The somewhat-delayed inauguration of culturemonkey wound up coinciding with a particularly busy first week of school, which is why I'm only getting to my first post now, a short rumination following up on Ryan's post on the way that film and television (between which I don't find any especially useful distinction) increasingly rely on the devotee's epistemophiliac impulse in the design of franchise. Jacob's post will be up in the next few days as we try to settle into something like a regular routine.

Like any blog post, the thesis comes at the end:

The pleasure that drives this devotion is the pleasure of the easter egg, the discovered background joke, the amusing continuity error, the tiny repeated phrases or quotations that are noticed only upon the thirty-sixth viewing—in short the tiny cinematic gestures the auteur slipped in reserved only for you. This—the discovery of lines of dialogue and music from Rushmore in The Life Aquatic, the sporadic appearances of Larry David on Seinfeld, noticeable only in retrospect—is the cinemaphilic reinforcement that keeps us coming back. (Think of the machine that spits pellets into a mouse's cage at irregular intervals. Think of a slot machine.) And this pleasure, once contingent and organic, has now been identified by the producers of culture as the ATM it is and is increasingly deliberate, planned, and outright commodified: Lost's numbers, Heroes's helix, The Office's catchphrases-that-aren't-really-catchphrases-but-really-are, and on and on. The increasing foregrounding of X-Files-esque mythology in mainstream media creations—the constant but never-quite-followed-up suggestion of narrative excess, of treasure beneath the surface, of check-our-website-for-more—all this speaks to film's new mode not as afternoon diversion or as total entertainment but as sacred text. We are all nerds now; we are all monks.