I’ve spent enough time in theaters (dark ones, bright ones, ones that smelled like decades of dust and ambition) to know this much: we’re fucked when it comes to how we actually see bodies anymore.
Three ways to watch someone perform. Theater: you’re in the room, sharing oxygen, watching sweat happen in real time, no safety net. Cinema: that gorgeous, lying bastard, all perfect lighting and impossible angles. And video. Christ, video. The thing that never stops, never shuts up, keeps shoveling content at you until you can’t remember what it felt like to not be consuming something.
And here’s what decades of watching this shift has taught me: I don’t just watch differently across these mediums. I think differently. The postmodern performance artists I’ve documented (the ones doing things that make audiences walk out or throw up or question their entire moral framework) know this. They’ve weaponized it. They understand that cinema and video haven’t just changed our taste; they’ve rewired our brains. We’re all junkies now, desperate for our fix of bodies and stories, but only if they’re served up in exactly the visual language we’ve been conditioned to crave.
We call these aesthetic differences. Polite academic term. They’re not. They’re perceptual regimes. Cages we don’t even know we’re living in.
The Industrial Problem of Theater
Let’s be brutally fucking honest here: theater cannot win this fight. Not economically, not perceptually, not in any way that matters to the average person trying to decide what to do on a Friday night.
When unlimited streaming costs less than parking in most cities, what possible argument can live performance make? Because the ticket price is just the beginning of the extraction. There’s the parking fee that feels like a mugging. The intermission wine that costs twelve dollars and tastes like regret. The slow, creeping realization as you’re walking to your seats that you’ve already dropped $150, maybe $200, and you haven’t even eaten dinner yet.
Meanwhile Netflix is sitting there charging nineteen bucks a month to pump an endless stream of content directly into your cerebral cortex. And if you’ve got any taste (if you’ve developed even a basic sense of what actually matters) you’ve got the Criterion Channel serving up cinema that shaped the medium, for less than the cost of that sad intermission wine.
This isn’t just me bitching about economics. This shapes what audiences expect when they finally do shell out for theater. They want value. And in our current media landscape, “value” has been defined entirely by cinema: polish, seamlessness, narrative that holds your hand, realism so perfect you forget you’re watching a construction. Theater becomes the artisanal, overpriced craft beer of performance. Niche, defensive, something you have to explain to your friends who think you’re being pretentious.
Shannon Jackson nailed this. Called it the infrastructural problem (Jackson 12–18). The way institutions, funding models, real estate costs, labor systems all quietly dictate what forms of performance are even viable, what “counts” as legitimate. Bodies on stage aren’t just bodies. They’re entering an economy of space, time, and capital that audiences are reading unconsciously, whether they know it or not.
Now, sure, there’s site-specific theater trying to break this whole fucked-up economic model. Get the audience off their asses, out of those plush seats, take them to abandoned warehouses, parking garages, somebody’s apartment. Make it cheaper, make it accessible, make it weird and immediate and impossible to ignore. It’s a noble effort, and sometimes it actually works. But even that can’t compete with the sheer laziness enabled by the couch and the remote.
When cinema first showed up, people wondered if it would save theater or murder it. Robert Edmund Jones actually fantasized that film would become theater’s structural support, its backbone (Jones 154). He was wrong. Film didn’t partner with theater; it colonized realism and then perfected it to the point where theater couldn’t compete.
Piscator tried to integrate film into theatrical space, thought he could make them collaborate (Piscator 89–91). It never caught on as standard practice because cinema was already doing that job better. Sharper, cleaner, more efficiently, without the awkward compromises of trying to make two mediums coexist.
By mastering those late-19th-century realist conventions (the ones that promised to show you life “as it really is”) film fundamentally rewired the public’s sense of what “real” even looks like. And American theater, poor bastard, still hasn’t recovered from that hangover. Even when realism is the least interesting thing theater could be doing, when it’s actively limiting what the medium can explore, audiences (raised on the seamlessness of cinema) expect it anyway.
This is the trap: realism became cinema’s religion, but somehow theater ended up as the one paying tithes at the altar.
And just when you think cinema won (when it seems like the movie theater conquered theatrical realism and claimed total victory) the pandemic comes along and reveals the ugly truth: cinema was always just one bad year away from irrelevance.
Post-pandemic, the movie theater is getting murdered by the same forces that killed theater a generation earlier. Streaming didn’t just compete with cinema. It replaced it. Why drive across town, pay for parking, sit in a sticky seat next to strangers, shell out fifteen dollars for popcorn that costs thirty cents to make, when you can stay home?
Because here’s what changed: home theaters got good. Seventy-five-inch 4K screens, Dolby Atmos sound systems, the whole setup available at Costco for less than you’d spend on a year of movie tickets. The suburban home theater, the urban entertainment isolation room. These aren’t just acceptable alternatives to the cinema experience anymore. For a lot of people, they’re better. Pause when you need to piss. No teenagers on their phones. No one kicking your seat. The perfect temperature. Your own food. Your own couch.
The theatrical experience (that communal gathering in the dark that was supposed to be sacred, irreplaceable) turns out to be pretty fucking replaceable when the alternative is this convenient and this comfortable.
And streaming services know it. They’re not even pretending to respect the theatrical window anymore. Films go to homes faster and faster, sometimes simultaneously. The economics are brutal and simple: why spend $200 million on a theatrical release when you can drop it on your platform, boost subscriber numbers, and let people consume it in their algorithmic feed between episodes of whatever Real Housewife or Kardashian they’re binging?
Cinema held the throne for a century by perfecting the thing theater couldn’t quite nail: realism at scale, stories so immersive you forgot you were watching a construction. Now it’s being dethroned by something even more perfect: personalized, on-demand, infinitely scrollable content delivered to entertainment spaces we’ve built in our own homes. Private screening rooms where we’re both king and prisoner.
The irony is almost funny. Cinema beat theater by offering a better, cheaper version of realism. Now streaming is beating cinema by offering an even better, even cheaper version of convenience. Each medium that dominated gets eaten by something more efficient, more isolated, more perfectly calibrated to our decreasing attention spans and increasing desire to never leave the house.
But cinema’s collapse isn’t just an economic story. It’s a perceptual one. Streaming didn’t destroy the movie theater by offering better cinema. It destroyed it by transforming cinema into something else entirely: video.
This is the part people keep missing. The death of the movie theater wasn’t caused by film failing. It was caused by film mutating—absorbed into the endless, frictionless flow of video. The moment movies became another tile on a platform, another object in a feed, they stopped functioning as cinema and started functioning as video content.
And video plays by different rules.
If cinema perfected realism (immersion, continuity, the fantasy of the seamless world) video perfected flow. The scroll. The channel-hop. The endless-now where nothing begins, nothing ends, everything bleeds into everything else. Cinema asked you to enter its world; video invades yours.
Fredric Jameson argued that literature and film were no longer the primary tools for understanding the system we’re all trapped in. That job passed to television and video: media built on discontinuity, repetition, saturation (Jameson 65). Even when a video program pretends to have structure, the broader system (endless channels, infinite scroll) dissolves it into pure sequence. Watch long enough and narrative just dies. What remains is sensation, fragments, intensities.
And video art? That’s the medium admitting what it is. Acconci’s early works… Centers, Theme Song, the masturbatory pieces: turn the camera into a weaponized intimacy, collapsing the distance between performer and viewer until the viewer becomes implicated, complicit (Acconci). It’s not cinema’s realism; it’s video’s proximity. Not spectacle, but intrusion.
Auslander would say this collapses the hierarchy between live and mediated performance entirely (Auslander 38–45). Schneider notes how the body becomes loopable, replayable, no longer tethered to disappearance (Schneider 102–110). And Jackson would remind us that none of this is neutral, that institutions create the very conditions that let these images circulate, be archived, be consumed at scale (Jackson 27–33).
Taken together, they’re saying the same thing:
Video didn’t just replace cinema. It replaced our entire way of perceiving bodies.
Cinema gave us perfected realism. Video gave us infinite flow. And together they’ve trained us to experience life itself as a perpetual feed. Curated, algorithmic, endless. Theater tries to offer presence, that old promise of the living body in space. But presence itself has been redefined by the screen.
A body on stage isn’t just a body anymore. It’s competing with its own digitized double. The idea of the body that audiences have absorbed from thousands of hours of streaming, scrolling, consuming. Bodies circulate now like currency. They’re flattened, sorted, consumed, memed, clipped, archived, looped, surveilled. They’re evidence. They’re spectacle. They’re content. They’re infrastructure.
After years of making commercials for tech companies, of documenting performance art that pushed every boundary, of working my way up through the institutional machinery of theater, I can tell you this is real. This is what’s happened.
So here we are. Bodies aren’t bodies anymore. They’re fucking interfaces. Data points. Aesthetic surfaces you swipe past on your way to the next thing. We don’t encounter them, we process them, the way you’d process a transaction or a jpeg or a piece of spam.
The physical body onstage? It’s become exotic. Almost quaint. This stubborn, sweaty, analog thing that insists on existing in real space and real time, that can actually fail, that bleeds and fucks up and smells like a person. It’s an interruption in the smooth, frictionless flow of content we’ve built our entire lives around.
Theater keeps trying to sell us on presence. On the real, living, breathing thing right there in front of you. But we don’t trust our own senses anymore. We trust the camera. We trust the edit. We trust the algorithm that knows what we want before we do. Our media diet hasn’t just changed our taste. It’s changed our goddamn perception. Bodies are images first. Maybe realities second. Probably third, if we’re being honest.
And here’s the thing that really fucks me up: I can’t believe I’ve gotten all the way through this essay without talking about porn. The single biggest reshaper of how we see bodies on screens, the most consumed visual medium on the planet, the thing that’s probably done more to rewire our neural pathways around bodies and desire and spectatorship than theater and cinema and video art combined. But that’s probably the next essay. That’s the one that really explains how deep this rabbit hole goes.
Because this isn’t just about art anymore. This isn’t about whether theater can compete with Netflix or whether cinema can survive the home entertainment center. This is about whether we can still see a body as anything other than content to be consumed. Whether we remember what it feels like to be in a room with other humans, watching another human do something dangerous and real and unrepeatable.
The crisis isn’t economic. It’s perceptual. It’s existential.
We’re not just watching the feed anymore. We’ve become it. We think like it. We see like it. We’ve trained ourselves to experience other human beings the way we experience everything else: as images to be scrolled past, rated, archived, forgotten.
And the worst part? Most of us don’t even notice it’s happened.