BLOCKBUSTERS

This is the summer of the blockbuster, as all recent summers have been, and it feels pointless to lament the fact. It doesn't matter how many writers tell you that the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel is convoluted, hammy, offensive and an hour too long; or that Superman Returns is simplistic, hammy, inoffensive and an hour too long. Whatever critics say, enough people will ignore them to ensure that those films still hit their inflated targets.
Indeed, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, which most critics agree is as flabby as the big squid it showcases, is at the top of the chart of US box office receipts for a film's opening weekend. Scrolling down the list of these record-breaking openings is weirdly telling about the cinematic culture we live in. If you thought that the last part of the Lord of the Rings was a very successful film, well, it was, and it was a much-loved Oscar-winner that will last - but in its first weekend it didn't make as much as the universally excoriated The Da Vinci Code.
That massive opening success is all a film needs to get the status of a blockbuster, and it is extraordinary to see films that nobody took to their hearts attaining that status. As the critic Tom Shone wrote a couple of years ago in his examination of the blockbuster: "It is perfectly possible for a studio to buy our curiosity for the space of a single weekend, which is all the time the studio needs to make back its money. It doesn't matter whether we like what we see or not, only that we sit there, liking it or disliking it in sufficient numbers."
That is exactly what is happening now. The crowd I sat among for Pirates of the Caribbean and Superman Returns seemed to be as unmoved as I was - there were no laughs, gasps or tears - but even so, there was certainly a crowd.
If this makes you feel just a tad depressed about the culture around you, cheer up: hope is on the horizon. It may feel as you walk past the multiplex and into the chain bookshop where Katie Price's bestseller is stacked up, and then home to pick up the television schedules dominated by reality shows, that we live in an age when there is little room for anything but the blockbuster, the bestseller, the audience-chaser, the top celebrity. But if you listen to some of the voices out there, it turns out that this isn't what is going on at all.
The opposite is true, at least according to a writer called Chris Anderson who has come out with a buzzy new book which tells us that we are not living in the culture of the blockbuster and the bestseller. In fact, we are living in the culture of the niche and the eccentric, or, as he puts it, the long tail. The long tail, as he explains in his book of the same name, is what you see on the sales graphs for retailers like Amazon or iTunes, where a few hits and bestsellers may sell an awful lot, but most sales are of books and music that sell hardly anything - just bobbing along selling twenties, tens, twos and ones, rather than thousands. For online retailers, who can afford the kind of enormous catalogue that a real-space shop can't dream of, this long tail of small sales adds up to significantly more than the short head of big sales.
There is something immediately convincing about Anderson's explanation of the way our culture is going. Because the great pleasure of new technology is that it did not turn us all into the drones of science-fiction fantasy, consuming nothing but mass media en masse. The way people decided to use the internet - both buyers and sellers - encourages tiny interests to flourish again. I'm sure you've had experience of that yourself: I know I have. The joy of getting some out-of-print thriller from Amazon or buying some hard-to-find Garbo film from eBay - there's space for anyone to indulge an old-fashioned quirk on the internet, plus the space for teenagers to download their Japanese anime or play video games with each other.
It's great to hear Anderson's blast of optimism about all this human-scale activity and what it means for the future. No wonder commentators have fallen on his work, drawn to this hopeful picture of a culture that is as individualistic as ever in the face of apparent conformism. But what you are left with, if you're convinced by this picture of a culture that is all top curve or long tail, is a nagging question about what is happening to what has been called the middle torso. A culture divided between the massive hit and the tiny niche may feel comfortable for retailers and producers of a certain sort, but not so good for others. Many writers do not just want to reach a tiny online community and yet will never follow the formulas that please a massive audience; many film-makers don't want to go it alone with a digital camera and sell to the teenagers on MySpace, but also don't want millions of dollars of computer-generated imagery and a first week opening on thousands of screens.
At the moment, there is space to work in this middle ground. There are, say, the distributors who support independent film-makers with a small theatrical release, and independent publishers who take on new writers and help bring them out of the niche without expecting them to be bestsellers. But just as the small independent bookshop is being squeezed both by supermarkets and online retailers, so we may find that if our culture becomes so dominated by the blockbuster on one hand and the long tail on the other, something precious is going to get squeezed out of the middle.