The Shape of the Box Office of 2025

In assessing the 2025 box office my first thought was of how the reality stacked up against my predictions at the end of last year. In particular I was interested in checking whether or not, as I thought, the forecasts so many others had made regard the year's gross had not been overoptimistic; the year had hewed to the pattern I saw in 2023 which seemed likely to be repeated of a pre-pandemic release slate in a shrunken post-pandemic market (reduced by a third), with the result too many tentpoles for the number of ticket-buyers to go around, leading to a large number of disappointing grosses; the claim that "Marvel's Back!" in the wake of Deadpool's success in 2024 proved wrong-headed as that film proved to have borne out interest in Deadpool, not the Marvel brand as a whole as the year's three major Marvel theatrical releases underperformed; and in general, the year's grosses conformed to the impression I have had for many years of increasing superhero fatigue and sci-fi actioner fatigue and franchise fatigue and the decreasing viability of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy so reliant on them for so long. As it turned out, what seemed to me was likely to happen, did happen, with the year's gross, instead of the $9-$10 billion so many hoped for instead under $8.7 billion, thanks to a large number of underperforming films--not least the three Marvel releases that showed that Deadpool was the exception, not the rule, for the sinking ship that this onetime king of the franchises has become.

Now, with the inflation data for the year out I am looking at the numbers again a little more closely, not least for how those of 2025 compare with those of 2023-2024, and 2015-2018. Doing so affirms that 2025 saw a gross 1.5 percent down from that of 2024, when a strike-thinned release slate was supposed to have been responsible for the soft gross, and down 8 percent from that of 2023, when the slate was pretty packed--and thus a more suitable point of comparison for how 2025 really did. In the process the gross continued its slippage from the level of 2015-2019--the figure for 2025 just 58 percent of that level (as against 59 percent in 2024 and 63 percent in 2023), suggesting that even after the dramatic drop of the pandemic period (which had me estimating a structural shrinkage of about a third) the erosion is still quite visibly continuing, rather than the situation stabilizing, let alone any recovery ongoing in the way some in the entertainment press at least pretend to continue to hope in spite of the evidence of the numbers from year to year since the pandemic.

In the face of this trend does Hollywood have options? As I have been saying for two years now they would do better to make cost-effective, well-targeted films than to pour money into tentpoles that nobody asked for (and those who never asked for them ever more inclined to take a pass on them entirely), and also make the most of the international opportunities open to them (as perhaps they mean to do in China, to go by what Disney did with the Zootopia sequel). Still, the problem right now is far bigger than anything Hollywood does. So far as I am concerned no discussion of the matter of the weak film grosses we are seeing is at all complete without acknowledgment of the extreme financial stress the public finds itself under today, one reflection of which is its passing up on all sorts of little luxuries they took for granted in better times, like dining out, and going to concerts, and yes, taking in a movie in a theater rather than contenting themselves with the offerings available to them on littler screens--the "affordability crisis" about which, of course, government has done nothing and shows no interest in doing anything positive. Indeed, elite unwillingness to address the issue is only underlined by the ways in which they pretend to address them (as seen in Ezra Klein and company's feeble sales pitch for the economic and political stupidity that is the blatantly neoliberal "Abundance" agenda). As the last implies I see no grounds for expecting any improvement in that part of the sorry picture, with all that means for Hollywood's share in it.

The term "fandom" is probably most strongly associated with science fiction, where Hugo Gernsback did much to cultivate a self-aware, self-identifying, active, visible community among fans of such fiction in the earliest days of its history as a genre. However, science fiction was by no means the first scene of such a phenomenon. Certainly my impression reading Julian Symons is that Sherlock Holmes had a fandom decades before Gernsback (such that Holmes may be the first really great example of the phenomenon). At the same time one finds fandom outside the realm of what is ordinarily regarded as "popular culture," with the following Jane Austen enjoys perhaps the most striking such example.

The question on my mind recently was just how long that would go on being the case. Fandom itself generally seems to be in decline, certainly going by what many say of the science fiction fandom, and the factors behind that--a result not just of the decadence of science fiction as a genre about which I have written so many times, but of how people generally experience our entertainment-saturated era. The conventional wisdom has it that, enjoying what is at least superficially a superabundance of choices, and not exactly encouraged to develop their attention spans, people sample a great many enthusiasms rather than immersing themselves very deeply in any of them--and one might add, favor the "relatable" over the pleasures of the exotic and faraway--so that the conditions and outlook that gave rise to the old-fashioned "fan" are a thing of the past.

If anything, the Jane Austen fandom would seem much more vulnerable. After all, it is ultimately print-based--the media adaptations of Austen's work numerous, but essentially secondary (does anyone consider someone who never read the books a genuine "Jane Austen fan?") at a time in which the habit of reading, and especially reading long works of fiction for pleasure, is in sharp decline. It also does not take much imagination to see that if even the most commercially-oriented contemporary work for young adults is not commanding the audience that it did a decade ago anything such as what Austen wrote is that much less likely to speak to their passions, as she not only writes of another era, but does so from within that other era, with its perspective and conventions, and with which they can have little patience, and which they can scarcely seem able to wrap their minds around. So does it go with, for example, that stress on chastity, propriety, reputation that plunged the Bennet family into crisis when one of their daughters ran off with Mr. Wickham, such that, as seen in the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice, the movie's makers had little choice but to greatly compress that very large and important part of the book at the cost of not just faithfulness to the original but the fabric of the drama--all as given their intent of reaching a really wide audience it was, again, natural for them to reimagine Elizabeth Bennet as a far more lively character than the original (her having a little more sensibility and a little less sense, so to speak). Indeed, that cliché of the depiction of the Austen fandom, the young woman picking up Pride and Prejudice and identifying with Elizabeth and being swept up in her story and swept away by it is something I find very hard to picture as a phenomenon of the 2020s--the more in as we are told that Bridgerton is more the present generation's speed. Bridgerton, of course, would never have become the phenomenon that it is without Austen and her less celebrated imitators and successors creating a genre of love stories romanticizing the Regency era so popular that an identity politics-obsessed Hollywood would give it its "makeover," but that fact does not necessarily translate into interest in the antecedents, certainly in a different medium, as written in and for another time. Just as those who enjoy today's space opera and superhero tales generally do not go back and look at the old pulp tales in which those forms were born, let alone become devoted to them, it seems to me that only very rarely will those enjoying wokefied twenty-first century versions of Regency romance on streaming pick up Austen's old books.

Instead the declining interest would seem likely to translate to the withering away of the old cohort of enthusiasts as, like so many giants of English and world letters who have become merely "obscure" names to even those who pass themselves off as literate today, just something they get assigned in school and never bother with again. At least, for as long as schools continue to assign their students literary reading--a practice that may well be on its way out in an era in which the Untermenschen who hold power at every turn show themselves out to kill the humanities, and indeed, humanity itself, in their Apocalypse-like chase after the godhood they and the media endlessly stroking them believe they deserve.

Is This Really an Age of Disclosure?

Hollywood producer Dan Farah's recent documentary The Age of Disclosure takes its name from the view held by some of those who believe governments have been concealing the reality behind reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The "ufologist" as some call them generally assumes this to be hard evidence of visitations of the Earth by extraterrestrials in vehicles capable of interstellar flight, with all that implies about the advanced character of this other civilization; that the "UFO cover-up" thus conceals a great deal about the history of humanity, the technologies that may actually be available to us, and possibly much, much else; and that the time when those long-held, profound secrets will be secrets no longer may be close at hand, perhaps "changing everything" for the better. However, in spite of recent public hearings about the subject of government knowledge of these matters in the United States Congress, among other such developments, I cannot help but think of how the broader direction of government conduct seems to be headed in the extreme opposite direction of what would expect in an age of openness. The twenty-first century has seen the governments of even those states that Westerners identify most with liberal freedoms, government accountability, democracy conduct worldwide programs of rendition, torture and assassination--all as it seems the public, encouraged by the brass check takers of our news media, take the situation in stride. Indeed, governments are becoming secretive about matters that most would consider to be far more banal than extrajudicial killings, refusing to release data they formerly made public as a matter of course, and even removing previously published data from their sites. (That U.S. Department of Agriculture report on food insecurity I cited in a post on this very blog a while back? The government has officially announced that there won't be any update on that, the report gone.) And indeed, it seems that many an informed observer even the most narrow-minded centrist would hesitate to dismiss as an ufologist-style "conspiracy theorist" openly discusses what report the government does put out regarding such matters as prices, economic growth and employment with unprecedented suspicion, charging increasing manipulation of the numbers to brighten the dismal picture.

All of this, of course, has gone hand in hand with an era of open contempt on the part of elites in and out of government toward the public at large, whether one thinks of the increasingly unhinged character of their dismissal of working people as "takers" parasitic upon their supposed betters (now we hear that they are "scavengers," and even "unhumans"), or their indifference to the prospect of their mass death as already seen in a viral pandemic; or as they now contemplate in the event of environmental collapse, and even the nuclear war that, displaying a Barry Goldwater-like incomprehension of what such a conflict would mean.

Looking at all of that I imagine that if governments really are sitting on a mountain of world-changing information of this kind (about which proposition I must account myself skeptical), any "Age of Disclosure" remains far off, with the chatter we have heard so much serving other purposes, not least a distraction from more pressing matters that we all know to be only too real, with the choice of distraction itself significant. As Tom Engelhardt remarked in his very worthwhile book The End of Victory Culture, ufologists were "almost the only group . . . to take on the national security state directly" in the Cold War period, while in spite of that being case this was "the only oppositional group in those years that no one bothered to accuse of communism." That Authority treated the ufologists so lightly even amid the hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War as to not even bother Red-baiting them in that way to which they so reflexively and nastily resorted would seem far from testifying that they were ever onto anything--all as, where the public's perhaps inevitable skepticism of government truthfulness is concerned, there has been no safer outlet than this one. Accordingly one may reasonably see the interest here as a sublimation of other discontents, and at the same time, an interest that those desirous of deflecting public attention from the hard facts of polycrisis have every interest in cultivating.

Book Review: The Road to Omaha, by Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum's MacKenzie Hawkins-Sam Devereaux novels seemed to me even more off the main track of his work than the novels Ludlum published as Jonathan Ryder. Those, at least, were thrillers (indeed, as it turned out, the Ryder novel Trevayne was one of his best such works), whereas his Sam Devereaux novels were comedies--all as I had found Ludlum's attempts at humor uneven. In truth I had sometimes enjoyed them (as with Valerie Converse's New York cab ride in The Aquitaine Progression or the misadventures of Brendan Prefontaine in The Bourne Ultimatum), but the weaker aspects of Ludlum's writing tended to put him at a particular disadvantage here. His tendency to make caricatures of his characters, ethnically as in other ways, went into overdrive here, with results that could seem crude and offensive rather than funny (like Krusty the Clown performing his '50s-era routine before a '90s audience), all as his less than efficient use of words seemed particularly disadvantageous when he went for laughs. Meanwhile this particular book, coming late in a period in which Ludlum was repeating himself (counting the return of Inver Brass in The Icarus Agenda this was his fourth sequel in a row), often to diminishing returns (certainly evident in the immediately preceding Bourne Ultimatum), could seem as if it had been on the shelf since the time when Ludlum wrote The Road to Gandolfo as he focused on his more profitable straight thrillers, and just brought this one out when he did out of sheer exhaustion before putting the pen down and letting the Ludlum name become the Ludlum "brand" slapped on the covers of the increasingly generic intelligence procedurals published under it from The Scorpio Illusion forward.

Still, suspecting this was the last "true" Ludlum novel I dove into The Road to Omaha--and all too predictably found it a slog. Rather than laughing at Sam Devereaux's predicament I found myself feeling sorry for him as I sympathized with his desire to just be left alone by the egomaniacal lunatic grifter General Mackenzie Hawkins (Ludlum's apparent admiration for whom jarred), all as the writing lived down to my lowest expectations. Indeed, during a rather protracted and complicated pursuit sequence through Boston that overtaxed my willingness to continue following the story I put down the book, unsure as to whether I would bother returning to it. But in the end I did so, and if it took me quite some time to "get into" the story (it didn't happen until I was almost halfway through this six hundred pager) I did get into it.

With the set-up out of the way, and Ludlum proceeding to develop the broader plot (this time Hawkins, with Devereaux once again dragged in, is suing the government "on behalf" of a Native American tribe Hawkins has determined may rightly own the land on which Strategic Air Command headquarters is built), he managed to put the scale and intricacy to which his narratives were prone to good effect, his taking in the bigger picture giving him plenty at which to direct his not merely comedic but satirical barbs, especially as we saw more of the villains of the piece and their machinations as they presumed to head off Hawkins' challenge to the government by other than strictly legal means. In the process Ludlum actually transforms General Hawkins from the (comic) villain he was the last time around, when he was simply after a big score, into an antihero fighting for justice (in his deranged way), all as Sam Devereaux goes from being Hawkins' hapless victim to this comedic epic's answer to Joel Converse, an accomplished attorney battling his Vietnam-era ghosts as he also battles the book's conspirators with the law as his weapon, with the book better off for it. Indeed, Ludlum gives free rein not just to the comedic impulses that did not always well-suit, for example, his Bourne sequels, but also to the politically critical impulses he made clear were still alive and well in his introduction to the reprint of his earlier Trevayne (impulses, if anything, exacerbated by the repellent state of American politics as Ludlum found it at the end of the 1980s) evident here to a degree not seen since the days when he was writing novels like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, giving the comedy its edge--with it helping greatly that displayed a healthy disrespect for the Establishment. Ludlum's depiction of Randolph Gates in The Bourne Ultimatum was just a hint of what he is to offer here, as Ludlum offered up some fairly inspired ideas, not least making the Director of Central Intelligence a literal "goodfella," selected for and installed in his position by the yacht club clichés who own the country's defense-industrial base (though they would never have such over to dinner, of course, such a personage "socially unacceptable," don't you know)--all as if you ever wondered what an "all star" government counter-terrorist team with John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier on it would be like (I didn't either), you find out here (sort of). Some of it even looks like prophesy in hindsight--like the combination of crudity and ignorance characterizing the dialogue in the book's Cabinet meeting, and its White House chief of staff who gives the press the middle finger as that press goes on being deferential in its wearisome pompous way.

The result was that what began as something of a chore became a pleasure as the pages flew by with results that were consistently amusing, and every once in a while even laugh out loud funny. By the end I was glad I had stuck with the book, which seemed a not unfitting close to the oeuvre of what I as much as ever think of as the "real Ludlum," the more in as where commercial fiction is concerned, what it had been possible to present as the material of a straight thriller in 1977 could only be presented as comedy in the political milieu of 1992, a less and less free and tolerant place where satire was concerned--all as, as we now know only too well, history's course was such course that in a very short time satire would be completely incapable of comparing with the stuff of our ever more em dash substitution-filled headlines for sheer absurdity and obscenity, exaggeration to any useful end simply impossible.

Of Mack Bolan and Leroy Jethro Gibbs: Thoughts

The near-total media silence regarding the announced end of Gold Eagle's day as an active book publisher was an indication of just how much the genre with which that imprint had become a publishing powerhouse--"men's action-adventure"--had fallen off the media's radar since its heyday in the '70s and '80s, going bust in the '90s and never recovering afterward. In the process the visibility of particular series' and characters has declined. In the case of the Destroyer series a feature film adaptation that, if a flop at the time of release, has since (deservedly) acquired a cult following, helps keep memory of that franchise alive, but the biggest series of all in that field, which was actually the one that started it all, the Executioner series featuring Mack Bolan, never quite made it to the screen, with all that has meant for its lingering in the broader pop cultural consciousness.

Still, echoes of Mack Bolan's creation remain audible, perhaps most obviously in the form of Marvel Comics' Bolan-inspired Punisher, but I suspect also in the form of less direct derivatives, like that lead figure in the original NCIS, Leroy Jethro Gibbs. So far as I know there has never been any public acknowledgment of conscious inspiration or influence here on the part of show creator Don Bellisario or anyone else "in the know" about it. Still, it would be a bit surprising if, given his generation and his particular line of work, Bellisario had never, ever, heard of the Executioner series and its hero Bolan, and still more surprising if there wasn't at least some indirect influence given how big the phenomenon was at its peak--and the numerous parallels between Bolan, and (at least where his personal back story is concerned) Gibbs. Like Bolan Gibbs was a young man from a blue-collar background in a relatively provincial part of the Northeast (indeed, it may not be wholly irrelevant that just as Bolan comes from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Gibbs' Pennsylvania has a Pittsfield of its own) who enlisted in the armed forces, and became a sergeant in a special forces section of their branch (Bolan an Army Green Beret, Gibbs a Marine Scout Sniper) with sniping as their specialty and a reputation for excellent marksmanship. While away at war (Bolan in the Vietnam War, Gibbs in the 1991 Gulf War) "ethnic" gangsters destroyed each of their families (Italian Mafia in Bolan's case, a Mexican drug trafficker in Gibbs'), after which, on returning home, each man used his skills as a special forces soldier, specifically relying on his prowess as a sniper, to exact personal revenge on those they held responsible for their loss in a vigilante action that the law could never countenance, but with which the audience is expected to sympathize.

Of course in other respects the situations are different. There is what exactly they had in the way of family. The young Bolan who went off to war had yet to settle down and marry, with the result that his family consisted of his parents and siblings, whereas Gibbs was a married man with a wife and daughter. The circumstances of the destruction of their families were also different, Bolan's father Sam, trying to make ends meet in the wake of a heart attack forcing him to shift from his old job to a less demanding but lower-paying one at the steel plant, took out a loan that seemed safe enough at first but proved to be predatory. Repayment being beyond his means he unsurprisingly failed to pay up, leading to the loan officers having the affiliated Mafia henchmen beat him up to make him somehow come up with the cash he didn't have. This drove his daughter Cindy to go and plead with them to lay off--something they agreed to do if she entered their employ as a prostitute to "work off" her father's debt, an offer she accepted. As it happened, her younger brother Johnny found out about what she was doing and told dad, who, apparently driven to madness by the news, shot the women, then Johnny, and then himself. By contrast it seems that Gibbs' wife simply happened to witness a crime, and the killer she was in a position to testify against decide to keep her from ever being able to testify. And of course, there was what the heroes did afterward. The vengeance Bolan exacts on the Mafia in Pittsfield--a whole series of actions that leave a very large number of gangsters dead and no doubt about the party responsible in the view of either the Mafia or the authorities--places him squarely outside society, while being just the beginning of the "War Against the Mafia" that is the book's title, and the theme of the series through the decade. For Gibbs the revenge killing is a one-shot incident he buried in his past as, after departing the Marines, he joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and rose through the ranks to become the senior functionary he is by the time of the TV series--though of course, like just about every popular hero of the type, he is not unknown to act the "loose cannon" and so look less Bolan-like in the process.

Still, having described the two characters' arcs it should be clear that any attempt to adapt Bolan's story would easily see the creator end up with something that looks a lot more like Gibbs'. After all, if Bolan's creator Don Pendleton in 1969 could expect that his readers would see the elder Bolan's destruction of his family as ultimately the fault of the Mafia's preying on them this is less the case today. His taking a gun and shooting his children, his wife and himself is what we today call a "mass shooting"--discussing which it is today all but taboo to seek explanation, those who violate it being vulnerable to accusation of excusing it (a stance that is not only unfair but, self-servingly from the standpoint of those who prefer such things not be discussed, putting consideration of social and economic factors, and criticism of what they mean for human life, beyond the pale). And of course the complex of prejudices regarding gender, religion, race further problematizes the matter, given the news that prompted the elder Bolan's action. Certainly were Bolan not an Irish-American but of a certain other background the conventional response would be to call his act of violence, particularly in regard to his daughter, an "honor killing"--remembering which facts is an unwelcome reminder to many that traditionalist notions of female and family honor in America are not so different from those of peoples that mainstream Americans prefer to treat as an utterly alien Other whose barbaric behavior toward their womenfolk is absolutely unlike anything ever seen in the West. Meanwhile even if oblivious to the ethno-religious double standard prevailing in such matters (as a great many persons who think of themselves as "progressive" are) the "woke" would at least speak of Bolan's father's "toxic masculinity" in dealing with his failure to provide for and protect his loved ones in the way that he did (while those with a broader, richer, social perspective will think about what Sam Bolan's hard luck says about working class life in America). Altogether, if no reasonable person would deny the destructive role of the Mafia in the episode, many would blame the elder Bolan and his backward values for his ultimately having killed himself, his wife, his daughter, with this, in turn, coloring their judgment of Mack Bolan. After all, not only does his course raise the eternal controversy over the legitimacy of vigilante action, but the view of Bolan's actions as a matter of Mack, refusing to accept his father's inability to confront either his personal mistakes or the bigger social reality behind them as ultimately the culprits, laying the entire blame on ethnic gangsters as he goes on a racist vigilante killing spree--and indeed, between this and Bolan's own recognition of the impossibility of his task (one vigilante wiping out the whole Mafia?), many would see him as the product of a sick, bigoted culture simply having lost his mind. The result is that even if Bellisario had actually consciously thought through an adaptation of Mack Bolan's story as the basis of Gibbs' back story, his keeping that particular sequence of events in his own narrative was totally out of the question, and electing instead for the plain and simple murder of Gibbs' wife and daughter by the thug against whom he exacted his personal revenge was probably the only way that he could have gone if he was serious about getting a show on the air in 2003.

Top Gun: Maverick, Ready Player One and the Weaponization of Wokeness

I remember that when the press announced that Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick) was out of the development hell where it had languished for three decades and going into production I was skeptical about its box office prospects, and later surprised at how high it soared--grossing over $700 million in North America, a figure which would have been stellar even before the pandemic, and was that much more so after COVID-19 dealt a structural blow to the theater business. Of course, hits like that tend to not "just happen," and in this case the film was helped by at least two advantages, namely the relatively weak competition in the summer of 2022 compared with more crowded summer seasons, and the media cheerleading for the film. The latter was evident in the extremely positive reviews (the Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics score was 99 percent--versus the 56 percent score they gave the original back in 1986, even though it was pretty much the same film), but also in what was evident in those glowing reviews, the critics giving much that they sometimes find objectionable a pass. This certainly went for how the film held up from the standpoint of "wokeness," and indeed a comparison of the response to Top Gun 2 with the response to Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One not much earlier is revealing.

After all, consider what those who attacked Ready Player One with such vitriol had against it, its trafficking in nostalgia for '80s pop culture. Many would not see anything inherently offensive about that. (I didn't then--and frankly still don't.) But some see the fact that Ernest Cline's book simply happened to be a love letter to things mostly enjoyed by males of a certain ethnic background as infuriating because of their demand for the "decentering" of that perspective and desire for the "centering" of other perspectives (non-male, non-White, LGBTQ+, etc.) in its place--to the point of demonizing pop cultural nostalgia of Cline's type. Rounding out the attack on that front those taking this line nit-picked his book from the standpoint of its failings with regard to "diversity" and "inclusion"--again, hyperbolically I thought, Cline seeming to me to have gone out of his way to offer exactly that in such characters as Aech, and Art3mis, only for those critics to dismiss them as superficial concessions (quite unfairly, in this reader's view, given the "moving the goalposts" of the implicit and very unreasonable demand for High Literature-level characterization in an unabashedly non-Literary novel). However, Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick), no less a piece of '80s nostalgia than Cline's book in intent and execution, seems to have caught nothing like such flak on that account. Equally those who were so hostile to Ready Player One did not raise any objections to the nods to diversity in Top Gun 2 having been rather more vulnerable to dismissal as "superficial concessions" than in Cline's book and its film adaptation, all as those prone to be fire-breathing about LGBTQ+ inclusiveness and "body positivity" did not raise a hue and cry about the self-described "fat," "old" and "age-appropriate" Kelly McGillis being out in favor of a slimmer and younger Jennifer Connelly as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell's love interest this time around.

Considering the difference one could argue that the summer of 2022 was not the spring of 2018, that passions about these issues may have cooled somewhat by that point--and that Cline's Ready Player One may simply have been unlucky in that one book and film's subjection to the whole weight of the identity politics' practitioners' fury over pop culture broadly, so that it ended up the object of what became a mindless pile-on in that way that so happens in political life as its detractors loaded it with a burden no one work can fairly be made to bear. However, that does not seem to me the whole story, especially in light of the media's Rah-Rah attitude toward Top Gun--and the plain and simple fact that wokeness was far from dead then. (Just consider the reception Barbie got a whole year later.) Rather it seems that the differences in the content of the two works matter immensely. After all, the entertainment press being what it is it is not without reasons for despising Ready Player One, and encouraging the public to do so. Most obviously, if that book's politics were often confused (with its thoroughly right-wing cult of the self-made tech billionaire, its evocation of Ayn Rand and her ideology by way of Rush's allusions, etc.), it still featured an ecologically ruined neoliberal dystopia where corporate scum who enslave the hapless are intent on controlling and enshittifying the Internet, with the heroes those who fight against them--and at the climax of the story, their not doing so in a singlehanded, individualistic way but literally rallying the whole online world's people to fight to keep the commons that is the only thing enabling them to get through the day in their hands and out of those of the grasping capitalists in what by twenty-first century standards could seem October 1917, all as Cline gave the middle finger to the copyright Nazis dominating the media over and over again. Don't think for a moment that any of this went over well with the neolibs and neocons who dominate the conventional wisdom--even with the film watering down what oppositional content the original possessed. By contrast Top Gun 2 was an old-fashioned flag-waving armed forces-singing right-wing movie all the way down--and don't think for a moment that this didn't go over well with the neolibs and neocons who dominate the conventional wisdom, for whom this was not Red October but the Hunt for it. That made all the difference in their attitude--and specifically in the weaponization of the wokeness that, for the millionth time, is not a left-wing but an essentially anti-leftist political outlook very readily deployed against anything that can smack of the left in that way that accounts for a very great deal in the politics of our time, even on Big Media's review pages.

The Whining of Literary Agents

It has long been routine for the functionaries of Big Publishing to write pieces in which they whine that the hatred that frustrated authors feel for them is unjustified. (One may find examples of this dubious literature in such places as the Guardian and Salon.)

As with almost everything that people in Big Business tell the broad public about their business these pieces, which bespeak the self-pity and callousness of privilege toward the less advantaged--the narcissism that says "Attention must be paid!" to my concerns as they deny that "Attention must be paid!" to anyone else's--they obscure rather than reveal, and it seems there is something to be said about that. Certainly I do not deny that people do pursue careers as authors with unreasonable expectations, and that the enmity many of those who have been through this feel toward literary agents and the like partly reflects those unreasonable expectations. For a start, the aspiring author is encouraged to think that publishing is a career open to talent; that publishers exist to publish books; that the slush pile is a plausible path to publication; that any good book is likely to find a home somewhere. However, every one of those premises is false. Publishing is a very crowded milieu, the actual demand for book writers miniscule next to the supply. Publishers exist not to publish books but to make the maximum short-term profit for their owners, with books a mere means to an end, and while things have always been that way as Balzac demonstrates in Lost Illusions, one should not underestimate how much more intensive and minute the predominance of the profit imperative has become in today's ever-more corporatized and monopolized market, where the biggest publishers are corporate giants in their turn owned by asset managers that practice as well as preach "shareholder value." Indeed, in line with this imperative many have decided to have nothing to do with slush piles, dumping that job on literary agents who are in the business of representing their clients, not seeking out new talent, such that where they do have a slush pile it is apt to be the responsibility of some unpaid intern. And as all the foregoing implies--the crowdedness, the emphasis on profit rather than books, the marginality of the slush pile--it is not to be assumed that a decent book, or even a great one, will make it all the way through the labyrinth. Indeed, what an aspiring author writes is of no consequence whatsoever--what they know of no consequence whatsoever next to who they know, and who knows them, which is to say their having "connections" and/or "platform," nepotism and a claim to fame, working in their favor, such that the industry's Dauriats are happy to make "authors" of illiterate celebrities as they brush off a worthy effort by a newcomer because idiots will buy a book with a celebrity's name on it, and not a nobody's, no matter how brilliant (all while encouraging them to believe the fault lies with their writing "not being good enough").

Of course, that raises a very important question, namely "If aspiring authors have unreasonable ideas about this business, one can only wonder: where did they get them?" The answer is only partly the pop cultural crapola that so profoundly misrepresents what writers do, and how publishing works (all the crappy books and movies of our time about this subject offer less truth than does Balzac's great novel of two centuries ago), but also the hard reality that a great many interests profit by exploiting the hopes of would-be authors. Just think of the vast business of books, magazines, web sites, seminars, workshops which bring in revenue by taking such authors' money. Think of higher education, with its Masters of Fine Arts programs--which are central to the revenue and the hiring of English departments, the persons running which, contrary to stupid clichés about the genteel residents of "ivory towers," are as cynically and ruthlessly entrepreneurial as mobsters where Money is at issue. (As one who has been there, you can take my word for it that the colleges wouldn't be able to get all those composition classes that English teachers view with as much distaste as do the students taught at the rates they do if there weren't adjuncts thinking "I'm just doing this crappy job 'til I make it as an author.") Many joke that the withered remains of the once vital fiction magazine scene endure mainly because of the people buying them and reading those magazines less out of interest in the content than research for the sake of attempting to publish in those magazines themselves, they hope, on the way to bigger and better things. And of course, the authors who have "made it," insistent that they made it on talent and hard work and nothing else in line with the egotistic stupidity standard among the "successful" in America, encourages this view as well.

Moreover, those whining functionaries do nothing to disabuse the aspiring authors of these illusions. Quite the contrary, they reinforce them at every turn. After all, who is it that publishes those "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" books? Publishers, of course. Meanwhile, on the web sites and other places where an aspiring author is likely to encounter these functionaries' presentation of themselves to the world feeds their expectation that, yes, these people are willing to look at material people submit to them through the procedures they prescribe, and taking the trouble to follow the instructions will have its reward, for these people have slush piles for a reason, and if seeing something of quality will show it some respect. They even attempt to affirm this in those rejection letters, the recipient of which is encouraged to think not that this was a hopeless endeavor given what it is that publishing actually does and how they stand in relation to it but that the match between their manuscript and this particular agency wasn't quite right. It is even the case that a literary agent's form rejection letter will have accompanying it an ad for their own "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" book, which they hope the author they have just soul-crushingly rejected will actually buy--the existence of which book, written by people who should know better than anyone else exactly how things stand in this world, testimony to their personal investment in the cruel exploitation of those authors' hopes.

That Big Publishing's functionaries feed these illusions, and exploit these illusions for profit, makes their complaining that people have these illusions and act on them entirely illegitimate--the more in as when they do so Big Publishing's gatekeepers (whine as they do about being called gatekeepers, that is exactly what they are) treat them so high-handedly and insultingly, to such destructive effect. After all, let us not forget just what hopes these people are exploiting because of what the dream of authorship represents to so many, not merely the realization of the whim of "seeing their name in print" but, as Upton Sinclair dared to acknowledge, their one shot at escape from the scarcely bearable life of a nobody, such that the hope of that escape and their glittering vision of the life they will have if they do is the only thing getting them through the do. And let us not forget what I have described means in this context, that pursuing that desperate hope the business instead subjects them to the misery and despair of a Lucien de Rubempre and a Martin Eden (two protagonists, mind you, whose involvement with the vileness of the literary world ultimately saw each of those men die by their own hand). The bitterness and the enmity of the author cannot be properly understood without acknowledging how it comes from that desperate hope, and the way in which they have been deceived by the lies Big Publishing and its cohorts spread, made a mark of its own, and as a result brutalized by the "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" racket. Alas, acknowledging that would mean taking responsibility, whereas in this society the respectable abide by the rule that with all the power comes none of the responsibility, and vice-versa, that those who have none of the power have all of the responsibility, and so deserve all of the scorn the world can fling in their faces. Acknowledging it would also mean acknowledging the Big Lie of the "You can do it too!" aspirationalism pervading the entirety of American culture for two centuries now, and that other Big Lie it sustains that this is a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Of course, very, very few have ever had the courage to speak honestly about that.

What Query Letters Really Ask of Their Recipients

It seems that those who think about such things conventionally think a "query" letter sent by an author looking for a publisher to an editor at a publishing house, or a literary agent they hope will connect them with a publishing house, is asking the recipient "Is this a good book? Yes or no?" with a rejection letter meaning "No, it isn't a good book," and this the sole possible explanation for their declining to publish it.

However, what the query letter really asks, whether the author realizes it or not, is "Are you willing to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in publishing my book? Yes or no?" It is, in short, a business proposition, and a "No" not a verdict on the book's quality, but whether in the circumstances the recipient finds the particular business proposition more attractive than the others available to them at the moment, only a very limited number of which they could take up even were they all attractive. Unsurprisingly their answer to a stranger of whom they have heard, and of whom it seems no one else has heard, asking them that question is almost certain to be "No, we will not invest hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars in publishing your book"--regardless of what the author has written, the issue likely to be decided even before the matter of quality could even be considered.

Why does the profoundly misleading conventional view of submissions to publishers as being a question about a book's quality rather than the business proposition that is publishing it endure? The reasons are numerous. The most obvious is that making clear the business-like nature of the matter is injurious to the hopes so many have of becoming authors, and thus also injurious to a very lucrative business of exploiting authors' hopes, ranging from publishers hawking "how to" books, to college English departments selling Masters of Fine Arts degrees, to underemployed authors supplementing the sub-poverty "wages of writing" with teaching in and out of "the Academy."

However, beyond that there is the reality that people are generally afraid to speak of the really important things in any area of life, and instead provide them with a bodyguard of irrelevancies. In a society where "economic self-interest" prevails--where, as a practical matter, the view those who have money take of whether or not a thing will be consistent with or opposed to their further enriching themselves as much and as quickly as possible decides what will and will not be done--people are at best squeamish, and often outright cowardly, about discuss hard business realities in all their crassness and cruelty. This is all the more in as they are scared out of their tiny, tiny minds of seeming to criticize the crass, cruel realities of business at all, because that would make them heretics in a land where Anti-Communism is, as Herman and Chomsky had it, the "national religion," and in the United States in particular "You can do it too!" aspirationalism is so much a substitute for any genuine outcome-and-not-"opportunity" consideration of the have-nots. This squeamishness-to-cowardice certainly applies to the nexus between business and culture, given that whether the arts can flourish where business concerns predominate is something about which pretty much anyone who isn't a complete idiot is skeptical at best.

Meanwhile the romance of the arts, literary art included, is central not only to the amour propre of the culture industry's functionaries (few of whom are as honest with themselves, let alone others as Dauriat about what it is they really do), but also to their "moving product." Publishers do not sell books so much as they do authors, and it is important to them that the public think of their authors not as the often mediocre or worse stringers together of words and sentences they often are who just happened to "get the breaks," but rare and special talents, figures touched by magic, "geniuses," such that if they come to their local bookstore they should buy a copy and wait in line to get it signed by the Great Genius themselves. That marketing imperative does not conduce to telling the truth that a great many authors are not just commercially but psychologically invested in this illusion, all the more reason that that category of human not much given to critical thought to begin with are the last to question little inclined to question it--even when what they sign as they so smugly sit in that bookshop is, as is so often the case with those who have been on the bestseller lists long, trash their publishers arranged to be ghostwritten for them to take the fullest possible advantage of the Name that they have one way or other ended up with for as long as works "by" them continue to sell.

Blaming the Victim on the Eve of the Web's Maximum Era

Contrary to the cyber-utopian stupidities championed by market populism-peddling corporate PR hacks, those whose economic function it is to platform the views of such vile specimens, and those people stupid enough to repeat such persons' lies, the playing field was never level, the game never meritocratic where trying to reach an audience online is concerned. Those who had deep pockets, powerful allies and privileged sympathizers were well-positioned to win--with the outrageously hyped possibility of the Little Guys competing against the Big Guys on the basis of the possibility of online "discovery," the "long tail" and perhaps "going viral" never better than slim, the equivalent of hoping to buy a winning Powerball ticket really, and as is generally the case with lotteries, for most a cruel disappointment. And it has all only got worse since. Indeed, these days the game, ever more "winner take all," can seem to be running its course as small bloggers, if never getting what they hoped for from their effort, find their traffic collapsing from quarter to quarter with each new round of "algorithmic" changes. And where many of them had once really been part of the dialogue in some degree they have increasingly wondered if there even is a dialogue anymore, and they are not after all on a "dead Internet," where all the humans have already departed and it is just artificial intelligence-generated sites out there being crawled by bots, or even if this hasn't happened yet this will soon be the case with what I have written of as the Internet's "Maximum Era" upon us.

Of course, this is not the Establishment version of the matter. "The major platforms pushing the small Internet sites to extinction, you say? Heavens, no!" they protest. They are simply trying to give the Internet user the best possible experience by separating the wheat from the chaff all as if anything they are helping the small-timer, who need only create quality "content" to succeed.

Alas, even the dumbest of us should on merely hearing such drivel recognize it as the same obscenely stupid and stupidly obscene claptrap that those complacent about the chase after success have peddled for as long as it has been around--as we can confirm given that the basis for judging what is wheat and what is chaff uses criteria ("brand names," backlinks, etc.) ever more favorable to the better-funded and longer-established players rather than the up-and-comer, and ever more remote from the "quality" of the content they present. Garbage on a too-big-to-fail platform (for indeed even mainstream media's supposedly most reputable newspapers and magazines are drowning the web and its users in garbage) will be moved to the top of the search results--the more in as it lays out the money for "sponsored" results--while gold on a blog by a nobody will likely not be indexed at all. Meanwhile, as they defend the vicious practice they not only hawk that bankrupt aspirationalism but engage in the all too familiar cruelty of telling those cheated in the rigged game that they have no one to blame but themselves for their unhappy lot for they "were just not good enough" as a prelude to telling anyone who would dare question the justice of the game's terms that they are not merely a "loser" and a "failure," but a "taker" if not a "scavenger", or even an "unhuman." For the time being, of course, few but those bloggers and others directly victimized by this process really care, but even those who have little sympathy for these groups should remember that this is part of the bigger enshittification of online life that touches the life of every web user, which is to say, everybody who has not elected to flee modernity for the wilderness and hide from it under a rock--and again, entirely in line with the ways in which those who flatter themselves that they are winners not only demean everyone else, but employ that demeaning of them as a tactic to compel their acquiescence in their victimization by this grift.

Richard Marcinko and the Cult of the Navy SEALs

A few decades back the U.S. Army's Special Warfare troops popularly known as "Green Berets" after their distinctive headgear were the most celebrated of the country's special operations forces units. Robin Moore wrote his bestseller about America's special forces in the Vietnam War specifically about, as the title made clear, The Green Berets, and John Wayne wrote, directed and starred in the hit film adaptation, further popularizing the force, helping make the Green Berets the go-to unit for writers wanting to impress their readers with their hero's association with an elite military unit. Thus Don Pendleton made his War Against the Mafia protagonist Mack "the Executioner" Bolan a Green Beret. David Morrell's Rambo was a Green Beret, and so did he most certainly remain in the film adaptation of his work. Air Force veteran and martial artist Carlos Ray Norris became the personage we know as "Chuck Norris" in large part by playing Green Berets--certainly in the first proper Chuck Norris-as-we-know-him-today film Good Guys Always Wear Black, and still more in his (and Cannon Films') greatest screen success, the Missing In Action trilogy, where he was Colonel James Braddock. Billy Jack was a Green Beret too, and so were the heroes of The A-Team (so named because they were formerly the members of a Green Beret A-Team). And of course, so were the many, many lesser imitations of all these figures, all as Green Berets were prominent in other ways, "paramilitary culture" icons Barry Sadler and Bo Gritz both, significantly, former Green Berets.

The U.S. Navy SEa-Air-Land (SEAL) units were not entirely absent from popular culture. Thomas Magnum of Magnum P.I. was a Navy SEAL, and so too Mitch Buchannon from Baywatch. The Navy SEALs also had some film appearances, as in Disney paramilitary-action-for-kids film The Rescue, and the SEALs' own would-be Top Gun-type film, creatively titled . . . Navy SEALs. Still, those very examples prove just how much less cultural cachet the SEALs had relative to the Green Berets in the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, in a situation that can seem the reverse of today's. Obviously that had a lot to do with the SEALs drawing the assignment of raiding Osama bin Laden's hideout and the adulation that followed from that, not least how for several years afterward a big movie lionizing the SEALs with a portrayal of what were at least supposed to be their real-life activities was an annual Hollywood tradition, producing the blockbusters Zero Dark Thirty, Lone Survivor and American Sniper, as well as a multitude of more thoroughly fictional portrayals like Act of Valor (which dramatized a typically made-in-Hollywood plot but had the novelty of using real-life SEALs as performers in the film)--and two television series' (the History Channel's SIX, and CBS' SEAL Team, which starred David Boreanaz and ran for seven seasons). Meanwhile it seems at times that you can't look at the coverage of the country's electoral races without coming across mention of a former SEAL running for office somewhere, and often getting it (seven members of the SEALs in the current Congress), as they frequently lean heavily on their Navy SEAL image in the campaign, sometimes more than they ought to have done. (Consider, for example former Missouri governor Eric Greiten's parody-proof 2022 ad.)

Still, the SEALs were gaining in prominence a long time before that, with their profile already rising in the '90s (as seen in The Rock, and G.I. Jane), and Richard Marcinko's emergence as a public figure rather important to that. The founder of the famous SEAL Team Six Marcinko published his (ghostwritten) autobiography back in 1992, which, aided by a storm of media publicity, became a major bestseller (making the New York Times hardcover list for 15 weeks), and launched a series of (ghostwritten) action-adventure novels billed as "sequels" telling of "missions" Marcinko undertook after his official departure from the Navy that could not be presented to the public in any other way (Rogue Warrior: Red Cell et. al.) also having their bestseller list presence. In spite of that, and advisory work on various TV shows and films (including, besides the expected shoot 'em up action-adventure stuff, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), Marcinko's adventures never got the big-screen treatment, but there was a video game (titled, of course, Rogue Warrior), all as Marcinko parlayed the publicity and the image it brought him into a talk radio show and a career as a writer and speaker on business leadership-management-team-building stuff for executives who like to pretend they are conquerors. Yet it also seemed the case that in spite of Marcinko doing so much to put the SEALs at the forefront of public consciousness the figure was, in exactly those years when the celebration of the SEALs shot into the stratosphere, pretty marginal in the whole business, and it does not seem unreasonable to say something about why that was--the more in as it can seem telling indeed of American attitudes toward the armed forces over the period.

As those familiar with Marcinko may recall the title of his autobiography was Rogue Warrior, foregrounding the idea of Marcinko not as the impeccable member of his service but that archetype of the then-still-very-much-alive paramilitary culture, the swaggering individualist, the "conformist nonconformist" who breaks the rules in the course of doing what must be done to keep the public safe, infuriating the cowardly higher-ups anxious to keep up political appearances so that they are ever out to get him in so much Anti-Establishment-from-the-right storytelling. Certainly this was the case in Marcinko's account of his conduct of the "Red Cell" operation, through simulated raids showing up the security of Navy facilities again and again in ways that outraged a good deal of the brass--all as, to go by what Marcinko says, they framed him for taking kickbacks from a grenade manufacturer, after which he did time in prison and ultimately left the Navy under a cloud. The Dirty Harry of the U.S. Navy, this was undeniably part of his cachet, and so too the extent to which, in this era in which the right bemoaned the supposed dominance of political correctness, and being politically incorrect seemed to so many a daring act of rebellion, the extent to which the exceedingly un-p.c. Marcinko, if undeniably an officer, did not seem a "gentleman" in any sense of the term, and indeed held that in his line of work it was a good and even necessary thing for a SEAL officer to not be a gentlemen. Reading Marcinko's biography, or his novels, one finds Marcinko reminding them again and again that SEALs and those at the tip of the spear whose work is killing people and breaking things generally live out on the edge, that it is a dark, wild place naturally inhabited by dark, wild people, with Marcinko apparently not joking when he told them that his old mentor Roy Boehm sought candidates for the unit in the brig because that way he knew they had at least a little much-needed "felony and larceny" in them, in contrast with the straight arrows who wouldn't cut it out where they were headed--with all that meant for what he thought about the quashing of aviator careers by the Tailhook scandal, or aspirations to making the armed forces a "female-friendly" environment, at a time in which even the generally stridently right-wing members of the circle of prominent military thriller writers to a man broke ranks with the Pat Buchanans to support the idea of "women in combat" (in the case of Army officer Harold Coyle's Scott Dixon thrillers, even women in ground combat, as he made Nancy Kozak a series character from Trial by Fire forward).

What served a Marcinko well with the audience for paramilitary culture arguably served him less well in a period in which the news and entertainment media lined up behind what many in the government hoped would be a looking-back-at-the-Greatest-Generation-through-rose-tinted-glasses World War II-style promotional effort for the War on Terror. That meant, at least at a surface, official, level, not anti-Establishment right-wingerism of the post-Vietnam Dirty Harry variety, but classic True Blue patriotic pro-Establishment center-right "bipartisanship" and "unity" behind a hard right line that, however Dirty Harry it could be in practice, made blatant Dirty Harryism not just unseemly but injurious to the mood they wanted to foster, and at any rate superfluous because the right-wingers were getting what they wanted, with for the time being everyone behind it (or so marginalized or scared into silence they couldn't give the lie to the image of bipartisan unity). Meanwhile, the more in as feminism was so much on board with the War on Terror, and so much a rationale for what was being done, a Marcinko-like attitude toward gender wasn't helpful. So (at least where what was put before the cameras was concerned) the officer and a gentleman was in, the rogue warrior out. That the particular rogue warrior in question, whether innocent or guilty of the charges made against him, had left under a cloud, with some powerful enemies behind him; that the wars in Southeast Asia, and even the "post-Vietnam" period, so significant in Marcinko's story, were becoming, as one Naval Academy instructor had it, as remote as the Peloponnesian War to the cohort of young people just then preparing for the grave duties of a commission; that Marcinko had already had much more than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame while newer folks like Marcus Luttrell were getting theirs; could not but have further diminished the media's eagerness to get him on their show, and indeed encouraged many to see Marcinko as "yesterday's man," the more in as they were less than sure that he could even be called "yesterday's hero," especially as Marcinko never seems to have tried to "clean up his image" or make concessions to changing social attitudes (Marcinko, apparently, never changing his mind about his old unit being no place for a woman). And even as the early World War II redux vision of the War on Terror (very quickly) unraveled, and the Dirty Harry attitude was often evident not just in the subtext where it had always been present, but very conspicuously in the text, some of this stuck. Thus Marcinko's post-military media figure career continued, but his cachet never again became what it had been in the '90s as today the preference for a sanitized, officer-and-a-gentleman image of even the roughest and toughest military units endures in a country where even those most eager for bigotry and brutality expect that their real-life Navy SEALs should be suitable for presentation as the leads in squeaky-clean Doris Day-ish Hallmark Channel romantic movies, and reacted with great hostility to any suggestion that they were not, such that the darker side of these things comes up only in exposés of the kind investigative journalists like Matthew Cole publish in alternative media outlets like The Intercept. If often giving mere hints of how ugly things really get in that world, the authors of such still get denounced as unpatriotic, left-wing attacks on national heroes, and for the most part seem to have had little effect on the celebratory, post-2011 image of the Navy SEALs and the special forces generally among the American public.