Room 666 and the Scorpio New Moon
The future of film and deep transformation.
The other night I watched Room 666, Wim Wenders’ strange prophetic documentary that he shot during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders rented a hotel room1, set up a static camera, and invited a bunch of cinema-making luminaries — Godard, Herzog, Antonioni, Spielberg and more — to enter the room alone and speak, confessional style, about the future of film.
Wenders left a list of questions in the room. The main one:
Is cinema a language which will disappear, an art which is dying out?
Godard’s answer is peak Godard: “I’m going to die, why shouldn’t my art?”
Herzog has to take his shoes off before he answers.
In 1982, the concerns were about TV and home video changing audiences’ relationship to cinema:
Films increasingly look like they were made for television, in terms of lighting, framing, and pacing. It seems that for audiences around the world, television aesthetics have replaced cinema aesthetics.
Wenders deliberately leaves a TV on in the background of all the interviews so the viewer is forced to choose what to pay attention to — can you focus on the filmmakers’ words about the potential death of cinema or are you hypnotized by the images on the television screen?
The central anxiety of the moment is staged as an aesthetic battle for your attention. Sound familiar?
Godard talks about how people seem to prefer to watch a small image from up close rather than a large image from far way. The small image feels safer than the big one, easier to consume. Herzog likens the television to a jukebox: As the viewer, you’re in a more mobile position. You can turn it off. You can’t turn off the cinema. But, he says, “none of it worries me too much.”
Then Spielberg comes in and immediately starts talking about money — how much his films make, the size of budgets, the size of audiences. While everyone else speaks about the future of cinema like they’re defending a sacred art, the American speaks the language of the studio system itself: metrics, appeal, universality. He wants the broadest possible circle of viewers. And this is not where art can live.
More than forty years later, we’re still having the same conversation, but now the competing screens are even smaller.2
Godard says, quite presciently, “Hollywood’s dream is to make one film, produced by TV, and release it everywhere.”
Film exists at the intersection of art and commerce and it’s this tension that leads every generation of filmmakers to think they’re witnessing the end of cinema.
The threat mutates — television, VHS, cable, YouTube, streaming, TikTok, verticals, AI3 — but the conversation is cyclical. We’re always on the precipice of disaster. Just like humanity has always believed the end of the world is imminent. But maybe it’s this very instability that generates new forms, new aesthetics. Creation and destruction are inextricably linked.
So what does all this have to do with the new moon in Scorpio that occurred on November 19th (which also happens to be my birthday, feel free to post belated birthday wishes in the comments :) ), besides the fact that Room 666 was recorded in the most Scorpio of all room numbers?
Well, this new moon is all about deep transformation. It’s asking us to go inward, excavate our psyche, and bring the dregs to the surface so we can let go of what no longer serves us. Mine the depths. Be ruthless. Lasting transformation requires a dissolution of the old self.
Think of it as less a death, and more an evolution. A clearing of space so something new and beautiful can emerge from the ashes.
Until next time,
Tara
I read that he got the last room at the Hotel Martinez. Assuming it was available because no one wanted to stay in room 666??
Lubna Playoust made a follow up film inspired by this one in 2023, called Room 999. She posed the same question to Wenders, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Lynne Ramsey, and others. I haven’t seen it yet, but I hope there’s a phone and a TV in the frame at all times.
As I was writing this, the thought “ChatGPT becomes a straitjacket for creativity” popped into my mind. Meaning, the more you use it, the more it binds your mind so the ideas can’t reach you anymore.