Can a web series be cinematic art?

The hyper realism of Netflix and Amazon Prime productions may make them look like cinema, but an essential difference is that a web-streaming series encourages anticipation while cinema encourages reflection

The arrival of Netflix and Amazon Prime into India has introduced audiences to a class of visual entertainment not seen before. Shows like 'Narcos', 'Breaking Bad' and 'Chernobyl' are different from the best of television earlier – like 'The Sopranos'. They are hyper-realistic and give you a credible sense of the physical milieu in which the action depicted might have actually taken place, once considered impossible on television.

'The Sopranos', for instance, hardly had the kind of artistic depth found in 'The Godfather'. But the best mini-series about India aired on television here – 'Delhi Crime' – is even superior aesthetically to the hyper-realistic cinema made in India, films like 'Gangs of Wasseypur' or 'Masaan'. Not only has technology advanced but newer revenue models also make enormous expenditures on television serials feasible. Still, television shows have rarely risen to the level of cinema as high art.

If one considers why television is inferior to cinema aesthetically despite the technological advances, a reason is its need to create drama within the limited interval of an hour and the requirement whereby each episode should end with a ‘question mark’ on how the series might proceed. A film usually runs to between two and three hours, allowing for silences and extended moments where seemingly little happens. Such segments gain when one reflects upon the film later. This last quality gives us a clue about the essential differences between TV and film.

The greatest films may not actually conclude when they seem to — we continue to live through them since the work has been absorbed at the basic level, leaving us to reflect upon our recall of it. In a TV series, on the other hand, the emotion at the conclusion of any episode is merely an expectation of more. We do not recapture what we have received to ‘chew’ upon it thoughtfully, so taken up are we with anticipating the next episode. This need of a serial — to keep us anticipating — means each episode must be crowded with drama. The action cannot be ambiguous either since lower comprehension naturally lowers the impact of the drama. The final conclusion is hence anti-climactic and without emotional satisfaction since we cannot reflect on the totality of the work. Complexity and ambiguity, the hallmarks of a film classic, are usually absent in television serials, which subsists on expectancies.
It is perhaps these aspects of TV that make it appropriate for minor talents. Films that depend on social nuance and subtle psychological understanding cannot provide ready excitement. Celebrated international directors – Steven Spielberg (Band of Brothers), Martin Scorsese (Boardwalk Empire), Robert Altman (M*A*S*H) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks) – have sometimes tried their hand at television but after one or two episodes, most have made over the series to their assistants.

The advantage for a big filmmaker in television serials could be that his or her name draws spectators, but filmmakers would then need to direct every episode themselves to certify that the series represents a continuing vision from an ‘auteur’ and not merely a brand. A striking new series that uses the auteur as brand to draw audiences is Nicolas Winding Refn’s 'Too Old to Die Young', now being aired on Amazon Prime.

Winding Refn is Danish but works in Hollywood and has developed a unique visual aesthetic, although his forte is action cinema (Drive, 2011). Drive was about a professional driver of getaway cars and his entanglement with the mob. The protagonist is an existential hero who might have been out of Ernest Hemingway. The good guy of Too Old to Die Young is policeman Martin Jones who doubles as a vigilante, and with some qualities of the protagonist of Drive.

Refn composes his frames deliberately, favours night sequences and harsh neon lighting, and slows down the human movement to lend it intensity. Episode 4 and 5 were screened at Cannes 2019 and they are the best from the series. If one were to ask about its philosophical thrust, it is constructed around Martin Jones acting well-meaningly but with partial knowledge. He liquidates ‘bad people’ without inquiring into their supposed wicked doings. This series by Nicolas Winding Refn represents an attempt to produce ‘cinema’ in television, explore a more complex view of reality and individual motivation, something not seen in Narcos or Chernobyl, which give us fully digested facts instead of asking questions about reality or the past.

Perhaps the best series to have ever come out of television hitherto has been David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Season 3 premiered on Showtime in 2017. The earlier seasons of Twin Peaks ran out of steam after they were passed on to minor talents, but Lynch directs all episodes of Season 3 himself.

Twin Peaks S 3 (18 episodes) is difficult viewing but may represent one of great cinematic achievements of the 21st century. Its tone has the guise of dead earnestness but what Lynch seems to be doing is parody American film genres like SF, the superhero film and the police procedural linked by spurious ‘occult’.

Genres are mythical narratives pretending to explain aspects of socio-political experience, and S3 is debunking them, though solemnly. Iron Man, for instance, responds to the murky entanglement in Afghanistan by concocting an invention with the potential to help America overcome its military adversities. Generic myths obscure the lack of public understanding of a subject, making it seem that opaque matters kept from the public realm are within their grasp.

In parts of Season 3 Lynch brings in issues like nuclear conspiracies, the brutal doings of serial killers and secret military experiments during the Cold War, not to mention the inner workings of the FBI, which serves as an undercurrent.

Occult explanations become a way of representing public ignorance of actualities. Season 3 needing interpretation and not being a mere elaboration of facts gives it a characteristic of high cinematic art, but it needs the Lynch brand to make it recognisable as such. Where the auteur emerges through the film, television can perhaps only provide certified auteurs with opportunities to produce high art.

(The author is a well-known film critic)