Streaming aesthetics center circulation and business over artistic craft

Evidence

As a starting point for theorizing stream aesthetics, look at one of the current top hits among proprietary series from Netflix: Call My Agent!, a self-referential showbiz romp that overtly thematizes the priority of circulation for stream style. Made in French for francophone audiences as Dix Pour Cent, the 10 percent fee agents collect, the show’s soaring popularity has now occasioned an English remake. Dix Pour Cent metabolizes the streaming era’s financial, distributional supremacy by thematizing the business end of cinema: it is a made-for streaming series about the most revered and glamorous center of the film industry, a premise that transposes the silver screen into the small screen by vertiginously inverting away from the real stars like Juliette Binoche or Charlotte Gainsbourg it regularly features, and toward the agents who are the show’s protagonists. The race for profit and the pressure of international conglomeration imperil the film industry, but its greatest threats are the dys-regulated affairs and exploits of the agents themselves. In irrepressible irruptions, the agents hurl every object and slam every door and yell at every interlocutor, and they seduce everyone they see—bosses, auditors, coworkers, clients. It is the agents who are the divas, the agents who need management—the petty business flushes the art. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 212

Categorization

• XREF: This is the reader’s core project — naming immediacy features. Dix Pour Cent as a structural precedent of the show about the business behind the show echoes Kornbluh’s claim that too-late capital flushes the art into circulation.
• QUESTION: Does Dix Pour Cent actually read as immediacy, or is its self-referentiality a form of mediation being mistaken for its opposite? Worth testing against the reader’s own view of autofiction-like reflexivity.