Maybe the Wes Anderson advocates and aficionados will be upset to hear it, but up until mid-April, I didn’t know Anderson had a new movie on the horizon, either. And my job is to know this stuff! But rather than fall into a hole of imposter syndrome and spend the night self-flagellating, I realized that there’s a whole multitude of factors keeping avid media lovers and filmgoers, as well as their casual viewer counterparts, from the films, television and art that they love — things they genuinely would want to watch.
With the way tech has inserted itself into our day-to-day lives, it has become nearly impossible to be a consumer of culture without being plugged into the mainframe. If you want to know what movie is playing near you or what television show is popular, you’re forced to look online. Or, if you’re seeking something streamable, you can choose to go to your streaming service of choice, where even the new additions are buried under random titles you have no interest in — so much for those algorithms! And that’s if you can get a laggy, frustrating streaming service to work intuitively. The digital avenues at our disposal are littered with roadblocks, and all the swerving that average audiences do keeps them from the films and television they want to watch. It’s too late to pivot backward from the merging of art and tech, but if the two must be inextricable, the solution to being lost in their fusion is to keep one foot outside the fold at all times.
