting. I’m not saying your life will be like Friends if you do; I’m saying it will be better than that. It will not be a regression, it will be progress. Take my advice and take Jennifer Aniston’s too.