I think you're pretty much exactly right. We could take all the adjectives and the verbs out of this piece and use them to write the very same article about elections where everything also is a goddamn analytics riden horse race. I've decided to watch mostly French films from the 50's and Hollywood "B" westerns from the same period from here on out. I wish I could figure out a similar approach to elections.
7 year old me had one of my life's premier experiences watching "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" at one of those really nice theatres that had a screen the size of a Billboard. I sat right down in front.
Funny, the missus and I watched some of "After the Fox" last night, and though it's a weird and not entirely successful thing the bright colors, broad acting, and especially the obvious way it was designed for widescreen reminded me of what fun it was to be a kid and see a stupid CinemaScope movie.
A couple of years later I saw "Ice Station Zebra" in Cinerama. Front row seat. That was another primal event. Yet another PE was "Jason and the Argonauts" at the drive -in.
I saw That Darn Cat in a theatre. I'm sure it sucked. We learned early on that live action Disney films sucked. The cartoons were better. This was "Jungle Book" and 101 Dalmations though, not nearly " Cinderella" or "Sleeping Beauty". The llive action films, Flubber and that crap , were one short step above TV. Mom would be like "Let's go see "Thomasina. It's on with The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band. " and we would hide.
Actually Disney was WAAAAY ahead of the curve with its early foray into cat-based content, they anticipated the Internet decades before there was an Internet.
I was a little older, maybe 7. I remember Uncle Remus being very friendly and I liked “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” but real time I felt the live action just got in the way of the cartoons.
Just watched "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines" on cable the other day, and while it has plot holes you can fly a plane through, it holds up really well as *entertainment*. Which is what it's supposed to be.
And all made in the days before CGI, I believe a significant chunk of the budget was building actual flyable replica planes. Who would do such a thing today?
Excellent connection with electoral politics. All matters are being framed as competitions, Us/Them thinking. It is the most basic psychology and brain chemistry, prone to irrationality and bad snap judgments, with a built-in organic reinforcement for antagonistic and hateful responses. The more intense the feelings, the bigger the jolt of dopamine and adrenaline. People get addicted to this nonsense.
The fixation on box office is merely consistent with a culture whose crowning value is money: the worth of an education is measured by how much a graduate can earn, people buy what is accepted as fine art these days as investments; and the esteem in which an individual is held — his social capital — depends upon his income.
Those last two have been true for a long time, I think, but while education always had something to do with credentials (that "sheepskin"!) it has certainly gone totally crazy in recent years, as multimillion-dollar college physical plants and endless coverage of the "consumer" model of higher ed will show.
Underlying all that is the anxiety that comes from living in a predatory economy and constantly worrying you might get fucked-over. Lots of college students now measure a major by how much it earns, but can you blame them when the "wrong" choice can land them in a life of unsupportable debt?
This has bugged me for around 30 years. I think I remember first noticing it when the rise of shows like "Entertainment Tonight" became popular on network TV. I remember being puzzled back then when I was a teenager... some movie that I liked "bombed" at the box office, or was somehow doing worse than some other movie that I hadn't seen. Why should I care, I haven't even seen the other film?
There were other competing shows like Entertainment Tonight. 30 minutes of Hollywood and Teevee news five nights a week. That's a lot of time to fill. They figured out a way to make advertising 'the show,' and then sell 30 second ads to sell the advertising-show itself. SO entertainment became less about the product and more and more about "inside baseball" because that's a great way to generate 20 minutes of content for Entertainment Tonight five times a week. Television and movies and music as competitive sports.
I follow various topics on Reddit, one of them is fantasy fiction. There's a weekly thread that gets posted there now that's the epitome of this nonsense. I'm paraphrasing here, but the topics are titled "HBO's 'House of the Dragon' up 3% viewership this week, Amazon's 'Rings of Power' down 2%." People are online talking about percentage changes in streaming numbers over two different fantasy TV shows week to week! It's completely bizarre to me that anyone would care. I understand being generally interested in seeing if your favorite show is a flop or success: it might get cancelled or it might get another season. But closely discussing some kind of horse race between television shows is absurd unless you work for one of the shows yourself.
I'm rambling, but this topic has mildly irritated me for decades. Guess what? I ain't never been a sports fan. I don't work for the entertainment biz, nor does anyone I know. The article you link seems to sum things up nicely.
"That's a lot of time to fill." Idle hands explains a lot; the richest country in the world could have been a shining city, but we gave ourselves over to malicious gossip.
the last movie I've seen in an actual theatre is Black Panther, so I'm hardly qualified to speak on this subject, but it seems that money has taken precedence over reputation in this arena as in so many others. huge revelation, that, eh? I guess by reputation I mean making something for its intrinsic value rather than how it will be reflected in the box office. making any sort of statement based on one's own critical thinking (the horror!) has been supplanted by how the great unwashed will receive it. and increasingly, it seems that the lowest common denominator is the end goal.
Thanks for this -- it seems like the sickness of a hyper-reality world to worry more about what people are saying & how they are feeling about a media object, than what that object actually is, does, or means.
But I don't blame us that much -- this world is literally hell & rotting to pieces. I'd retreat to some fourth meta-dimension too. Look at me here -- responding to this. :)
Tom Tomorrow ran this forward into its logical conclusion, all fact-based reporting has stopped, there remains just one fact still known, all media is consumed with takes and counter-takes on the One Fact (we're never told what it is, but I imagine it was the Gross Domestic Product of Bolivia).
Regressive, reactionary, exploitative times and economy aren't fertile ground for an avant garde. The amount of regurgitation in the entertainment biz is, for an old who's been paying some attention over the years, amazing.
Speaking of which: When it can cost approximately nothing to make a movie, it's not happening. (I suppose some energy is instead going into TikTok and YouTube videos and podcasts.)
Back when we were young -- Scorsese, Roy and me -- it was as Roy noted: A movie did well or it didn't. A movie was the cool thing or not. If the former, we all went to see it. But of no concern was the box office. But starting with St. Ronnie and the nation's 180, more and more the only thing of importance as the MSM tells us is 💵💰💸.
Listen, it's been a couple of decades of societal collapse to the point that far too many can't be bothered to do anything to mitigate a pandemic and think not voting or electing the puppets of those making things worse is somehow the correct thing to do. So, you know, we get the art the times, well, dictate.
As for Scorsese, he's not talking but he might have a clue:
Or not. The underlying real life events as they say in Hollywood could of course be the basis for a great critique of capitalism and racism and how they combine into murder for money.
Are you suggesting that art has been…*commodified*?!?!
YOU COMMIE BASTARD!
Oh, wait, sry.
You’re suggesting that 21st-century culture is driven by an algorithmic quest for the perfect commodity, one that will suck every last dollar out of every last pocket of every last member of the consumer caste.
And it's looking more and more, I hate to say, that automation and robotics, instead of liberating us from drudgery to accomplish higher things, are doing the same now while we are still expected to find new drudgery to participate in because something something Protestant work ethic.
AI has been a disappointment when it comes to the self-driving car thing, but one thing computers have always excelled at is optimization/maximization/minimization, given a well-posed problem with well-defined numerical inputs and outputs. Capitalism has always had "maximize shareholder value" at its core, but to REALLY fuck things up requires a computer:
I think Capitalism used to maximize stakeholder value which is different from shareholder value as stakeholder is a much broader group than shareholders. Shareholder value was a Milton Friedman thing and another example where Uncle Milty was wrong, wrong, wrong
I think one of the factors at play here is the human need to feel validated and superior. People are into the idea that if something is wildly popular, it must be good. And if that thing is good, then the people who like are also good. So my liking [latest hyped blockbuster] validates my taste in movies if [latest hyped blockbuster] is topping the box office numbers this week, and that, in turn, proves that I am superior by virtue of my superior tastes.
In other avenues of life, this tendency takes the form of snobbery. Back when I was big in fly-fishing circles, I would look on in amazement as guys who were insurance salesmen or trash contract administrators spewed at length about how fly fishing was superior to any other form of fishing. These guys were actually ashamed that they started fishing with a spinning rod like everyone else. (And within fly fishing, there was a "moral" hierarchy--at the bottom were those who fly fished and used whatever fly the fish were eating and caught whatever fish were biting; at the top of this pyramid looking down on all the other benighted souls were the few dipshits who only fished dry flies to rising fish using 100-year-old classic hand-crafted bamboo fly rods. These latter types were utterly insufferable, but God gave them their punishment in this life by rendering them incapable of catching fish under even the most favorable of circumstances.) And all of this was in service of trying to feel that their hobby was validated and that it made them superior to other mortals.
Also, look at the NY Times "Wirecutter" feature. I can't just walk down to the hardware store and pull a space heater off the shelf like Grandpa did, I have to have the BEST space heater, as determined by the experts at the New York Times! So sad, those losers who - through accident or carelessness - bought the SECOND-BEST space heater.
Come on, admit it. There's nothing like the happiness one feels when discovering that Wirecutter has selected one of your purchases as an "Our Pick" BEST. What could be more American than the joy engendered by having one's buying decisions validated by elite experts?
And then you examine this best thing you have purchased and realize it is made out of cheap crap and the only quality item left is the label which very likely is emblazoned all over said thing. But your pals know that you bought what used to be the best until it was capitalized into the pockets of its shareholders. And you, consumer sucker, are using it until it breaks down and--gotcha--you've got to get another one.
This is hilarious. And just yesterday I was thinking, "Man, if there's one area of life that ISN'T dominated by competitive expertise, equipment fetishization, and holier-than-thou score-keeping, it's fly fishing." When will I ever learn?
Anytime Derelict slips into "Back when I was big in fly-fishing circles" mode it is your signal to sit back and enjoy. Perennial 2-marks territory. I only wish I had as many groovy stories from the factory, or the back of the bike shop, or the property management gig, or from the trailbuilding game...
Because "Back when I was big in reviving 45 year old bicycles and teaching punks a third my age about how to ride" would be epic comedy gold, I'm certain.
The tail wags the dog to some extent here as I see it. Jaws was considered the watershed 'blockbuster' in 1977 for box office sales as well as reviews, only to be outdone by Star Wars a short time later. This, I feel, set the trend (akin to greedy landlords, and what I call 'The Nirvana Effect' on the music biz) towards aiming at Beacoup Bucks over art for art's sake, when such insane profits were on the line and marketing / distribution became more important to investors rubbing their hands together than it ever had before.
I hear ya talking, especially when it comes to landlords. They were always greedy (just like producers and all the other people we're talking about) but when they started building media monuments to big earners, it drove them feral.
Madison has been going through a building boom for the past 10-15 years, and I got into an argument with a guy who thought "Supply and demand determine price, so this means apartments will get cheaper, right?" To be fair, he was thinking "in the long term", not "right now."
Of course, all the building is luxury-level, and you plop one luxury building down and the landlord who owns the 60-year-old apartment building next to it thinks, "Hey, I'm now in a luxury neighborhood, time to raise rents!" Funny how economists don't show much interest in these exceptions to their "supply and demand" rule, which just shows econ isn't a real science.
Wait, people are going to movie theaters? Are there no HDTVs, are there no streaming apps? Why subject yourself to the talking, candy wrapper crinkling, guys going to pee mid movie, sticky floors…? Are Sno-Caps worth enduring all that? I spent whole days going from theater to theater in NYC in the 60’s, cramming in as many movies as possible in a weekend, but now I can do the same on a Smart TV any time I want. So, I’m not doing much for box office numbers and they’re not doing much for me. Thanks, COVID!
$8 Sno-Caps, mind you -- because theaters are so squeezed by extortionate profit-sharing "agreements" that siphon off most of tivket sales to the movie distributors.
I still go to the theater from time to time. There's a great arthouse place here in Chicago (The Music Box) which still has the trappings of its old 1920's vaudeville and silent film regal decor. And being in a big city means for megaplexes I have choices. I don't go to crummy ones. Maybe that's why I see these kinds of posts about "theater problems" like you describe as overblown. Sure, I've had minor annoyances at the theater over the last few decades. But I cannot even remember the last time I experienced a really movie-ruining experience, or even a distracting experience.
I have a decent home TV/sound setup in a room that can be darkened. But some movies are just better in a theater.
... and none of this changes the fact that 95-99% of anything/everything is shit; yeah, ok, MOST of anything/everything is shit. So much of it is shit, that I'm starting not to mind when things are just a little shitty (of course, very shitty things often have their own entertainment value--among those who know which very shitty things are actually entertaining...)
A business model for art comes a close third to a business model for health and a business model for education when it comes to stupid ideas (which are many and varied)
I think the studios have always thought this way, right? Producers have always played a kind of Moneyball game, pushing the "creatives" to follow formulas for competitiveness while creators wanted people to love their movies (the schlock as well as the art). But writers and critics used to identify with the creators (or even like Pauline Kael with the audience), and make fun of producers and their fixations, and that's what's turned around. I wonder if there's a real readership for it though. If the exciting developments are mostly on streaming video nowadays, as my kids think, there's a lot more talk about whether people like a particular show or not. I wonder if the handicapping preoccupation with movies is some kind of awful signal that people don't care so much about movies now.
Worriedman below is right to equate this with the journalistic coverage of politics as sport, too, and I wonder if the same kind of worry applies. Political journalism seems mostly directed to gamblers rather than voters--what's that a sign of?
Thinking of changing my name here to Grouchy Mathematician if I see one more news story about how Mandela Barnes was ahead by 1 point (within the margin of error of the poll) and is now behind by 1 point (also within the margin of error of the poll) and how this constitutes a "surge" by his opponent.
And of course every change, no matter how small, deserves an explanation, doesn't it? This two-point change MUST be Suburban Mom's response to Johnson's latest attack ad! NO PLEASE STOP RANDOM NOISE DOESN'T GET AN EXPLANATION SORRY.
If one thinks about it, one could append the term "Grouchy" to the front end of pretty much all our so-called 'callings' and then have a mondo glorioso grumpfest on this here stack. Roy, on the other hand, might eventually find the thing he's got here devolved into just another off-lawn screed zone...which is not necessarily a bad thing, but we could presumably aim higher.
Not my usual phrase, but I do correct people sometimes. (Often I type out the correction and then delete it before posting — I have a tendency to be a know-it-all, so I try to control myself.)
Human nature, right? Why play the game if they don't keep score. It's been going on since they figured out how to count all those beans and tell who had the biggest pile. (That's important for some reason.).
Who amongst us doesn't look at their upvote total?
Guilty as charged, but imagine a world where we each generated our comments using a computer algorithm designed to maximize upvotes, based on a database of a billion past comments and their upvote totals, rather than my tried-and-true method of "Irritating thing that has been banging around in my head for a month finally gets to be let out, because Roy has provided even the slightest pretext for my doing so."
Yes, political journalists have decided that what we need is not honest and straightforward reporting on what our politicians and government are doing right now, no, we need predictions of the future, even though though 99.99% of us have absolutely no need or use for predictions about who's going to win.
And it doesn't just apply to elections, look at two years of breathless "Will he or won't he?" coverage applied to Joe Manchin and the Build Back Better bill, and then some shadow version of the damn things passes, and it's one day of coverage and on to the next predictions.
What drives it? Maybe a Chattering Class that is secure and having all its needs met, mortgages paid for, health insurance provided, kids safely gotten into Ivy League schools, so nothing really important is ever at stake for THEM, so let's just treat it all as entertainment, or the passing weather.
"Maybe a Chattering Class that is secure and having all its needs met..." Brother, sign me up for that! This poverty-prophet business is getting old.
You're right of course. One of the reasons so many people deny the inhumanly poor design of modern life is their fear that if they admit it, the Tinker Bell dream of endless riches will evaporate.
"predictions of the future, even though though 99.99% of us have absolutely no need or use for predictions about who's going to win"
As William Goldman astutely observed some time back, nobody knows anything -- and much of the time, the predictions are wrong anyhow. I personally can't understand why anyone would care about predictions, but -- well, I guess it's a form of gambling, and god knows that's always popular.
"...some kind of awful signal that people don't care so much about movies now." Well, *somebody* doesn't, and as you also seem to suggest it's the people who produce them. I wonder whether that's really what the audience thinks -- or just what it has been trained to expect?
Those documentaries about movie-making , "A Star Is Born" and "Singing In The Rain", go into great detail on the business calculations the studios made in each step of the process. They were way ahead of Madison Ave. on audience sampling and image/brand management. What changed, as you and Roy note, was the media coverage, around the time that another documentary, "Wall St." announced that Greed is Good. I think we're all fish swimming in late-stage capitalism.
I think I speak from experience when I say most people hate math, but boy do they LOVE numbers. In particular, what people love is one big, dumb number that quantifies how good something is. I think I first noticed this as a '70's-era college student shopping for stereo equipment when "Watts per channel" was the big, dumb number, and more was better and that's all you needed to know. Today, I notice it in how electric cars are marketed, and range is the big, dumb number and you've GOT to have 300 miles and won't be caught dead in some piece of shit with anything less (the majority of trips by car are 6 miles or less.)
And I get it, the world is complicated and it's not getting any simpler, so people seek comfort and reassurance in over-simplification. Nothing more complicated and anxiety-producing than the economy, wouldn't it be nice if someone could come up with a single number that says "good" or "bad" and then report on it EVERY DAMN DAY on the news, always with a handy explanation for why it went up 0.2% or down 1%? Why, of course that would be great, and that's why you know the ONE news story that they always find space for no matter what and even in the event of a nuclear war is the fucking Dow Jones Average.
"people seek comfort and reassurance in over-simplification." yeah, but we've never, ever been this good at oversimplifying! We used to *have* to be simple because we didn't have the proper technology -- now we can use algorithmic analysis to oversimplify beyond what even a micrometer can pick up.
Roy, did you see Ted Gioia's new post about "the longer the blog (or stackpost, or podcast), the more likes/views it gets? He's collected the data and it seems that Substack can ferret out the analysis.
And adding here: I find that the most entertaining (in all the ways I think about 'entertainment') here are your long posts (whether humorous or other) and the long responses.
I'm a big fan of science fiction, so I love reading about production of science fiction movies. Movie critics are rarely science fiction fans, so there's an inherent handicap there.
But what I find most mystifying is sequels. There seems to be this tendency for studios, when they have a so-called "blockbuster" on their hands, decide they can produce a sequel they expect to be just as big of a "blockbuster", but on a fraction of the first movie's budget. And, with each sequel, the budget gets smaller and smaller.
Is it any wonder why sequels are rarely successful?
I think Hollywood should be required by law to produce an annual "Grumpy Old Men" sequel with the geezers of the moment as a sort of living momento mori.
Right, with the year it comes out included in the name, like some of those bad ole' science fiction movies I claim to love: "Grumpy Old Men 2020, Grumpy Old Men 2021, Grumpy Old Men 2022, etc., etc....
I doubt it. Studio set space comes at a cost, so who is going to rent space to store sets once a movie has concluded? I'm sure there's exceptions, but I'm guessing it's cheaper to build new sets/costumes than pay for their storage, in the event that they *might* get a sequel. If they are really expecting to make bank, they'll do filming for sequels concurrently.
I have barely started to read, just what's above Marty's quote. But it's important. Before it gets away.
You wrote another column on a similar subject. There's a quadrilateral that embraces both this rectangle and that square. Maybe they are all parallelograms. Creating something for money. Creating something for attention. Creating something because it makes us happy, because we believe it has value in and of itself. Why do we create things? Entertainment, edification, because we can, I just have to go, you know? Try this mustard!
Is it other directed or is it for ourselves alone? Are we communicating or just getting rid of something? Is it for today, for now, simply a lark, a laugh, a quickie, or a marriage, beyond, for all time? This one today seems to focus on the commerce, that is, will it play in Peoria and will the piper get paid, versus, will a public I don't know and never the twain shall meet think I'm swell well after my corpse is swollen and will I get a tomb after all even if it is only a slim tome.
So, if you are following me in my mad method here, and I know it's a bit jazzy for this time of the morning (good morning, by the way), the central question comes back to: Who are we trying to be (identity); does this trope make my brain look phat and what will it inspire others to feel/believe/do (rhetoric): brother, can you spare a dime and/or give me your wallet, bitch (I own you, you owe me)... What else?
Now, I'll go back and read you whole thing here, before I have to go to work and the day dulls my pencil to the point I pour myself another martini and don't care whether anyone thinks anything about the fact Angela Lansbury is dead and wasn't she a looker when she was younger and maybe even now, still wondering if Ursula Le Guin is still with us and should I just walk away from Omelas altogether.
"does this trope make my brain look phat" is very funny. You're right -- it's all connected, and has to do with the difference (and similarity) between the eternal and the evanescent.
I think you're pretty much exactly right. We could take all the adjectives and the verbs out of this piece and use them to write the very same article about elections where everything also is a goddamn analytics riden horse race. I've decided to watch mostly French films from the 50's and Hollywood "B" westerns from the same period from here on out. I wish I could figure out a similar approach to elections.
7 year old me had one of my life's premier experiences watching "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" at one of those really nice theatres that had a screen the size of a Billboard. I sat right down in front.
Funny, the missus and I watched some of "After the Fox" last night, and though it's a weird and not entirely successful thing the bright colors, broad acting, and especially the obvious way it was designed for widescreen reminded me of what fun it was to be a kid and see a stupid CinemaScope movie.
A couple of years later I saw "Ice Station Zebra" in Cinerama. Front row seat. That was another primal event. Yet another PE was "Jason and the Argonauts" at the drive -in.
I saw That Darn Cat in a theatre. I'm sure it sucked. We learned early on that live action Disney films sucked. The cartoons were better. This was "Jungle Book" and 101 Dalmations though, not nearly " Cinderella" or "Sleeping Beauty". The llive action films, Flubber and that crap , were one short step above TV. Mom would be like "Let's go see "Thomasina. It's on with The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band. " and we would hide.
Didn't like That Darn Cat or Thomasina, I think I'm beginning to detect a pattern here, which is that you're not a ten-year-old girl.
Actually Disney was WAAAAY ahead of the curve with its early foray into cat-based content, they anticipated the Internet decades before there was an Internet.
We had furballs when Tim Berners-Lee was just a kitten!
We went to "The Gnome Mobile" because it had the kids from Mary Poppins. Haven't seen it since yet I can still sing the theme song. Not good.
Based on a book by Upton Sinclair! I love Wikipedia.
I’m one of the dwindling pool of people who saw “Song of the South” in a theater. I was very little, so all I remember is “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”
I was a little older, maybe 7. I remember Uncle Remus being very friendly and I liked “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” but real time I felt the live action just got in the way of the cartoons.
Just watched "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines" on cable the other day, and while it has plot holes you can fly a plane through, it holds up really well as *entertainment*. Which is what it's supposed to be.
And all made in the days before CGI, I believe a significant chunk of the budget was building actual flyable replica planes. Who would do such a thing today?
hearted for the scale of the plot holes.
Well, surely you didn't expect those Magnificent Men to fly their flying machines through nothing, did you?
Excellent connection with electoral politics. All matters are being framed as competitions, Us/Them thinking. It is the most basic psychology and brain chemistry, prone to irrationality and bad snap judgments, with a built-in organic reinforcement for antagonistic and hateful responses. The more intense the feelings, the bigger the jolt of dopamine and adrenaline. People get addicted to this nonsense.
The fixation on box office is merely consistent with a culture whose crowning value is money: the worth of an education is measured by how much a graduate can earn, people buy what is accepted as fine art these days as investments; and the esteem in which an individual is held — his social capital — depends upon his income.
Those last two have been true for a long time, I think, but while education always had something to do with credentials (that "sheepskin"!) it has certainly gone totally crazy in recent years, as multimillion-dollar college physical plants and endless coverage of the "consumer" model of higher ed will show.
I am perpetually amused (read – I never grew up) that when one gains that diploma one is proud of having (or is it being?) a sheeps' kin.
Underlying all that is the anxiety that comes from living in a predatory economy and constantly worrying you might get fucked-over. Lots of college students now measure a major by how much it earns, but can you blame them when the "wrong" choice can land them in a life of unsupportable debt?
This has bugged me for around 30 years. I think I remember first noticing it when the rise of shows like "Entertainment Tonight" became popular on network TV. I remember being puzzled back then when I was a teenager... some movie that I liked "bombed" at the box office, or was somehow doing worse than some other movie that I hadn't seen. Why should I care, I haven't even seen the other film?
There were other competing shows like Entertainment Tonight. 30 minutes of Hollywood and Teevee news five nights a week. That's a lot of time to fill. They figured out a way to make advertising 'the show,' and then sell 30 second ads to sell the advertising-show itself. SO entertainment became less about the product and more and more about "inside baseball" because that's a great way to generate 20 minutes of content for Entertainment Tonight five times a week. Television and movies and music as competitive sports.
I follow various topics on Reddit, one of them is fantasy fiction. There's a weekly thread that gets posted there now that's the epitome of this nonsense. I'm paraphrasing here, but the topics are titled "HBO's 'House of the Dragon' up 3% viewership this week, Amazon's 'Rings of Power' down 2%." People are online talking about percentage changes in streaming numbers over two different fantasy TV shows week to week! It's completely bizarre to me that anyone would care. I understand being generally interested in seeing if your favorite show is a flop or success: it might get cancelled or it might get another season. But closely discussing some kind of horse race between television shows is absurd unless you work for one of the shows yourself.
I'm rambling, but this topic has mildly irritated me for decades. Guess what? I ain't never been a sports fan. I don't work for the entertainment biz, nor does anyone I know. The article you link seems to sum things up nicely.
"That's a lot of time to fill." Idle hands explains a lot; the richest country in the world could have been a shining city, but we gave ourselves over to malicious gossip.
the last movie I've seen in an actual theatre is Black Panther, so I'm hardly qualified to speak on this subject, but it seems that money has taken precedence over reputation in this arena as in so many others. huge revelation, that, eh? I guess by reputation I mean making something for its intrinsic value rather than how it will be reflected in the box office. making any sort of statement based on one's own critical thinking (the horror!) has been supplanted by how the great unwashed will receive it. and increasingly, it seems that the lowest common denominator is the end goal.
so sayeth another internet crank
And this Internet crank as well!
I for one appreciate the notion of a hand-cranked internet. Gives me the illusion of manual control...
Thanks for this -- it seems like the sickness of a hyper-reality world to worry more about what people are saying & how they are feeling about a media object, than what that object actually is, does, or means.
But I don't blame us that much -- this world is literally hell & rotting to pieces. I'd retreat to some fourth meta-dimension too. Look at me here -- responding to this. :)
Tom Tomorrow ran this forward into its logical conclusion, all fact-based reporting has stopped, there remains just one fact still known, all media is consumed with takes and counter-takes on the One Fact (we're never told what it is, but I imagine it was the Gross Domestic Product of Bolivia).
I like that Bolivia and Oblivian are, well, whatever they are...
A near-anagram?
Don't know about that, but A MAGA ran near.
Eh, points, no discussion:
Regressive, reactionary, exploitative times and economy aren't fertile ground for an avant garde. The amount of regurgitation in the entertainment biz is, for an old who's been paying some attention over the years, amazing.
Speaking of which: When it can cost approximately nothing to make a movie, it's not happening. (I suppose some energy is instead going into TikTok and YouTube videos and podcasts.)
Back when we were young -- Scorsese, Roy and me -- it was as Roy noted: A movie did well or it didn't. A movie was the cool thing or not. If the former, we all went to see it. But of no concern was the box office. But starting with St. Ronnie and the nation's 180, more and more the only thing of importance as the MSM tells us is 💵💰💸.
Listen, it's been a couple of decades of societal collapse to the point that far too many can't be bothered to do anything to mitigate a pandemic and think not voting or electing the puppets of those making things worse is somehow the correct thing to do. So, you know, we get the art the times, well, dictate.
As for Scorsese, he's not talking but he might have a clue:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5537002/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_5
Or not. The underlying real life events as they say in Hollywood could of course be the basis for a great critique of capitalism and racism and how they combine into murder for money.
Wait wut.
Are you suggesting that art has been…*commodified*?!?!
YOU COMMIE BASTARD!
Oh, wait, sry.
You’re suggesting that 21st-century culture is driven by an algorithmic quest for the perfect commodity, one that will suck every last dollar out of every last pocket of every last member of the consumer caste.
YOU LUDDITE COMMIE BASTARD!!!
Don't hate on the Luddites -- They were fighting the good fight against mechanization that forced thousands out of work & into poverty
And it's looking more and more, I hate to say, that automation and robotics, instead of liberating us from drudgery to accomplish higher things, are doing the same now while we are still expected to find new drudgery to participate in because something something Protestant work ethic.
AI has been a disappointment when it comes to the self-driving car thing, but one thing computers have always excelled at is optimization/maximization/minimization, given a well-posed problem with well-defined numerical inputs and outputs. Capitalism has always had "maximize shareholder value" at its core, but to REALLY fuck things up requires a computer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economics/freight-train-mismanagement.html
I think Capitalism used to maximize stakeholder value which is different from shareholder value as stakeholder is a much broader group than shareholders. Shareholder value was a Milton Friedman thing and another example where Uncle Milty was wrong, wrong, wrong
Piero Sraffa was a commie bastard economist who wrote "The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities"
I think one of the factors at play here is the human need to feel validated and superior. People are into the idea that if something is wildly popular, it must be good. And if that thing is good, then the people who like are also good. So my liking [latest hyped blockbuster] validates my taste in movies if [latest hyped blockbuster] is topping the box office numbers this week, and that, in turn, proves that I am superior by virtue of my superior tastes.
In other avenues of life, this tendency takes the form of snobbery. Back when I was big in fly-fishing circles, I would look on in amazement as guys who were insurance salesmen or trash contract administrators spewed at length about how fly fishing was superior to any other form of fishing. These guys were actually ashamed that they started fishing with a spinning rod like everyone else. (And within fly fishing, there was a "moral" hierarchy--at the bottom were those who fly fished and used whatever fly the fish were eating and caught whatever fish were biting; at the top of this pyramid looking down on all the other benighted souls were the few dipshits who only fished dry flies to rising fish using 100-year-old classic hand-crafted bamboo fly rods. These latter types were utterly insufferable, but God gave them their punishment in this life by rendering them incapable of catching fish under even the most favorable of circumstances.) And all of this was in service of trying to feel that their hobby was validated and that it made them superior to other mortals.
So sad!
"God gave them their punishment in this life by rendering them incapable of catching fish under even the most favorable of circumstances."
But it looked so easy when Brad Pitt wuz doin' it! (And I'll look just like Brad Pitt when I'm doin' it myself)
Also, look at the NY Times "Wirecutter" feature. I can't just walk down to the hardware store and pull a space heater off the shelf like Grandpa did, I have to have the BEST space heater, as determined by the experts at the New York Times! So sad, those losers who - through accident or carelessness - bought the SECOND-BEST space heater.
Come on, admit it. There's nothing like the happiness one feels when discovering that Wirecutter has selected one of your purchases as an "Our Pick" BEST. What could be more American than the joy engendered by having one's buying decisions validated by elite experts?
We are what we buy, so not only is your space heater the best, YOU are the best for having purchased it.
And then you examine this best thing you have purchased and realize it is made out of cheap crap and the only quality item left is the label which very likely is emblazoned all over said thing. But your pals know that you bought what used to be the best until it was capitalized into the pockets of its shareholders. And you, consumer sucker, are using it until it breaks down and--gotcha--you've got to get another one.
This is hilarious. And just yesterday I was thinking, "Man, if there's one area of life that ISN'T dominated by competitive expertise, equipment fetishization, and holier-than-thou score-keeping, it's fly fishing." When will I ever learn?
Reading this comment was like watching an excellent short documentary.
Anytime Derelict slips into "Back when I was big in fly-fishing circles" mode it is your signal to sit back and enjoy. Perennial 2-marks territory. I only wish I had as many groovy stories from the factory, or the back of the bike shop, or the property management gig, or from the trailbuilding game...
Because "Back when I was big in reviving 45 year old bicycles and teaching punks a third my age about how to ride" would be epic comedy gold, I'm certain.
Don't sell it short, I'm sure there are endless interesting notes in that checkered past.
I always think of my checkered past as 'excheckered'...and that sorta describes the state of my accounts now, too...
The tail wags the dog to some extent here as I see it. Jaws was considered the watershed 'blockbuster' in 1977 for box office sales as well as reviews, only to be outdone by Star Wars a short time later. This, I feel, set the trend (akin to greedy landlords, and what I call 'The Nirvana Effect' on the music biz) towards aiming at Beacoup Bucks over art for art's sake, when such insane profits were on the line and marketing / distribution became more important to investors rubbing their hands together than it ever had before.
(No I can't spell French words)
No. You got it right. Aunt Bea was deep cover til she wasn't.
Somebody had to pack lunches for all those Proud Boys!
I hear ya talking, especially when it comes to landlords. They were always greedy (just like producers and all the other people we're talking about) but when they started building media monuments to big earners, it drove them feral.
Madison has been going through a building boom for the past 10-15 years, and I got into an argument with a guy who thought "Supply and demand determine price, so this means apartments will get cheaper, right?" To be fair, he was thinking "in the long term", not "right now."
Of course, all the building is luxury-level, and you plop one luxury building down and the landlord who owns the 60-year-old apartment building next to it thinks, "Hey, I'm now in a luxury neighborhood, time to raise rents!" Funny how economists don't show much interest in these exceptions to their "supply and demand" rule, which just shows econ isn't a real science.
You might enjoy "Empire of Value" by Andre Orlean which talks a fair amount about some cases where supply and demand theory does not work
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Value-Foundation-Economics-Press/dp/026202697X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=andre+orleans&qid=1665781095&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIyLjM4IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&sr=8-1
Well, if you wanted to make the ghost of Adam Smith cry… mission accomplished.
Jaws came out in 1975. Star Wars was 1977. Where did Aunt Bea lead the coup in Mayberry from?
Just down the road apiece.
Wait, people are going to movie theaters? Are there no HDTVs, are there no streaming apps? Why subject yourself to the talking, candy wrapper crinkling, guys going to pee mid movie, sticky floors…? Are Sno-Caps worth enduring all that? I spent whole days going from theater to theater in NYC in the 60’s, cramming in as many movies as possible in a weekend, but now I can do the same on a Smart TV any time I want. So, I’m not doing much for box office numbers and they’re not doing much for me. Thanks, COVID!
$8 Sno-Caps, mind you -- because theaters are so squeezed by extortionate profit-sharing "agreements" that siphon off most of tivket sales to the movie distributors.
Why, Doctor, that's *humanity* you're talking about!
Many films are much better viewed on an enormous screen
I still go to the theater from time to time. There's a great arthouse place here in Chicago (The Music Box) which still has the trappings of its old 1920's vaudeville and silent film regal decor. And being in a big city means for megaplexes I have choices. I don't go to crummy ones. Maybe that's why I see these kinds of posts about "theater problems" like you describe as overblown. Sure, I've had minor annoyances at the theater over the last few decades. But I cannot even remember the last time I experienced a really movie-ruining experience, or even a distracting experience.
I have a decent home TV/sound setup in a room that can be darkened. But some movies are just better in a theater.
... and none of this changes the fact that 95-99% of anything/everything is shit; yeah, ok, MOST of anything/everything is shit. So much of it is shit, that I'm starting not to mind when things are just a little shitty (of course, very shitty things often have their own entertainment value--among those who know which very shitty things are actually entertaining...)
A business model for art comes a close third to a business model for health and a business model for education when it comes to stupid ideas (which are many and varied)
I think the studios have always thought this way, right? Producers have always played a kind of Moneyball game, pushing the "creatives" to follow formulas for competitiveness while creators wanted people to love their movies (the schlock as well as the art). But writers and critics used to identify with the creators (or even like Pauline Kael with the audience), and make fun of producers and their fixations, and that's what's turned around. I wonder if there's a real readership for it though. If the exciting developments are mostly on streaming video nowadays, as my kids think, there's a lot more talk about whether people like a particular show or not. I wonder if the handicapping preoccupation with movies is some kind of awful signal that people don't care so much about movies now.
Worriedman below is right to equate this with the journalistic coverage of politics as sport, too, and I wonder if the same kind of worry applies. Political journalism seems mostly directed to gamblers rather than voters--what's that a sign of?
Y sez: "Political journalism seems mostly directed to gamblers rather than voters--what's that a sign of?"
Capitalism, Katie -- capitalism
Thinking of changing my name here to Grouchy Mathematician if I see one more news story about how Mandela Barnes was ahead by 1 point (within the margin of error of the poll) and is now behind by 1 point (also within the margin of error of the poll) and how this constitutes a "surge" by his opponent.
And of course every change, no matter how small, deserves an explanation, doesn't it? This two-point change MUST be Suburban Mom's response to Johnson's latest attack ad! NO PLEASE STOP RANDOM NOISE DOESN'T GET AN EXPLANATION SORRY.
If one thinks about it, one could append the term "Grouchy" to the front end of pretty much all our so-called 'callings' and then have a mondo glorioso grumpfest on this here stack. Roy, on the other hand, might eventually find the thing he's got here devolved into just another off-lawn screed zone...which is not necessarily a bad thing, but we could presumably aim higher.
"devolved into just another off-lawn screed zone" look, you could say the same thing about the Algonquin Round Table.
And Mencken before that.
I could be " Grouchy Horticulturalist."
My, is that ever long.
In honor of Roberta Gregory's comic character Bitchy Bitch, I will simply be known as Grouchy Grouch.
Noted.
You can lead a whore to culture....
Hence, the Grouchiness.
My “Grouchy Copyeditor” seems redundant.
Hey! I thought that was me! Do you put in comments saying "Or in English, ..." too?
Not my usual phrase, but I do correct people sometimes. (Often I type out the correction and then delete it before posting — I have a tendency to be a know-it-all, so I try to control myself.)
I am an Earthsea fan as well, Madam dragon.
I'm often playing the part of "Grouchy Reader #2" these days...
OLD FOLKS YELL AT CLOUD
I was only trying to fit in, you know -- as one of the younger members of this Mötley Crüe
Human nature, right? Why play the game if they don't keep score. It's been going on since they figured out how to count all those beans and tell who had the biggest pile. (That's important for some reason.).
Who amongst us doesn't look at their upvote total?
Yeah. I want more. But I also want more than more. (Why else would I do this?)
More than more, then, more.
Guilty as charged, but imagine a world where we each generated our comments using a computer algorithm designed to maximize upvotes, based on a database of a billion past comments and their upvote totals, rather than my tried-and-true method of "Irritating thing that has been banging around in my head for a month finally gets to be let out, because Roy has provided even the slightest pretext for my doing so."
I definitely am guilty of this!
Yeah this. (Not enough characters in Twitter for my hobbyhorses.)
Yes, political journalists have decided that what we need is not honest and straightforward reporting on what our politicians and government are doing right now, no, we need predictions of the future, even though though 99.99% of us have absolutely no need or use for predictions about who's going to win.
And it doesn't just apply to elections, look at two years of breathless "Will he or won't he?" coverage applied to Joe Manchin and the Build Back Better bill, and then some shadow version of the damn things passes, and it's one day of coverage and on to the next predictions.
What drives it? Maybe a Chattering Class that is secure and having all its needs met, mortgages paid for, health insurance provided, kids safely gotten into Ivy League schools, so nothing really important is ever at stake for THEM, so let's just treat it all as entertainment, or the passing weather.
"Maybe a Chattering Class that is secure and having all its needs met..." Brother, sign me up for that! This poverty-prophet business is getting old.
You're right of course. One of the reasons so many people deny the inhumanly poor design of modern life is their fear that if they admit it, the Tinker Bell dream of endless riches will evaporate.
I'm a temporarily embarassed billionaire. and considering how embarassing our billionaires are, that's really saying something!
"predictions of the future, even though though 99.99% of us have absolutely no need or use for predictions about who's going to win"
As William Goldman astutely observed some time back, nobody knows anything -- and much of the time, the predictions are wrong anyhow. I personally can't understand why anyone would care about predictions, but -- well, I guess it's a form of gambling, and god knows that's always popular.
"...some kind of awful signal that people don't care so much about movies now." Well, *somebody* doesn't, and as you also seem to suggest it's the people who produce them. I wonder whether that's really what the audience thinks -- or just what it has been trained to expect?
Those documentaries about movie-making , "A Star Is Born" and "Singing In The Rain", go into great detail on the business calculations the studios made in each step of the process. They were way ahead of Madison Ave. on audience sampling and image/brand management. What changed, as you and Roy note, was the media coverage, around the time that another documentary, "Wall St." announced that Greed is Good. I think we're all fish swimming in late-stage capitalism.
Everybody outta the pool!
All I know is that Barton Fink fella couldn’t write a wrestlin’ flick if his life depended on it. Some “writer” amirite?
‘Amsterdam’ is on pace to lose $100 million
There's yer problem and yer answer right there
Marty, DiBergi...2 marks!
You'd think with the legal weed they'd be doing better than that.
David O. Russell is a great filmmaker and I'm sure there's more to say about the movie than B.O. BOMB.
Big B
Little o
Little m
Silent B
- Laurie Anderson
I think I speak from experience when I say most people hate math, but boy do they LOVE numbers. In particular, what people love is one big, dumb number that quantifies how good something is. I think I first noticed this as a '70's-era college student shopping for stereo equipment when "Watts per channel" was the big, dumb number, and more was better and that's all you needed to know. Today, I notice it in how electric cars are marketed, and range is the big, dumb number and you've GOT to have 300 miles and won't be caught dead in some piece of shit with anything less (the majority of trips by car are 6 miles or less.)
And I get it, the world is complicated and it's not getting any simpler, so people seek comfort and reassurance in over-simplification. Nothing more complicated and anxiety-producing than the economy, wouldn't it be nice if someone could come up with a single number that says "good" or "bad" and then report on it EVERY DAMN DAY on the news, always with a handy explanation for why it went up 0.2% or down 1%? Why, of course that would be great, and that's why you know the ONE news story that they always find space for no matter what and even in the event of a nuclear war is the fucking Dow Jones Average.
"people seek comfort and reassurance in over-simplification." yeah, but we've never, ever been this good at oversimplifying! We used to *have* to be simple because we didn't have the proper technology -- now we can use algorithmic analysis to oversimplify beyond what even a micrometer can pick up.
Roy, did you see Ted Gioia's new post about "the longer the blog (or stackpost, or podcast), the more likes/views it gets? He's collected the data and it seems that Substack can ferret out the analysis.
And adding here: I find that the most entertaining (in all the ways I think about 'entertainment') here are your long posts (whether humorous or other) and the long responses.
"...most people hate math, but boy do they LOVE numbers."
That's wonderful. Thanks.
I'm a big fan of science fiction, so I love reading about production of science fiction movies. Movie critics are rarely science fiction fans, so there's an inherent handicap there.
But what I find most mystifying is sequels. There seems to be this tendency for studios, when they have a so-called "blockbuster" on their hands, decide they can produce a sequel they expect to be just as big of a "blockbuster", but on a fraction of the first movie's budget. And, with each sequel, the budget gets smaller and smaller.
Is it any wonder why sequels are rarely successful?
I think Hollywood should be required by law to produce an annual "Grumpy Old Men" sequel with the geezers of the moment as a sort of living momento mori.
Love it, every actor (or at least every male actor) would know that "There's a Grumpy Old Men in your future too."
Right, with the year it comes out included in the name, like some of those bad ole' science fiction movies I claim to love: "Grumpy Old Men 2020, Grumpy Old Men 2021, Grumpy Old Men 2022, etc., etc....
Hahaha, looking forward to the Paul Rudd / Sean William Scott installment in 2047.
Do they hand down the sets and the costumes, like large families passing clothes from older to younger kids? That would save some money.
"You're not fit to wear Walter Matthau's pants!"
I doubt it. Studio set space comes at a cost, so who is going to rent space to store sets once a movie has concluded? I'm sure there's exceptions, but I'm guessing it's cheaper to build new sets/costumes than pay for their storage, in the event that they *might* get a sequel. If they are really expecting to make bank, they'll do filming for sequels concurrently.
I have barely started to read, just what's above Marty's quote. But it's important. Before it gets away.
You wrote another column on a similar subject. There's a quadrilateral that embraces both this rectangle and that square. Maybe they are all parallelograms. Creating something for money. Creating something for attention. Creating something because it makes us happy, because we believe it has value in and of itself. Why do we create things? Entertainment, edification, because we can, I just have to go, you know? Try this mustard!
Is it other directed or is it for ourselves alone? Are we communicating or just getting rid of something? Is it for today, for now, simply a lark, a laugh, a quickie, or a marriage, beyond, for all time? This one today seems to focus on the commerce, that is, will it play in Peoria and will the piper get paid, versus, will a public I don't know and never the twain shall meet think I'm swell well after my corpse is swollen and will I get a tomb after all even if it is only a slim tome.
So, if you are following me in my mad method here, and I know it's a bit jazzy for this time of the morning (good morning, by the way), the central question comes back to: Who are we trying to be (identity); does this trope make my brain look phat and what will it inspire others to feel/believe/do (rhetoric): brother, can you spare a dime and/or give me your wallet, bitch (I own you, you owe me)... What else?
Now, I'll go back and read you whole thing here, before I have to go to work and the day dulls my pencil to the point I pour myself another martini and don't care whether anyone thinks anything about the fact Angela Lansbury is dead and wasn't she a looker when she was younger and maybe even now, still wondering if Ursula Le Guin is still with us and should I just walk away from Omelas altogether.
"does this trope make my brain look phat" is very funny. You're right -- it's all connected, and has to do with the difference (and similarity) between the eternal and the evanescent.