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TheThe CULTURE PAGES CULTURE PAGES
Why
Films Look
So Cheesy on
Your Fancy
New TV
Illustration by Zohar LazarN
ot so long ago, I found myself at a
Best Buy in Brooklyn, mesmerized by a
wall filled with giant TVs, all seduc-
tively state of the art. Each was playing,
on a loop, a demo designed to showcase
its quality and cast a spell. I was drawn to a massive Sam-
sung QLED TV displaying unnervingly vibrant images
of sizzling butter, exploding flowers, yellow snakes, and
various colors of rippling fabric. Another was airing a
soccer game, and, despite being in a scentless commer-
cial non-place of a big-box store, I felt as if I were on the
pitch with the sweaty players. It all looked quite amazing,
a reminder of how high-definition digital technology has
upped our tolerance for the hyperreal onscreen to the
point where sometimes it can feel more real than, well,
reality. ¶ As I wandered, however, I noticed another,
smaller TV off to the side, showing a couple of film trail-
ers—Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury
Road—which, by comparison, looked curiously cheap
and lifeless. If I had to watch all of these clips on the
same TV—the exploding flowers and sizzling steaks and
stretching fabrics and soccer players and then the film
trailers—I might have come to the conclusion that mov-
ies today, by and large, look like crap.Hollywood is furious about
“motion smoothing,” a high-tech
default setting on most new TVs.
But do electronics manufacturers
care what auteurs think?
By Bilge Ebiri