Since the advent of television in the 1950s, the medium film and literature have had a complicated relationship, all fighting to please the American consumer. I didn’t forget, music is a thing, too. In a culture of efficiency, though, music, I’ve found, is the most brushed off despite its prevalence. Sorry, not brushed off. Music doesn’t get the full attention of the American. It seems to be the thing to do while driving, talking to friends, or doing homework. Very little do I know of kids who sit down, close their eyes, and listen to a song, let alone an entire album.

Film, literature, and television, though, require the full attention of the viewer or reader, even if the reader isn’t asked too much of them. All three mediums are, in many ways, similar. You have to use your vision to do it, you have to stay engaged from beginning to end, etc. Crossovers are common through the different mediums. I wrote an article, about book-to-film adaptations, but it doesn’t stop there. Some television shows get their own film adaptation. Shows like "Dexter" or "Game of Thrones" have seen their book-to-tv adaptations. There have been the film-to-tv adaptations, though most of them, like "Napoleon Dynamite," get cancelled after one season. A story like "Friday Night Lights" holds the trifecta, a book adapted into a film adapted into a television show.

There is a gap, though. Sure, there’s a medium gap. Some mediums just can’t handle the same visual, story-based, or stylistic elements that the others can. Under that, there’s a much more consumer-based difference, a critical difference, both in popularity and quality. Such a difference, seen through three different mediums, each containing a plethora of works within them, can be inconsistent at times, outliers in a graph that is already rooted in theory. It’s much more compromising and more relevant of a proposition to be made, though, that, say there were a critical difference, it has changed shapes in the 1950s and is projected to do so even more in the future.

A common criticism of the young writer, one that can be appropriately given, stretching over genre or style, is the lack of maturity. Sure, a mentor can easily use that as an alibi, saying a writer just needs to mature and slapping them with a B instead of telling them that their protagonist should start talking about what he wants instead of talking about how much he loves Axe Body Spray. But I disagree, proposing that, in most situations, the young writer is already on the right pace because he or she has proclaimed his or her commitment to writing based on his or her decision to start it and, thus, is far ahead of any non-writers, as more and more writers are starting to read more heavily and more and more non-writers are starting to read less and less heavily. So the young writer has good taste but suffers from his or her youth, an ailment that includes side effects like lack of real world experience and less time to read (due to the simple fact of being younger).

The same can be said for film and television. This is not to say that literature has inherently started worse and gotten better, for two reasons. For one, literature goes too far back and has produced far too many authors to accurately gauge whether or not literature started poorly and has improved. One can argue that is the case in an evolutionary sense. The writer of the first book was probably one of the first to invent it which, though it might help in some instances, also has a similar problem to the young writer: a lack of experience. A second issue with that is that since there were (and are) so many authors, more than, say, the amount of television shows on air today, it is difficult to gauge the common trend. Though there is the same today regarding the spectrum of writers, we are familiar enough with the era of now to dissect this spectrum, living it instead of having to inherit it. It’s the same as the adult’s superior knowledge of trivia games like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” over children. The adults have lived the period and are inherently more adept to answering it.

To continue, film and television have had their growing pains. Despite producing classics like "Citizen Kane" much of early American Cinema, Old Hollywood, specifically, has been glossed over for its incompetence. Part of that, I think, is due to the “young writer” syndrome again. One of the best films of the 1890s was "Train Arriving at Station," which was as simplistic and rudimentary as its title, which essentially told the story: a train arriving at a station. And though silent films, to some, are considered great, most of their slapstick I see is not paid in homage in well-acclaimed films of the present but of poorly-executed hyper-comedy films that plague Hollywood today.

Old Hollywood, to many post-modern cartoon of the likes of "Looney Toones" that emulated them, is what our culture now associates as the classic view of the movies: “poor set design, exaggerated makeup, and cheesy, unrelatable extreme genre, among others. This view, I think, is the view that estranges The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield from the “goddamn movies” : “Her favourite is The 39 Steps, though, with Robert Donat. She knows the whole goddamn movie by heart, because I’ve taken her to see it about ten times. When old Donat comes up from this Scotch farmhouse, for instance, when he’s running away from the cops and all, Pheobe’ll say right out loud in the movie – right when the Scotch guy in the picture says it – ‘Can you eat the herring?’ She knows all the talk by heart. And when this professor in the picture, that really jolly German spy, sticks up his little finger with part of the middle joint missing, to show Robert Donat, old Pheobe beats him to it – she holds up her little finger at me in the dark, right in front of my face.”

It’s the obvious genre film, one that is distanced from actual people. It’s a shame Holden was not documented during the 70s, though. The 60s brought a shift as European film had started to get popular. The French New Wave, in particular, was a revelation to America, a stark difference to what is currently seen as a movie in America at the time. That is, in my opinion, a large reason why the 70s were viewed as the “Golden Age” of film. There were American filmmakers that knew Hollywood and its appeal but also knew the art that was European cinema. They had the commercial attraction and the art attraction, and gave them to good use. Martin Scorsese, for example, heavily stole from European directors, and it can still be seen today through directors like Wes Anderson.

Though film needed a little nudging, it eventually came through. That is surely a reason why this old-school view of the “movies” is slowly receding. The eighties, though, brought back a return to the studio, Hollywood system. Sure, there were the occasional suave gems like "Raging Bull," but the 80s were largely predicated to the Hollywood films that you will see a reboot of at your local theater next summer. Once the popularity raised, studios got smart, (money-smart, that is)— and realized that if you can emulate movies like "Jaws" or "Star Wars," films that entertained everyone that didn’t ask anything of the viewer, you can make some serious money. And so we had a reform of the Old Hollywood, one revitalized with more advanced technology.

The 90s complicated things even more, though, as an Independent Film movement arose. With technology becoming accessible to the point where a middle class American can get their hands on film equipment for cheap, the studio system saw the same kinds of auteurs that they had to deal with in the 70s. At this point, there were two completely different films coming out: the Independent and the studio. The independent, though drawing stark similarities to the smart films of the 70s, earned considerably less, mostly due to its inability to be distributed and low budget. These are also Americans, too, that saw "The Goonies" and weren’t going back.

Through the 00s and now to the 10s, film seems to have created more of a difference between Hollywood and Independent. The Hollywood system has gone all in on commerciality, if you see how many sequels, reboots, and downright universally accessible films that have come out recently. Sure, there have been the "Mad Max’s" of the world, but if someone were to argue with the point that I’m making, regarding the decline of quality of film, you would more likely than not see that film, which, you should remember, is a reboot, would commonly be the only one to be answered.

Independent films now are kind of taking over six times in the past ten years has a Best Picture winner received less than $100 million dollars at the box office. So this disparity, in a way, mirrors, the the good taste of the young writer, saying that writers write more heavily while non-writers read more lightly. In this case, Independent films get better as Hollywood films gets worse. In a way, it’s very complicated to talk about the state of film today. Here, in 2016, we have over a century’s worth of film to go over, and we see film progressively become more revisionist, as well as technology and special effects getting better. To many, Independent films have been better than ever, having been a prevalent force for more than 25 years. On the other hand, Hollywood continues to get more and more broad and reaches to a wider and wider audience, which, in part, has made them worse. Many people, Dustin Hoffman, in particular, have criticized today’s film, calling it “the worst it’s ever been.” When they talk about this, though, just like Caulfield did, I really have to believe that they are talking about the very worst that had come out in film, not understanding that there is so much more and so much better.

This idea of film is hard to summarize, if one were accurate, in a fleeting disapproval or a virtue. Majoring in film at college is seen as high-brow, at least from those who understand it, though the role of filmmaker is, in many way, different from that of the filmgoer. Today’s filmmaker, I’ve found, is more sensible toward the broader range. By range I don’t mean the mainstream tastes but more the range of all films there are. They have seen, or at least are aware of, films of all varieties: Hollywood, Independent, and Foreign, included. The filmgoer, though, is much more adept to seeing the Hollywood film, shown through box office numbers week after week. This proves it difficult to talk about the state of film without bringing box office into the equation and it’s especially difficult to talk about Independent cinema with those same Hollywood-centred moviegoers.

Television, I’ve found, usually hits to the more critically adept, though I’d like to go through a brief history of the brief history of television. Of the three, it has the shortest lifespan, younger than some people still on the earth. Growing pains, I’ve found, were more apparent for television. I’ve often found that television was more spoofed pre-90s than Hollywood cinema was pre-70s. This, I believe, is because those who’ve seen both pre-90s and modern television are younger and more in tune with the media cycle that we’ve seen. I haven’t seen any particular reasons why these growing pains left, or necessarily what they are. Maybe the television industry was different from film that it didn’t need something like World Cinema or Independent Cinema to give it a bump. I just can’t get through five minutes at "I Love Lucy" without wincing at its "humor."

But this 90s “golden age” happened or so it seemed at the time, producing television like "Seinfeld" or "Friends" that we still love today. Other television shows like "Full House" or "Saved by the Bell" have also had a steady popularity, though I think it’s due to the nostalgia we seem to have for this decade, because I see them as tiring as old television, sometimes even more. The 2000s seemed like a continuation of that, though things didn’t really hit off until the 2010s. The explanation for this is very easy. Yes, part of it is due to my familiarity to this time period, but people looking back at pre-10s TV and TV from 2010 on can see a difference. For one, there’s the budgeting. I criticize shows like Dallas for their high-concept, action-heavy premise thus having a low-budget, fake execution. Low budget is not the case here, especially when it comes to the new Marvel shows.

The biggest difference I believe, though, is ratings. Ratings seem to be the major impediment for television’s relevance in the artistic realm. Art based on how many people watch it? Not for many people. However, with platforms like HBO and Netflix, they have more freedom to include shows that don’t happen to have as many ratings, though the inverse relationship between critical appeal and commercial appeal is by far less apparent here than it is in film. The top rated shows. Viral shows like "Breaking Bad," "The Walking Dead," and "Game of Thrones" continue to enthrall both critics and fans, while it’s rare that, aside from the occasional "Keeping up With the Kardashians" or "Gossip Girl," there is little TV that is considered the bad TV that writers of the type of David Foster Wallace would call “TV”.

I do wonder, though, what it means that so many people are favorable of such TV. A theory I have is that television is inherently a lesser medium, one that’s viewer-centric. Though viewers are getting smarter, I have a feeling that it’s easier for them to jump from one television show to another instead of from one medium to another. I consider today’s television to be passable and shows I consider to be the likes of Tarantino and Nolan films. I do not think that their quality is necessarily up to par, but I see common trends of both of their styles. I do not see much understated television and, though it isn’t necessary to create good art, I believe it is necessary when creating good, introspective entertainment. But why I can never dip both my feet in the water that is both Nolan and Tarantino, as the same with television, is that whatever artistic forces that are used are done so that everyone can understand it.

Tarantino’s dialogue is a good example. It’s different and I enjoy it standing on its own. Oftentimes, especially in westerns, I’ve found dialogue to be an exposition dump in the film, something that is used to provide a framework while what we really care about it the action. But his dialogue, to me, is just too outlandish, and it gets to a point where we start to doubt the believability of the film. And, at points, it becomes just interesting filler. I know many supposed cinephiles constantly reference "Pulp Fiction’s" cheeseburger scene as one of their favorite, screenwriting-wise. Yes, there is appeal, especially on the first listen, but think about how the cheeseburger related to the rest of the film. It would make sense, given its length and its timing. Being at the beginning of the film and in place of what is supposed to be exposition, the audience member is programmed to think that this will be a part of the rest of the film, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But they talk about the Royale with cheese and the metric film for five minutes and then they discuss it fleetingly with Brett at his apartment. When it comes to stylistic dialogue, I would much prefer Aaron Sorkin, which actually talks on-topic, though overstated.

This reverse from traditional dialogue is appears to be what I would think to be a quick escape for the viewer. The viewer is so accustomed to such an extreme, plot-dialogue, that the viewer is delighted to see the exact opposite of it. I believe, though, if we were in a world where Quentin Tarantino was the most seen director of all time and someone got a copy of "The Expendables 3," they would revel in how sleek it is, how direct it is, how little b.s. there is.

I think it comes down to that film has a very direct inverse between quality and commercial appeal, with the obvious and appropriate exceptions. For the most part, in my opinion, most commercial film today is worse than most (prevalent) independent film today. That part in the middle, I’ve found, Independent films with Hollywood tendencies and vice versa, have, more or less, been in the middle of my tastes as well as the middle of the box office.

This I think happens, as well, in literature. At least, I think, in the youth market. The adult market sees the initiative of reading as an initiative into bringing something in as well as getting something out of it, a vital quality of Independent cinema. That’s a reason why I believe that Independent cinema is often seen in the same light as Literary Fiction to children: boring, not entertaining. With youths, though, fiction is actually not too unpopular, though popular, YA fiction is usually the genre of choice. Though film genres usually very among younger people, I find that the millennials find YA fiction to be the selected reading. Literary fiction does grab a few fans, most of them branching by students compelled by their high school required reading, but the fiction I see most popular is those YA ones, particularly if they have or will about to be adapted into a film.

So the in between of popular and unpopular, I’ve found, are entertaining, yet thought-provoking works, like Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, in this straddling position, I’ve found is very similar to Tarantino’s position. He’s fairly popular but not too much and has a unique style of prose. The subject matter, I’ve seen, is very outlandish and opinionated. Like Tarantino, I enjoy Vonnegut but have never been completely sold on him. It’s almost as if he markets just like Tarantino. His subject matter is wild but not one that is too polarizing, like the works of Thomas Pynchon. And his prose is different, but not radical or one that will ultimately give payoff like Hemingway. He straddles this line between accessibility and quality, like a person searching the internet for no apparent reason. Again, though, Vonnegut’s ability to be different and nearly anarchic for young adults though covertly not straying too far from what the Millennials have seen give it both a comfortability and an illusion for a new frontier reached, one in which there’s a feeling that you can’t get any better. Vonnegut is the pop-punk of literature.

I’m not saying, to back up, that a book has to be either entertaining or thought-provoking. When appropriate and ideal, implementing both is great. I do find, though, that some artists aren’t competent in their medium enough and instead compromise to find space for both. What I find is that my favorite art, whether be film or otherwise, it to find the artistic value in commercial appeal, or vice versa, not just putting one aside another like a blind date.

Though it’s been said since the 50s, only recently have I found that television is truly replacing literature with streaming services. For brevity, I’ll just summarize, calling that default service Netflix. One reason I’ve found that binge watching is so popular is that, with reading having been devoid in our culture for some time, Americans have, for long, wanted to truly be committed to something, but don’t want to make the effort to read literature, something that you need to do with a particular novel for an extended period, sticking with you for longer. Movies you watch in one sitting, which, though it can extend to over two hours, I find that there’s always a magical period in between sittings of reading, ones where you review what has been to come and what there is to go. It’s like that brief pause in a profound speech. So though a book might take a day to go straight through, realistically one might be involved with it for two weeks. To be engaged with a piece of literature for a long time is really a beautiful thing, and people are rediscovering that with Netflix.

I’ve seen this replacement almost comically, like a before-and-after shot. Before at work Joey would be reading a book during his break. Now he’s watching it on his bulky laptop with earphones and a charger attached.

Unlike many other literary types, I do not find television inherently awful. How it is set up, it’s effective. It’s structured in a way that is short but meaningful and it leaves on a twist to keep you coming back the next week. All of this does come with its shortcomings but, in some ways, it’s nothing worse than the inability to have complete visual clarity in literature or the inability to have an unabridged first-person limited perspective in film. But with binge watching, though, it throws out all of what makes television television. If someone watching a film for two hours, they are thrown into another world for two hours, one in which there’s so much time to explore. When watching three episodes of tv in two hours, the viewer is only given forty minutes to explore in three different intervals, so right when he or she is about to break the precipice and truly get lost in the work, the next episode comes on and he or she might start over again. This feeling is not viewed, though, as one of futility but one of a sort of refreshness that hits, as much intimacy has been replaced by boredom in our instant gratification society.

So with this suspense and brevity thrown out, we get tv shows played like movies. And now all we get is what makes tv good but in a cinematic sense, which does not convert, like downloading iTunes on a PC. And what’s starting to happen now, with Netflix shows becoming more popular, is television shows meant to be binge watched. These are shows, particularly ones on Netflix, that don’t bother to keep the watcher going for the next week but instead just give the material right there. Though I actually do applaud this innovation, making the most of the platform, I ask why not just go all the way and make a movie?

Hollywood’s response to this change in television is basically an inversion, making up for it. Now sequels and, even more extreme, parts of films ("Mockingjay," "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"), is starting to become more popular. Instead of just letting one film exist and die peacefully, sequels are starting to pop back up, giving the viewer the sense of watching something that they’ve seen before but continuing it. It really is taking the role of television. Though at times it’s effective, I see little merit in making parts of movies and rebooting them. Again, I ask, why not just go all the way and make a television show?

This morphing of platform is what I’ve seen as the most protruding of the twenty-first century. The film and the novel have had an interesting history, but now I’ve seen a real joining of them, possibly spurring off the increasingness of their adaptations, as, again, I’ve discussed in my earlier article as well as this one. In short, literature and film are starting to become one another despite the opportunities each of them perform. I’ve seen much Young Adult contemporary fiction as glorified, easy-to-adapt screenplays and I’ve seen many films as very talky stories, though not necessarily the good talky. The talky I’m talking about is two people sitting in a coffee shop and talk about what’s happening and what’s going to happen with a conflict and very mechanical, very predictable, very unrealistic dialogue. Then they leave and the protagonist goes to another shop, all with as unimaginative of dialogue as the direction. Reverting back to these “glorified” screenplays, I’ve found in YA fiction the kind of irritating first-person limited that doesn’t contribute to story or character but instead appeals to the almost stereotypical millennial, talking about how school sucks and Facebook rocks.

So as time goes on, who knows, maybe popular fiction will become what television used to be and film will be what literature used to be. Roles might reverse.

And with this popular art moving farther and farther from what makes it compelling, the auteurs — the smart ones, at least — will live on in obscurity and will get the condescending “okay, grandpa.”