I am a product of the sixties. Mine is a sixties sensibility, reflecting on the media of the millennium from a low to middlebrow point of view. It’s the viewpoint of an artist more than that of a critic, of someone who, like Pollock trying to recreate the body language that produced a Mondrian, needs to feel in his bones where the maker is coming from.

It is the filmmaker’s task to make emotionally moving films, the streamer’s task to provide emotionally moving streams of films, the viewer’s task to seek out films that linger in memory and enrich their life. It’s not enough to watch reality TV and sports, to listen to rap, country or pop, to follow celebrities on Twitter and Instagram, to watch Tik Toks, and to be up on the latest episodes of series like Game of Thrones (2011 - 2019), that spectacular triumph of mise-en-scène over narrative. If you want to get high and immerse yourself in the rich mise-en-scène of Game of Thrones, just do it. But absorb the mise-en-scène and the second unit-directed action. Don’t subject the narrative to a strip search for significance or meaning. For me, Game of Thrones ended with Daenerys Stormborn, The Unburnt, victorious. For one moment, thanks to CGI, she is not like a dragon. She is a dragon. I don’t really remember or care to remember what happened after that.

We have to paddle hard to reach the top of the oncoming swell, before the wave breaks, swamping our little craft.