Have you seen F9? How about A Quiet Place Part II? Black Widow? Zola?

What I am asking is whether you have gone back to a cinema yet.

In the past month or so, as pandemic restrictions in the United States have eased and multiplexes and art houses have edged towards full capacity, a handful of releases have done well enough at the box office to feed hopes of a return to pre-pandemic normality.

Vin Diesel, the Fast And Furious patriarch, declared that "cinema is back" and who wants beef with Vin Diesel?

Certainly not the critics - I was one of them - who greeted the almost 150 minutes of extravagant action, baroque plotting and high-octane sentimentalism of F9 with gentle sighs of gratitude.

In ordinary times, the bloat and incoherence of this late instalment in a weathered franchise might have elicited a measure of scepticism, if not outright scorn.

But after more than a year of subsisting on screening links, people found the critical zones of their cerebral cortices flooded with fan endorphins.

Maybe fans felt the same way.

Whether or not this was a good movie, it undoubtedly offered a good time at the movies and, as such, a reminder of what people had been missing and what they cared about.

The same might be said for the Quiet Place sequel, a serviceable horror film that helped fans recover the specific pleasure of being scared in the company of strangers.

Black Widow, released in theatres and on streaming service Disney+, provided a superhero fix.

You can find similar experiences - and better movies - on Netflix, Amazon or Apple TV+. But there is a special way in which things can be sexy, scary, funny and exciting on the big screen, and a particular delight in buying a ticket and sitting through a whole movie, without the option of pausing, skipping ahead or returning to the main menu.

You risk disappointment, but even boredom or disgust can be fun, especially if you have company for your misery. And there is always the potential for surprise.

All of which is just to say the pandemic-accelerated fear that streaming would kill movie-going has been proven wrong.

People like to leave the house. But this does not mean the status quo has been restored.

Not everything was great beforehand. Franchised blockbusters sucking up the theatrical oxygen as smaller, more idiosyncratic films fought over a dwindling share of the market; daring movies from festivals buried in Netflix algorithms or marooned in the video-on-demand hinterlands; a shrinking cultural footprint for art in an expanding universe of content.

Is that the normal people want?

Quite apart from the disruptions of the coronavirus, the culture of movies feels more than usually unstable, more uncertain, more charged with peril and possibility. How people watch is changing, which means that what and why they watch are changing too.

THE JOYS OF TRADITIONAL MOVIE-GOING

The confusion and ambivalence that preceded the pandemic have intensified to the extent that an innocent question about whether you saw F9 in a cinema can be taken as a culture-war trigger.

What is, for most people, a matter of local, individual choice - should they stay home and watch this or go out and see it? - is often treated, at least by journalists who cover media and technology, as a matter of ideological commitment and zero-sum economics.

A winner-takes-all techno-determinism, which sees streaming as the inevitable and perhaps welcome death of an old-fashioned, inefficient activity, is answered by an equally dogmatic sentimentality about the aesthetic and moral superiority of traditional moviegoing.

I am old enough to remember when most movies were difficult - and in many cases, impossible - to see. Some places had local repertory houses or campus film societies, but otherwise, your best chance to catch something old or weird was on a local ultra-high frequency station during off-peak hours.

Obsessive interest in movies was best fed by digging up old reviews and Mad Magazine satires.

What changed all that was a home-viewing revolution that began with video stores and cable channels like Turner Classic Movies.

The sheer variety of movies now available for purchase, rental or streaming is a source of astonishment to an old-timer like me, even as it is taken for granted by my children, students and younger colleagues.

That in itself might be a problem. When everything is accessible - and I know it is not literally everything, nor is it equally accessible to everyone - then nothing is special. Movies exist in the digital ether alongside myriad other forms of amusement and distraction, deprived of a sense of occasion.

I fear movies are becoming less special and more specialised.

The big intellectual property-driven studio movies grow less interesting as a matter of policy, while the smaller releases cater to the interests of splintered, self-selected communities of taste.

Global blockbusters, engineered to appeal to the widest possible mass audience, are conversation-stoppers by definition, offering vague themes and superficially complex plots rather than food for thought.

Meanwhile, the broad middle ground that defined popular cinema's glory and potential - the pop-cultural amusements worth taking seriously, the things everyone at work or online seems to be talking about - continues its migration to television. If that is the right word.

BLURRED LINES BETWEEN CINEMA AND TELEVISION

"What is cinema, and if you know what cinema is, what is television?"

That sentence paraphrases something American novelist Gertrude Stein said about the difference between poetry and prose.

The answer is at once intuitively obvious and theoretically confounding. For every easy distinction - between the cinema and the home screen; between standalone stories and serial narratives; between a director's medium and one dominated by writers - there is a ready rebuttal.

Three words may be enough to throw the matter into permanent confusion: Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Disney, which owns Marvel - and Pixar, Star Wars and ESPN - draws on unmatched reservoirs of money, labour and talent to sustain its position as the world's dominant entertainment brand.

This year, there are already three Marvel series - WandaVision, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier and Loki - as well as the Black Widow movie, with Eternals set for cinemas in November.

One reason streaming services and movie theatres are going to coexist for a long time is that the same companies hope to derive profit from both. In its first weekend, Black Widow earned US$80 million (S$109 million) at the domestic box office, and US$60 million more in premium charges from Disney+ subscribers.

Recent headlines provide fresh evidence that, at the corporate level, the boundaries between film, television and the Internet are not so much blurry as obsolete, with Disney swallowing Fox and Amazon acquiring MGM.

Technology companies are movie studios. Movie studios are TV networks. Television is the Internet.

At the level of creative endeavour and popular reception, the old borders have been porous for a while. At its best, the mobility of talent has made routine a flexibility that used to be rare.

Novels that once might have been squeezed into two hours or tamed for network or public television - Normal People, The Queen's Gambit, The Plot Against America - can find a more organic, episodic scope.

Actors, especially women and people of colour, can escape the narrow typecasting that is among Hollywood's most enduring and exasperating traditions.

What people used to call television is quickly becoming synonymous with streaming, a subscription-based medium, and the old ways of measuring success - through ratings and box-office revenue - no longer apply or, at least, are rarely publicly available.

Attention is a valuable commodity. Every artiste, writer, movie studio, legacy media outlet, social media platform, TV network and streaming service is competing for a share of it.

This has always been true to some degree, but the intensity of the competition and the global reach of the market it has spawned are new.

For most of human history, life has been heavy with tedium and toil. Leisure was scarce, precious and unevenly distributed.

Today, an international economy exists to fill people's time with images, stories and other diversions. The by-products of this economy - fan culture, celebrity news, secondary media that help with the work of sorting, ranking, interpreting and appreciating - occupy the same virtual space as the primary artefacts, and so both complement and compete with them.

You can watch the show, read the recap, listen to the podcast and post your own responses, using whatever screens and keyboards that are at your disposal.

That is also, increasingly, how people work, socialise and educate themselves.

People are not so much addicted to screens as indentured to them, paying back whatever convenience, knowledge or pleasure screens provide with their time and consciousness.

The screen does not care what you are looking at, as long as your eyes are engaged and your data can be harvested.

The question is not whether the movies will survive, as a pastime, a destination and an imaginative resource.

It is whether the kind of freedom that "going to the movies" has represented in the past can be preserved in a technological environment that offers endless entertainment at the price of submission; whether active, critical curiosity can be sustained in the face of corporate domination; whether artistes and audiences can sequence the democratic DNA of a medium whose authoritarian potential has never been more seductive.

It is not about whether people go back to the movies, but how they take the movies back.

NYTIMES