Did Celebrity Narcissism Kill Celebrity?

In discussing the decline of celebrity it is a commonplace to remark the many, many "faux pas" of the famous, and how all these have been amplified in the age of a 24/7 news cycle heavy on infotainment, and then online life with its social media and propensity for three hour tempests-in-a-teacup over absolutely nothing that all the same have their effect on perceptions. The narcissism of many a celebrity has been a factor here, of course, but I suppose that where most apparently identify this with a celebrity's more obviously unpleasant behavior--their exploding in rage on some occasion when the help didn't jump fast enough for the sake of catering to one of their petty whims (Coming next summer: Kanye West on a Plane!), or perhaps flakily throw their pampered existences in our faces in an Ugh-I-can't-pretend-to-be-someone-who-makes-twenty-five-thousand-a-year sort of way (says the literally-won-an-Oscar-for-pretending Gwyneth Paltrow)--this has not been its only dimension by any means, with much else that they do reflecting the same narcissism, and if not quite so obviously, making these figures wearisome.

One way is the insistence of so many of them on the whole world acknowledging them as three-dimensional human beings, and indeed, brilliant Renaissance Men and Women blessed with all the talents. Not content to be seen simply as a Master Thespian, and star of stage, screen and television, they insist that each and every human being on the planet Earth also validate them as, for example, an equally gifted and accomplished writer, director, musician, painter, martial artist, scientist, aviator, political analyst, humanitarian, activist, philanthropist, and of course, "entrepreneur." I don't have a problem with their doing other things, of course--it's a fine thing to try one's hand at different things, to stretch themselves, and finer still when people succeed at it, as sometimes they do, and few have so much opportunity. Nor are they obliged to be secretive about their "extracurriculars." Rather the issue is how strident they so often are about demanding the public's acknowledgment of their accomplishment on the basis of the most marginal, even flimsy, claims in all of these other areas, in spite of, again, their extreme privilege conferring on them opportunities of which many an aspirant scarcely dares to dream (as seen in the case of James Franco, the star of Zeroville and Why Him?, director of such masterpieces of world cinema as Future World). And of course, when they have been something else of note they never lets anyone forget. (Ever notice how it seems that Arnold Schwarzenegger can't go for two seconds in an interview without shoehorning into the conversation that he was "Governor of California?" As when, telling us that he wasn't in Terminator 4 reminding us entirely gratuitously that this was "Because I was Governor of California?")

Meanwhile they very readily decide that their life's journey is so unique, and reflective of such an exceptional personality, that while still far from retirement they not only insist on putting out a memoir, but make it double as a self-help book, a guide to living for all the Little People--in which doing the extreme opposite of what they apparently intend they actually reveal themselves not to have grown one iota as a human being since they, for example, started that feud with their colleague on the set of that sitcom they were in thirty years ago, before going on to ruin what was supposed to be the Big Night they had awaited for decades and pressed for by throwing a years-long tantrum by slapping the host of the awards ceremony right on camera before a disbelieving world that initially thought it was just a stunt to enliven a ceremony in desperate need of enlivening, and then having to devote their acceptance speech to a humiliating excuse for an apology as they hold their little statuette, with the result that it's pretty much all anyone can remember about that particular year's Oscars--including who it was that won Best Actor. (I suppose you can supply the relevant example yourself in this case, certainly to go by how in the run-up to the release of Bad Boys 4 people were, of course, asking "Does he get slapped in the movie?")

Even paying as little attention to the stupidity of public figures as I possibly can without hanging it all up and living completely off of the grid just yet I feel myself hit over the head with it again and again, and I don't imagine myself the only one to feel that way. But what seems to me even more relevant from the standpoint of how this may have undermined celebrity is how much it is at odds with that larger-than-life one-dimensionality that is the foundation of the concept--or even just the old adage that it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open one's mouth and remove all doubt. The result is that these fools so favored by fortune are not just too overexposed to allow for the old mystique, but also personally too obtuse, too unruly, too "Me, me, me" to adopt the public persona that celebrity conventionally required--ironically, even though the fame of so many of these personages literally rests on their claim to being able to play a part better than us nobodies watching at home, endlessly being assured that it isn't the nepotism of which they were such colossal beneficiaries but the raw talent and "hard work" that put them in a position to annoy not just a limited circle of personal acquaintances but the whole world with their idiocies.

The Rhythms and Texture of the TV of Yesteryear

Older TV--TV from before our prestige TV-dominated era--certainly had its particular rhythms and texture that, even when the show isn't black-and-white, or its age given away by ostentatiously period elements (like a cast swathed in eye-offending polyester), is produced by those elements of television production that one is much less likely to see in any recent show. The often leisurely opening credits sequences presenting the cast in a montage set to a theme song. The narratives that would unfold with their dramatic beats timed to coincide with cuts to commercial and run their course within the span of a single episode's running time (save for those occasions when we would realize that the story couldn't be wrapped up in the very little time remaining and, sure enough, the words TO BE CONTINUED appeared on the screen in the final, frozen, frame). The tendency of such narrative toward a procedural format (the cops cracking the case of the week, the doctors resolving the medical emergency of the week), and frequently to the making of episodes that were a 45-minute low-budget version of some feature film "everyone" had already seen (which movie had almost always "done it better," usually much, much better). The "canned audience" track that not only automated the whole range of claqueur's sounds but enabled the viewer to experience that range at home as if they were in a theater (as immortalized in such masterpieces as "Sounds of the '80s Studio Audience").

Alongside the rhythms and texture of single episodes were the rhythms and texture of whole seasons, and even a show's run. Their fall-to-May seasons with their predictable alternation between new episodes and reruns organized around premieres, finales and "sweeps" periods, the latter of which tended to promise something "special" to the audience such as some character being in mortal danger and maybe not making it, their enlivening particular episodes with "special guest stars" (perhaps playing themselves, perhaps not), their seasonal episodes where some character learned "The true meaning of winter" of somesuch, episodes where a character asked "Remember when?" and started the whole group reminiscing in a manner dramatized by bits of past episodes and we realized that rather than a "proper" new episode what we were getting was (yet another) budget-stretching clip show--and of course, a lot of "Will they, won't they?" crapola about a pair of characters of whom one is obviously romantically interested in the other from episode one but due to an endless series of obstacles that the writers all too obviously contrived solely for the purpose of keeping them apart (she's finally realized she has feelings for him, too, but here he is dating a different woman, until he isn't anymore but now she's involved with someone else) they don't have their first date until season seven (often, after the audience had long since stopped caring). There was too how, as shows wore on, they would replace audience favorite characters and actors with new ones that people usually liked less than the original and in the end never got around to accepting, and in the process (just like those gimmicky episodes where at the end we found out that "It Was All a Dream") made it all the more obvious to everyone but the desperately-in-denial network executives that a show had run longer than it ought to have done.

All if this must seem antediluvian today in that way that draws sneers from those overgrown obnoxious "cool kids" who dominate professional reviewing of pop cultural crap--all as someone to whom it isn't probably wouldn't say that they loved all of it. (I certainly won't.) Still, even its worst wasn't a complete barrier to laughter, dramatic substance or intelligent storytelling, just as those of us who can see through the claquing-gone-mad of the critics, the cinema grade-caliber production values and the pretentious tricks and turns that inspire such respect in the Midcult-gobbling middlebrow mind to what prestige TV has actually offered (or not), the absence of those things do not guarantee laughter, dramatic substance or intelligent storytelling. Such that people continue to watch many of them today, over and over again, as the ballyhooed prestige TV shows after airing their last episode commonly cease to hold any interest for those who had once (or so we were told) breathlessly followed--leaving the critics scratching their heads over their continuations in some other form's failing to draw an audience, as when, contrary to the idea that The Sopranos was going to replace oxygen as the thing we need to breathe in order to live, few felt that they had to go back for more when The Many Saints of Newark hit theaters.

The Victim of Marginal Worthiness

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky showed in their classic of news media criticism Manufacturing Consent, a single critical detail can crash the supposed worthiness of a victim--with their examples showing how the mainstream media's regard for the life of a Catholic priest murdered by state forces plummets 99 percent if the state forces responsible for the murder were Anti-Communist rather than Communist, all as a great many victims of a great many contemporary evils would be considered even less "worthy" than even the priest killed by a right-wing death squad.

There are an enormous number of angles to the matter of this long spectrum extending from absolute and extreme worthiness to the kind of absolute unworthiness that represents not a 99 percent+ drop in attention from one end of the spectrum to the other, but a 100 percent drop--because their sufferings rate no acknowledgment whatsoever (as is, arguably, the lot of the vast majority of categories of people on this planet, and their causes of death). One that may escape the notice it ought to have is the situation of the victim who is not totally dismissed as unworthy, but perhaps enjoying a very marginal worthiness, and straining to hold on to that and improve on that--and the standard of behavior expected of them even by those who are prepared to say in public that they are not totally unworthy.

It seems to me that one can think about the difference between those who are treated as unquestionably worthy and those who are treated as only marginally worthy in this way: Who is allowed to show anger, even rage, over how they have been mistreated, and who is required at all times to display the utmost restraint in the face of the severest insults and provocations rather than responding to their tormentors the same way they have spoken to them, ever taking the "high road" as others snipe at them from the "low?" While no one argues for hatred as a healthy or constructive emotion, who is allowed to admit that the abused are apt to feel hatred toward those who have abused them, that one can bear such feeling even when they are fighting justly for their rights, and that others must show some understanding of that--and who destroys whatever sympathy others had for them with the least hint that they may harbor any impure feeling whatsoever? In short, when the victim in question lapses in "right" thought, speech and action, whom do we make excuses for as we continue to insist on their worthiness, and whom do we subject to cold, sanctimonious moralizing when they show themselves an ordinary mortal rather than the saint we require them to be if we are to show them any consideration at all?

It is those who are deemed unquestionably worthy who get all the understanding, while those on the edge of worthiness and trying not to get further away from that edge of whom the adherents of conventional wisdom make a non-negotiable demand for impeccable conduct, while forgiving no failures to adhere to the standard whatsoever--perhaps because they are looking for any excuse to not care, or perhaps simply be frank about their not caring, and getting others to not care, and very well aware that holding the victim to an impossible double standard must inevitably provide them with that excuse they so obviously want, indeed can even seem desperate to have? Because they have an agenda that open indifference, or opposition, and promotion of the same in others, will serve? And indeed, in their relentless search after excuses to condemn, not only act like a bearer of hatred, but actually hate them, another enemy of the victims differing from those who openly attack them in that openness (with the feeling likely to be less well-hidden than they think it is)? Yet those in that position of "marginal worthiness" are very likely to feel that they have no practical alternative to playing a cruel game rigged against them as well as they can--in this way as in so many others "choice" really "dilemma," and least-worst the best they can hope for from the selection of options available to them.

Hard Evidence of the Declining Relevance of Blogging?

According to Wikipedia, "[a]n n-gram is a sequence of n adjacent symbols in a particular order"--for instance, that particular order of adjacent symbols that are the letters making up a word or phrase, which is the kind of sequence with which I am concerned at the moment. The Google Books' "Ngram Viewer" measures the frequency of the use of a word or phrase in the vast body of digitized books in that system over time, which the Viewer presents in the form of a graph for the share the word or phrase of the amassed texts by year going all the way from 1800 to 2022. This makes looking at the figures the Viewer provides for particular keywords a handy way of seeing whether particular subjects or ideas have come to be more or less widely discussed over time which I have found consistent with my experience. For example, it seems telling that the Ngram viewer scores for the terms "woke," "new normal" and "remote work" exploded in recent years--and "narcissism" and "kakistocracy" too--all as usage of the term "democratic peace theory" fell hard over a period in which the end-of-history delusions of the post-Cold War period receded into the past.

Considering just where blogging stands in our online life today it seemed plausible that the Ngram viewer could provide some insight, and so I went ahead and plugged in "blog" and "blogosphere"--the latter term, denoting the totality of blogs, and those who interact with them, understood by its users to comprise a space, a culture both revealing and formative of public opinion in sufficient degree that what is going on in said "sphere" matters. As it happened the use of the word "blog" peaked in 2012 with a score of 0.00076, and plunged all the way through the following decade, with a score of 0.00057 for the last recorded year, 2022--a rough one-quarter drop in incidence. The fall in the usage of that derivative of "blog," "blogosphere," was even more pronounced. Peaking in 2011 with a score of 0.000028 in 2022 its score stood at 0.0000096--a two-thirds drop in incidence.

It does not seem wholly unreasonable to infer from this that blogs are less spoken of, and the blogosphere much less spoken of, by book authors after 2011-2012 because blogs singly and the blogosphere generally simply became less important to our online life afterward--the more in as this judgment would seem to align with a great deal of other information and analysis about the character of online life today. For the same reason I would imagine that the fall in the words' Ngram scores did not bottom out in 2022, but continued through 2023, 2024 and 2025, and that we will see this confirmed when scores become available for those years--and the years after them as the results of the search engine algorithm changes, the turning of many from search engines to answer engines, and a good many other developments in the way in which we access the web increasingly register in the ever-lagging analysis. This will not be because those developments will have compelled those who think about any relevant matter to think about the blog's importance, but simply because it will be less and less the case that the blog, let alone the collectivity of the blogosphere, will force themselves on their attention. Still less will they give any thought to the bigger story of which the withering of blogging is merely a part--namely the death of what little hope there had ever been for the democratization of participation in our cultural and political life via the "actually existing" web. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that the great majority of the members of that very small social stratum which is in a position to write books that may actually get read has never cared for that hope, indeed seen it as a threat, maligned it endlessly in their public statements, and I suspect, to the extent that they think about the matter at all now, gloat over what has come to pass as they hail the Overlords of Big Media and Big Tech whose, in lieu of a more accurate but less socially acceptable term, claqueurs and courtiers they are.

The Quirks of Clancy's Ryanverse on the Screen

Tom Clancy's heyday as a novelist was unquestionably in the 1980s, but the "Ryanverse" he created remains an on-screen presence decades later with Amazon's Jack Ryan series only recently wound up and much more of the Ryanverse supposed to be in the pipeline (not least, a film extending the series). As one might expect in all those decades the franchise has had its share of little oddities from the standpoint of cinematic and pop cultural history.

There is the way that, after making The Hunt for Red October Paramount decided to film Patriot Games with an older actor for what was supposed to be the prequel--a sixteen-years-older than Alec Baldwin Harrison Ford, pushing fifty as he played the "younger" Ryan after edging Baldwin out of a lead once again. (The prior time was in Working Girl, just a couple of years earlier.) There was the irony of star of the avant-garde, countercultural, post-punk Manhattan nightclub scene, face from edgy films like The Hunger and quirky ones like Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right, and audience-tantalizing narrator of HBO's sex-soaked Shock Video: Turn-On TV documentaries (how un-Clancy can you get?) Ann Magnuson playing that stereotype of espionage history and fiction, the lonely secretary susceptible to exploitation by a foreign "Romeo" in Clear and Present Danger (which, of course, is as un-Ann Magnuson as it gets). There was the odd notion of pairing William Shatner with Harrison Ford in the unrealized The Cardinal of the Kremlin. (Captain Kirk meets Han Solo! Great for publicity, great for jokes and laughs--but probably not what those who wanted the film taken seriously were hoping for.) There was how Harrison Ford's Air Force One could be mistaken for a Jack Ryan movie because Ford was playing the President that Ryan had just become in a big techno-thriller film. There was the decision to turn The Sum of All Fears into a rebooting prequel with Ryan as a "rookie," in spite of Ryan's seniority having been central to the resolution of the plot's central crisis--and one might add, the fact that Ben Affleck was so well-received in the role. (These were the now all but forgotten days before Gigli, and the horrible blow that far from brilliant but probably-not-really-worse-than-a-multitude-of-crappy-post-Tarantino-indie-crime-movies film dealt to many of the reputations involved, from which some bounced back--because, really, who could hate Jennifer Lopez on screen?--though alas poor Affleck never completely escaped the backlash even two decades on.)

There was the decision to reboot the franchise yet again in 2015, way, way after the brand wasn't what it used to be, without even a book on which to base the story--this entirely original tale simply using Ryan's name in the B-movieish title, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, while the producers' apparently thinking that making Ryan a rookie again would make it look less "dad thriller," cast Chris Pine as Ryan (instead of Captain Kirk meets Han Solo as Jack Ryan, it was Captain Kirk playing Jack Ryan!) with Sir Kenneth "Shakespeare for the Masses" Branagh not just playing the Russian villain but helming too--and the whole thing ultimately demoted from the would-be summer blockbuster launch the past three Ryanverse films got to a January dump month release. There was the long sequence of unlikely "Mr. Clarks," from Willem Dafoe to Liev Schreiber to Michael B. Jordan (the last in a Without Remorse perhaps unavoidably changed out of all recognition given that even in the '90s the original had been a piece of nostalgia). And of course, after all that, there was the idea of making Jim from The Office the Jack of the series that has been the most recent incarnation of the franchise. (Cue the jokes about Dwight being green with envy, a portrait of life at CIA headquarters where the cast talk to the camera in between office hijinks, and the Jim Halpert stare.)

One would expect it all to have been somewhat more remarked, but again, the brand (in spite of Amazon's recent success with it) just doesn't get the attention it used to, all as I'm not sure how many of those who comment from any sort of significant platform actually looked at Clancy's books--not just recently, but ever, such that I wonder just how many people looking at Patriot Games realize that it was a prequel. (Thrillers of this type tend to see their readerships erode fast and far when their profile drops, all as people are just plain reading less in general, and especially doing less light reading for entertainment.) Indeed, these days it is mainly old folks paying attention (it seems the streaming audience for Jim Halpert's turn as Jack Ryan is skewing strongly gray), the young, I imagine, knowing Clancy as a brand name in video games more than books, movies or TV. Still, the situation also reflects the way things get knocked around in adaptation, the vagaries of artists' careers (don't we want performers to be able to stretch themselves and surprise us?), and how strange such entertainment can look long after their day has passed (Jack Ryan, like so many other such figures, a creature of the Cold War, and only reminding us of that as he dealt with the aftermath of the conflict in a novel like The Bear and the Dragon).

Will There be an Audience for James Bond in 2028?

As the pandemic proved to be a lingering phenomenon I came to expect that it would mean a long-term structural change for the cinematic market through its changing of habits and shuttering of theaters. I doubted that expectation for a while after seeing what big hits Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun 2 and Avatar 2 became, and thought that the return of a pre-pandemic-style release slate in 2023 would see the business bounce back completely or close to it--then as 2023, and 2024, and now 2025 proceeded, saw that there had indeed been long-term structural change, with American box office grosses down 40 percent from their 2015-2019 level for two years running and the international market too taking what seems an equally bad hit. With Americans now going to the movies about twice a year instead of the 3-4 times seen before tentpoles became a much riskier proposition, the fate of franchises like the recently triumphant Marvel Cinematic Universe exemplary of the situation. An occasional blockbuster of the conventional type can make as much as ever it did (as the aforementioned films show), but underperformance was much more common than before, with the list of undeniable catastrophic flops mounting (The Flash, Captain Marvel 2, etc.), as the successes proved to be more targeted and frankly fresher hits (from a Taylor Swift concert movie, to our video game adaptations, to an Oppenheimer or a Sinners)--with this going even for movies that may at first glance look like ordinary blockbusters, like Deadpool & Wolverine, a colossal success by even pre-pandemic standards and indeed a real-terms best performance for the 25-year old X-Men/Deadpool universe.

None of this bodes well for the current plans for "Bond 26," which going by everything said about it is intended to be another big-budgeted tentpole aimed at a general audience of exactly the kind failing to pay off, all as this particular franchise looks especially chancy given the increasingly exhausted look of the "spy-fi" genre (consider the decline of the Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises), all as Bond appears even more vulnerable than 007 these days.

No comparable franchise has leaned so heavily on nostalgia for so long as this one has (falling back on it to help prop up a reboot whose runners initially tried to cut their links with the original series, from Skyfall forward), while it was painfully apparent from the audience response to No Time to Die that the young had pretty much long since lost interest in that particular hero, a fact that contributed to the movie's having the lowest real-terms North American gross of a Bond movie since Licence to Kill way back in 1989. (Indeed, it seems fair to say that while the reboot undeniably pleased a lot of critics and made a lot of money, where that important measure for a neverending franchise that is winning a new generation to the character is concerned it has to be regarded as a failure, and a predictable one given that where it wasn't running on nostalgia it was running on borrowed ideas.) The result is that when 2028 rolls around very few of those in the two "24 and under" quadrants are likely to have any personal recollection of seeing a Bond movie in an actual theater, with all that implies for any appeal based on prior attachment. Meanwhile it is hard to picture anything making this figure, way back in 1962 already an update of what was in 1953 an update of the already then very stale stuff of Duckworth Drew and Bulldog Drummond, "relevant" today, even the route of self-awareness and self-parody that, for example, worked so well for 2024's Deadpool movie long since exhausted here, nowhere left to go with the big screen spy parody, or even parody of this particular spy (whose adventures had their touch of parody from the start, with Charles Feldman already having Peter Sellers essay the role way back in 1967).

Indeed, the extreme challenge of making a Bond movie salable now on the scale that it needs to be in today's saturated yet contracting market--something M. Bezos might have considered before plunking down so much money for control of the franchise, but hey, why actually think in an age in which Ms. Bernanke, Yellen and Powell decided that speculators and other asset-mongers should have free money forever, the cost to everyone else be damned--is probably why even with the project supposedly underway for half a year, with two prominent producers (Amy Pascal, David Heyman) and a Big Name director (Denis Villeneuve) attached, we have yet to see made public the slightest hint of anything resembling an actual idea as to what they all mean to do with the franchise that will let them deliver the hit the real-life would-be world-controlling billionaire with his own personal space program expects. (The combination of cacophonous noise with the utter lack of signal in fact seems to have had talk of the much smaller event of a new Bond video game "trending" online to a degree it would ordinarily not have done because between the contentless publicity for the film and the cynical copy of the articles about the game they were made to think the Bond of Bond: First Light had actually been cast as the Bond of "Bond 26.") My guess: rather than holding back until the time is right to deliver a big and brilliant surprise Ms. Pascal of Sony e-mail leak fame, Mr. Villeneuve and company are going to give us more pretentious, downbeat, James Bond. In the process this will likely only underline how unbelievably tired the game of making not just Bond movies but shamelessly milking any and every franchise out there has become as, befitting an epoch of rentier dominion, those defending the decision point to "back catalog value" as offering at least a silver lining to the big dark cloud that will hang over the series runners when the receipts are in.

Has the Ceiling Fallen for Superhero Films?

2025 was supposed to be a year of recovery for Hollywood generally, and the superhero film genre particularly, with Marvel seizing on the undeniable smash that Deadpool & Wolverine was at the box office in the summer of 2024 with a new Captain America, a New Avengers, and a daring reimagining of the Fantastic Four (third time's the charm!), while Warner Bros. was launching its reboot of the DC universe with Superman.

Of course, there were those who were skeptical about the bullish press--as I was about the year generally, the superhero film more specifically, and particularly the claqueurs' insistence that the Deadpool movie was proof that "Marvel's back!" But as the fact that you have come across this view not in the Penske Press but on a blog of the type very much an endangered species in the Internet's Maximum Era, no one of real weight in Hollywood or the claqueurs who dutifully represent their views to the world at large cared to air such an opinion in public. Of course, as usual these days the Establishment view proved wrong, the view of the dissenters right, as all four superhero movies disappointed. Even with prices in 2025 about 25 percent higher than in 2019 according to a Consumer Price Index that almost certainly underestimates it the movies made between $382 million and $617 million, and took in less than $1.94 billion altogether. Putting it in 2019 terms the biggest success didn't quite make the half billion dollar mark, while the average take was more like $400 million, versus the billion-plus bucks that were commonplace at the time.

There is no way to spin that as a success by comparison with the grosses superhero films so regularly scored not just in Marvel's Phase Three glory days, but the "real" grosses of such films through the twenty-first century as you recall when you look at the consistent successes of Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man, as well as the X-Men, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Aquaman series' at their strongest commercially, and for that matter, the colossal financial investment of the studios in all of these films that makes a lot more sense when that billion-dollar gross is a possibility. But that was how things went during the year--even with most of these films frankly being well-received by critics, and those moviegoers who bothered to show up, so, no, the lame "There's no superhero movie fatigue, just bad superhero movie fatigue" line won't fly, while the admitted backlashes against both Captain America 4 and Superman probably ought not be overrated as factors in this decline. (We've seen worse before, not always to much effect.) This is all the more the case in that it is all too consistent with what I have been saying over and over and over again, namely that the long-eroding box office has shrunken structurally and sharply post-pandemic, that if you want people to show up to your movie they really have to be excited for it, and that large more casual audience tentpoles used to be able to draw in with some regularity just cannot be counted upon anymore.

"But what about Deadpool?" the doubter may splutter. Again I insist that Deadpool did so well in 2024 not as a "four quadrant" tentpole for everybody but as a movie playing to a very enthusiastic, if also very large, cult and giving those fans what they want rather than trying to be a broader crowd-pleaser. In the absence of Deadpool-like devotion the ceiling would seem to have definitely fallen for the superhero film, with (I know full well it's a small data set, but it broadly aligns with my calculations about an overall market just 60 percent the size of the 2015-2019 average) $600 million about as good as it gets. Should American superhero films get their old opportunity in the China market (and that doesn't seem out of the question post-Zootopia 2) they might do better than that by supplementing their earnings elsewhere with more money from this market. Still, the game has changed, with this reaffirmed by the fact that it isn't just superhero films but big action movies of all types that are suffering, as we see with Avatar 3's take down significantly from that of the prior film in the series (which itself had a gross way down from that of the original), and the troubles of the spy-fi genre as seen in the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible movies (and it seems fair to say, the slowness with which the next Bond movie is coming along). And so rather than tentpoles the studios would do better to target smaller movies at smaller audiences and, by racking up lots of relatively large profits keep their businesses in business--a practice which does not necessarily rule out superhero movies, of course, even big-budget ones (it worked with Deadpool!), but makes the strategy that has prevailed for so long an ever-bigger money-loser likely to just put more red ink on books that already have so much of them that Hollywood as a whole can seem to be going the way of Enron.

The Compromises of '90s TV

Back amid the mostly "new network," cable and syndication-based '90s boom in science fiction television some have spoken of as a "golden age" for the genre in that medium--though one might do well to remember that this was, from the standpoint of those who value science fiction's more cerebral uses, at least as much a matter of quantity as of quality, there having been a plenitude of fare that was more lowbrow in nature. Indeed, in 1998 Gardner Dozois remarked in the "Summation" of the "year in science fiction" with which he introduces the editions of his annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies that the principal theme of science fiction television at the time seemed to be "Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt," for even as an identity politics-minded Hollywood's attempts to make female-led action movies a commonplace at the level of big-budget feature film fizzled (exemplified by Geena Davis' two flops, 1995's Cutthroat Island and 1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight) there was an abundance of such material on the small screen. As Dozois' phrasing in regard to "Women Kick Male Butt" indicates, this meant, from those more favorably disposed to the development, shows about "strong" and "empowered" women defying gender norms as they gave what some held to be an underserved female audience action-adventure "in their own flavor," with protagonists to which they could relate and who could embody their fantasies--all as those less favorably disposed (less often heard from in the "respectable" mainstream) saw this as a stridently "political" presentation of stories and images of "masculinized" women constantly fighting, defeating, dominating, humiliating males physically and in other ways amid much feminist Rah-Rah, with this not only going for their enemies but the helpmeets to which the "good" male characters were emasculatingly reduced in a misandrist and man-bashing spectacle. Still, along with the "Women Kick Male Butt" aspect there was the matter of the Women doing the Kicking being "Beautiful," with feminists delighted at the kicking of male butt by women less delighted at the way that the women doing the kicking so consistently conformed, often in very great degree, to conventional standards of feminine beauty and sexual attractiveness--the more in as many men were not unappreciative of the fact.

Thus looking at the combined package--"Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt"--it would seem no one was completely happy, but at the same time there was "something for everyone," and pleasing all of the people some of the time was what mattered in that media market. Thus did the vampire-slaying Buffy Summers' being a blond "Valley Girl," and the Warrior Princess Xena by any standard a very beautiful woman who was by no means desexualized, not bar feminists from singing hosannas over both characters--to the point of, in Buffy's case, starting a whole academic field in honor of the phenomenon! Meanwhile, if the gender politics were not what men might generally prefer, it was still action-packed television that didn't take itself too seriously, with a plenitude of "eye candy" for the male viewer, and as a result a fair number of men did watch.

Of course, such please-all-of-the-people-some-of-the-time compromises today seem a thing of the past. There is the fragmentation of the media that has producers so often going for a deep appeal to a narrow part of the audience--pleasing some of the people all the time--with changes in mainstream feminism factoring in here. If feminism would have been happier about "Women Kicking Male Butt" without the accent on the "Beautiful," and indeed even in the '90s sometimes quite vocal about disliking particular developments from that standpoint (they were delighted when the Star Trek franchise made the captain of the Voyager a woman, but rather less pleased when Jeri Ryan joined the crew in a catsuit in season four) male gaze-quashing feminism has become hegemonic within the mainstream media post-#MeToo. The particular concession to male viewers that was making the female protagonist of a show which might otherwise have had questionable male appeal conventionally sexy was thus far less acceptable to the makers of respectable opinion, and less often seen in an era in which less a Buffy the Vampire Slayer than a Bridgerton seems to exemplify the female-led and female-oriented small screen hit--the more in as action-adventure, even if there is still plenty of it about on television, just doesn't make the splash it used to, regardless of the gender politics of a given show. Part of that may be the media's fixation on Midcult "prestige TV" as the "cool thing" for a quarter of a century now, part of it the fact that really big new franchises have become impossible to launch in the current long tail-crowded, hyper-saturated, ultra-fickle and risk-terrified media environment, and part of it, I should think, that action movies are so abundant and easy to access these days, all as there may be a sense of exhaustion about the form given how much of it we have had, and how little innovation it has seen in a long time. Thus it seems exemplary of the situation that the tiresomely ubiquitous Phoebe Waller-Bridge (The Suits like her! They really, really like her!) is working on a new iteration of Lara Croft for the streaming market--but also exemplary that whether it is well-received or not in the present milieu it is hard to picture it making the same pop cultural splash that, for example, Waller-Bridge's Fleabag did, for better or worse.

The Politics of Star Trek, 1966-2005

In discussing Star Trek (I have in mind the entire saga on the small and large screens from the pilot "The Cage" to the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise) I have argued for its being a marriage of the tradition of Wells-Stapledon-type "scientific world-view"-minded science fiction with the tradition of pulp space operatic adventure identifiable with the work of writers like E.E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton. My view has been that this has been on the whole an interesting and fruitful combination, but there are also ways in which it has synergized less than ideally, not least politically. The Wells-Stapledon tradition is squarely leftist in the proper sense of the term--a bearer of the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially the possibility and desirability of humans applying reason to the material and social world to improve human social arrangements and humans' lot generally because of the existence of a common humanity, the capacity of human beings to think and act rationally, and the potentials for applying scientific knowledge to tame material and moral problems, be it relieving material want through greater productivity or freeing the human mind from ignorance and its terrors. Indeed, the Wells-Stapledon view holds that given the complexity, delicacy and resource-hunger of industrial life, and the destructive as well as liberating potentials of existing technologies (e.g. can states go on making war when the weapons have become so destructive?) it is not merely possible and desirable but necessary that humans use these potentials to move the world beyond an economic life of Bernard de Mandeville grasping meanness, tribalism, superstition in the way some sneer at as "utopian." By contrast leading lights of the space opera tradition have not only often been right-wingers (as was the case with Smith), but in such aspects of that tradition as the "frontier mentality," the Otherness of aliens, the stress on armed conflict and its constant conduct in such fiction to the point of genocidal extermination, the stress on old-fashioned individualistic two-fisted heroics and technical "genius" with its obfuscations going far beyond babble about "reversing the polarity," and their propensity for dressing up old genres such as Medieval romance in high-tech trappings, has bequeathed a legacy of deeply right-wing storytelling.

Thus on the one hand we had in Star Trek a united Earth that proceeded to help build a United Federation of Planets, not least in collaboration with the rationalistic Vulcans. We see that, at least at the level of everyday human wants such as food and shelter scarcity is no longer an issue--and that if humans are not without their faults or foibles, individually or in groups, and not wholly free of the danger of falling back into the bad old ways (as seen on Turkana IV) they are on the whole healthier, more rational, more capable of bearing responsibility than their twentieth or early twenty-first century counterparts. The Star Trek: The New Generation episode "The Neutral Zone," where the crew of the Enterprise meets humans from our time just awakened from the cryogenic sleep that kept them alive in the interceding centuries, exemplifies this. As Jean-Luc Picard tells that arrogant embodiment of the bad old ways Ralph Offenhouse "We've grown out of our infancy." Indeed, though it is rarely spelled out as such the Federation is apparently a Wellsian World State, and as socialist ("People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions"), cosmopolitan and rationalist as that implies, on an interstellar scale reminiscent of the polities of the later chapters of Stapledon's Star Maker.

However, if this is the premise of the series, and it sometimes figured importantly in a scene or even an episode, the stuff of the typical episode of Star Trek was not really rooted in that. Rather than attempting to depict life in such a society it rarely showed us so much as a glimpse of the ordinary life of a citizen of the interstellar World State of the Federation. Instead it concentrated on the quasi-naval Starfleet dealing with the less utopian or rationalistic galaxy beyond it, in adventures that tended to hew to space operatic norms. There was the emphasis on military confrontation with other galactic polities--the Klingons, the Romulans, later the Borg and the Cardassians, in just the first sequel series. (Indeed, it was a confrontation with the Romulans in the Neutral Zone between them and the Federation that was the backdrop to Picard's encounter with Ralph Offenhouse and his contemporaries from our time.) Even when there wasn't a war or military confrontation on there was a lot of attention to feudal pageantry and general barbarism--the warrior culture of the Klingons in particular, all as even the irrationalism Vulcan rationality doesn't always keep in check was memorably foregrounded in episodes like "Amok Time"--and the existence of a different, less attractive, alternate timeline for humanity and the Federation hinted at in "Mirror, Mirror." (Cue the battle theme!) Moreover, as it progressed much of this became more rather than less prominent, with The Next Generation devoting more time to the martial side of Starfleet's activity than the Original Series as Worf's inclusion in the cast foregrounded Klingon barbarism, Deep Space Nine a war story that for many glittered most brightly in the darker patches where Starfleet officers behaved rather unlike Starfleet officers (it says something that the episode "In The Pale Moonlight" was such a hit with fans), Voyager a saga of the ship's crew making their way home from cosmic terra incognita predictably inhabited largely by hostile barbarian types, such that this "voyage home" tended to consist of the crew enduring one year-of-hellish battle with such enemies after another. After that Enterprise retreated from the 24th and even 23rd centuries to offer a prequel that repeatedly went the same path (most obviously in Season Three's arc). So it went with the movies that, after the cerebral Star Trek: The Motion Picture, inclined to increasing action from The Wrath of Khan forward, with it seeming notable that if the box office trend was generally downward number eight (First Contact) represented a bit of a rebound, with this at least partly a matter of the movie being Die Hard on the Enterprise. Indeed, even in the more intellectually serious episodes looking at another society we saw not the "world that works" that the Federation had become, but those societies that didn't work, and indeed didn't work in the same way that our own society is clearly not working, with its exploitation, its oppression, its irrationality, such that that is what viewers might remember most--all as our glimpses of life on Earth could sometimes seem a cheat. (Thus is it the case that when Captain Picard visits his brother we see not 24th-century San Francisco, say, but a French vineyard whose owner rejects modernity to the point of refusing to have a replicator in his house, looking at which we may feel we have gone centuries back in time.)

Amid all that one could be forgiven for not paying all that much attention to the show's better tomorrow, let alone how we arrived at it, the more in as practical politics required the showrunners to not get too vocal about that. This was, after all, a show presenting a Wellsian-Stapledonian utopia amid the height of the Cold War, when even what passed for "liberalism" was apt to be conservative if not reactionary--all as Anti-Communism never ceased to be the "national religion," and the flak was always there to make sure Star Trek's showrunners never declared too loudly for progressive values, or too obviously critical of the present day. (Hence the commentariat's quickness to attack a Star Trek show whenever it presented its satire of the ultra-capitalist Ferengi, all as, reflective of the politics that prevail on the web, one very quickly comes across those hastening to declare for the supposed virtues of their social system and society generally.) The result was that one could just take what progress there was as a matter of hazy optimism about "progress" divorced from any more worked-out social views, and not too disturbing to--or even be oblivious not only to how we got to a better tomorrow, but the fact that we had done so at all, attending to the more sensational episodes and thinking it just standard space opera stuff--with all the political baggage going with the war and barbarism and "backwardness" while the humanistic, utopian, cerebral stuff not even on their mental radar. (Indeed, much as I admire New Wave science fiction titan Harlan Ellison, reading his literal hundred page-long rant in his book about his experience writing the episode "City on the Edge of Forever" and the rancorous aftermath of his efforts, it seemed to me clear that this very intelligent and able writer just "didn't get it," all as evocations of the show in popular culture tend to slight the humane and intellectual aspects. The film Galaxy Quest, for example, was in many ways a memorable parody of the show, but it didn't even acknowledge this side of it, instead sticking with the martial, war-fighting, running from alien rock monsters-type stuff as if that was all there had ever been to it.)

This not infrequent mismatch between the premise of Star Trek (and I might add, what the show delivered at its most ambitious and thought-provoking), and the stuff of a typical episode (maybe, too, the episodes that made their deepest impressions on pop culture in such ways as the oddities of Vulcan mating habits, or the significance of Mr. Spock's beard), may seem predictable. After all, imagining everyday life in a "utopia" (indeed, anything much different from the writer's own world), let alone endowing that with a dramatic interest that would be meaningful for an audience of millions week in, week out, year in, year out, is a far from simple task. We may expect that such a society would still have its conflicts and its drama, but they would be different from those of today--a society that has progressed beyond barbarian to something truly deserving of the term "civilization," from "infancy" as Picard had it to something closer to adulthood--with the result that in our present state even if we can try and imagine them intellectually (as Leon Trotsky certainly tried to do in Literature and Revolution) we would likely end up with just hazy notions, rather than anything we can "imagine to saturation" in that way desirable for dramatization, and still more dramatization that could really touch a broad audience, making them feel those conflicts in the same visceral way they feel those of our present life and time. (What do the troubles of grown-ups mean to those still in their infancy?) Certainly I can't imagine any media corporation being willing to bet real money on the ability to do that. The result itself cannot, especially as they were making a space opera, the show's makers often reached for space opera stuff, perhaps encouraged in this by the fact that action-adventure is always an easy sell, and indeed the pressure to take that course greater as time went on simply because of changing audience expectations. (Those who write professionally of the TV today can be very smug when they compare the television production of our era and its audience to those of prior decades, but the evidence seems to favor the position that today's viewer probably has less patience or literacy than did his predecessor of the 1960s, with all that meant for the requirement of more Zap, Boof, Pow! per minute of air time, as editors cut even romantic comedies for Hallmark as if they were action films.) Still, however one explains the situation the result cannot be gainsaid, and that seems to me something to remember as we see--bizarrely from the standpoint of left-leaning fans, who admire the show's humanity, utopianism and socially critical perspective--right-wingers likewise lay claim to a show that stands for everything they stand against.

When I first considered the idea that cultural genres may follow life cycles--emerge, develop, stagnate, decline, even "die"--and what this theory suggested about where science fiction (or more specifically, the particular Anglosphere print science fiction tradition that became consolidated as a genre in American fiction magazines in the 1920s) it seemed to me that science fiction was already in a fairly decadent phase. Most of what I had to say about that in the essay I ended up writing for The Fix still seems persuasive to me two decades later, affirmed by the way that where the absence of great new movements or subgenres or themes for some time had already been conspicuous all these years later that situation simply did not change.

However, some things did change--not least the proneness of the genre to "decadent phase"-screaming output. As John Barnes put it in his essay about the matter, in the late and declining phase a genre tends to become an "inside joke" or "treasured family story" for its fans. So did it go in the mid-to-late '00s when we were saturated with the allusive and metafictional, with playful evocation of or subversion of its classics, in which nostalgia for science fiction's past played a very great part. Amid all that Ernest Cline's Ready Player One's hitting the shelves in 2011 could seem a monument to the tendency, the more in as it was such a hit that Steven Spielberg was soon helming a film adaptation. However, by the time the film hit theaters in 2018 the attitude toward Cline's book was bitter hostility that, as that hostility's hyperbolic nature implied, was much less about Cline and anything he actually did than what he through no fault of his own represented, that nostalgic wave, which all these years later we can clearly see was drawing to its end--the output of nostalgic science fiction now well behind us, and perhaps much else with it. After all, if nostalgia is a hallmark of a genre's twilight years, might not the end of nostalgia mean that the genre's twilight years have passed as well? That the genre is no longer coming to an end but ended, no longer dying but dead?

It does not seem unreasonable to think so--that this particular tradition has run its course, and the genre is in its "undead" phase, as Barnes had it, not unlike those zombies science fiction helped popularize until they were one of the more prominent pop cultural phenomena of the past quarter-century as it goes on and on without showing signs of truly living (new novels appearing, for example, but just the same old thing produced for a declining fan base). Still, if that is the case, as seems to me possible, I do think that, as the case of Cline suggests, there was more going on than just the working out of the aforementioned life cycle. If the analogy with living things is indeed useful in understanding a literary or cultural genre, then it may be worth remembering that genres like other living things do not exist hermetically sealed off from their environment, that indeed their life cycle is inseparably bound up with that environment from beginning to end--with the fact that environmental circumstances may cause people to age and pass more quickly than they otherwise would especially relevant. Some of this, I think, had a direct bearing on science fiction's creative stagnation—that the technological and economic stagnation evident since 2007, the worsening eco-catastrophe, the pandemic, the wars, and the complete contempt government and the powerful showed the public and its concerns about the world's problems added greatly to the highly unbalanced diet of pessimism that encouraged science fiction's already hypertrophied and suffocating dystopian inclinations. However, those same years had unsalutary effects of other kinds as well, with the case of Cline especially telling. The release of the film version of Ready Player One, and the career of its author, fell afoul of a backlash against nostalgia less because fans were angry with nostalgia as such than because nostalgia had become an object of the country's status and "culture" conflicts, with supporters of identity politics aggrieved by their view that science fiction's pantheon, canon, concerns, received history, marginalized many a group--though that is far from all of it. There is also the fact that print fiction as such has been increasingly marginalized within contemporary culture broadly, to such a degree that behind the facade of stupid boosterism one has good grounds to suspect that the publishing industry is in crisis, with all this seeming to many evidenced in a generation gap within science fiction fandom that can almost seem to make the identity politics' crowd's concern for the tradition moot. As the preponderance of gray heads at the conventions shows, whatever the kulturkampfers may think, younger people these days care no more about Isaac Asimov than they do about Gone With the Wind, BECAUSE THEY DON'T READ. This combination of cultural conflict, with the marginalization of print with all that it means for the continuation of a genre of print fiction, has meant that the sense of a tradition, a discourse, a fan base, has dissipated to leave science fiction in a very different position from where it was not just in 1947, 1977, but even 2007, such that one can much less speak of a genre at all.

Remembering the Fiasco of Crazy Rich Asians' Asian Release

The entertainment press has preferred to remember the 2018 romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians as a great success. The reality, of course, was more complicated. The film was undeniably a big domestic hit in America, taking in a--for a romantic comedy--sensational $174 million. Yet the film, if made for American audiences first and foremost, was one that Warner Bros. also hoped would be a giant hit in Asia broadly and the vast mainland Chinese market particularly--indeed, that the film would prove "the exception to the rule" that such "comedies . . . are too culturally specific" to cross over successfully.

The result is that it seems only fair to consider that side of the matter in appraising the film's commercial performance. And in doing that it seems fair to start with just why the producers expected the movie to be a great hit in those markets, which seems to be their perception that the movie was profoundly novel in its having an "all-Asian" cast. However, the attitude of some Asian-Americans may be one matter, the attitude of Asians in Asia another. This is most obviously the case in the fact that if for Asian-Americans (or at least, Asian-Americans who watch nothing but Hollywood content) a film with an all-Asian cast has been an extreme rarity, for residents of East Asian, living in a region with a burgeoning output of film and television, this has not been the case. One may add that romantic comedy specifically is a strong presence in that output, such that Hollywood making a romantic comedy with an al-Asian cast is simply not a big deal there in itself, that kind of story one their own industries can and do tell--constantly. (For a very small taste of this, just check out the sheer number of versions of live-action adaptations of Yoko Kamio's classic manga Hana Yori Dango in the Wikipedia listing devoted to them.) Meanwhile the particular material Crazy Rich Asians offered was more problematic than the aforementioned Hollywood geniuses realized--or could. From the standpoint of a certain kind of American petty bourgeois seeing members of "their own group at the top"--seeing them among the rich, stupid, vulgar elite of the modern world, or better still the whole of the rich, stupid, vulgar, elite in some corner of that world, ruling it, and thus by way of them able to vicariously look down on those not in "their own group" as social inferiors is supposed to be inspirational, "aspirational," and outright cause for ecstasy. (Yes, there actually was a certain amount of explicit acknowledgment of this mean-spirited side of identity politics in discussion of the film, entirely uncritical of course.) That not all members of any group really think that way is not something the identity politics-minded mainstream acknowledges. Still less does that mainstream acknowledge that people in other countries may think differently about the matter, in spite of the cultural differences staring them in the face.

Thus much as the commentariat loves to describe China as "Communist" when demonizing the country, they did not actually think the meaning of that through to the point of considering how in contrast with a country where Anti-Communism is the "national religion," in one ruled by a Communist Party for as long as almost everyone alive can remember, for all that party's long record of (in cases, nothing short of colossal) idiosyncrasies, compromises, backtracking, mistakes, crimes, hypocrisies, "Communist" ideas may have some purchase on the minds and sympathies of the Chinese public (Communism having survived its mishandling by Communists, so to speak). Especially given that in that country history (not least, the longest record of peasant revolts of any country on Earth) and demographics obfuscate the matter of class rather less than in America. Especially given that many in and out of China attribute the rises in the wealth and well-being of the Chinese far less to the "entrepreneurs" whose worship is mandatory in many other nations than the firm hand of a Five Year Plan-making state that, by refusing to put on a Friedmanesque "Golden Straitjacket," industrialized a formerly very poor country to a G-7 level--producing the one great success story of the age in regard to development and poverty reduction, however much those of neoliberal sensibilities pretend the situation is otherwise.

Likewise if those emphasizing Chinese Otherness love to speak of Chinese "Confucianism," they forget that Confucianism is not favorably disposed toward a life devoted to individual material gain, merchants, and certainly not a society ruled by merchants, and indeed that much of Chinese history has been a struggle between Confucian scholar-administrators anxious to preserve order and the desire of the merchants to increase their wealth and power (one reason why Western commentators are so often disdainful of Confucianism), with those eras of the merchants' ascendancy identified with hard times for the poor, the spread of slavery, backwardness, chaos--and that this too may color the audience's attitude. Indeed, even in complete ignorance of both Chinese Communism and Chinese Confucianism the fact that capitalistic reform has created in China a very unequal society with its own stupid and vulgar billionaires publicly shooting their mouths off in ways that make clear that they, like their counterparts everywhere else, think the rest of their country and humanity exists only to serve the needs of the super-rich (like Jack Ma), and that much as the American press lionizes them for it the Chinese public generally does not find this endearing--such that China's young people disgusted with the Rat Race and protesting the "996" work culture in such ways as the "Lying Flat" movement--is something they should have noticed. If it has hardly been a complete barrier to the appeal of upper-class glamour (far from it, as even a small taste of the country's film and television shows--again, see Hana Yori Dango), it still raised the likelihood that rather than the spectacle of a bunch of plutocrats living off of the exploitation of the whole rest of the planet being rich and stupid and vulgar and arrogant in Singapore (which, by the way, is to non-Singaporean Chinese another country, a fact overlooked by filmmakers little interested in the cultural differences between the Chinese of the mainland, and those of the Chinese "diaspora," and even different parts of the diaspora (like the Chinese-American heroine, and her Chinese-Singaporean lover and his family) being a thrilling uplift they would be bored, annoyed, even repelled.

At any rate the film failed miserably internationally, not least in Asia, and especially in China, as the hard data shows. Crazy Rich Asians made 73 percent of its money domestically--a very high proportion these days, even more than was the case for such a domestically-oriented, not-for-the-foreigners film as Clint Eastwood's American Sniper with its 63 percent. The second and third biggest markets were actually Western, Anglosphere, Australia and Britain, accounting for another 10 percent by themselves. By contrast the film made a mere $13 million in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia combined, with mainland China kicking in a mere $1.6 million from its whole run, barely enabling it to make not the top 10 or top 20 or even top 100 highest-grossing movies released in China that year (ranking #183), and the lot contributing just 20 percent of the movie's less than towering international gross (some $65 million). At least initially the media registered the impossible-to-deny failure, and even began to talk about some of those basic facts relevant to the situation they had previously ignored, notably the un-specialness of an all-Asian film to an Asian audience not exactly crying out for an Asian-led romantic comedy from Hollywood, and its seeing the movie exactly for the shallow-minded Western product it was in its relation to their values and understanding of their culture, the equivalent in "comedy of manners" terms of what Panda Express is to Asian cuisine according to one commentator. (I have no recollection of their acknowledging how Asians and especially Chinese might be less than thrilled by the particular class politics so prominent in American discussion of the film, but then one could hardly expect the American press to acknowledge that in a public way, can one?)

The result was that the supposed great milestone for Asians on film can in hindsight seem not just a piece of identity politics-pandering crapola pretending to be more than that, but one that may have succeeded even less at the dubious goal of such pandering than at the perhaps even more dubious one of producing just another piece of foreign exotica for Westerners. It was also a considerable letdown for the bean-counters. But all this was quickly marginalized by an entertainment press that has succeeded in establishing a narrative of success as the conventional wisdom about how the venture fared. (Cultural sensation! Blockbuster! $240 million worldwide!) Entirely in line with its tendency to the most upbeat possible reading of the outcomes for identity politics-minded movies in the inverse of "Get woke, go broke" (recall, for example, how amid enthusiasm for woman-led action movies their talking up Mad Max: Fury Road had people thinking the middling performer and ultimately money-losing project was actually a colossal hit?), in the process not only confusing the remembrance of how one particular film performed commercially, but also affirming some unhealthy misapprehensions about such film projects and the portrayals of other cultures--not least the misapprehension that Hollywood as we know it does these things successfully. Thus did they pave the way for other disappointments of much greater financial consequence. (There was, for example, what Disney did with its live-action version of Mulan. There was what Disney-Marvel did with its Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.) A bunch of executives in C-suites in the more privileged enclaves of the Southland understand other countries? Their every word and deed shows that they don't even understand the metropolis, let alone the country, in which they have led their lives of profoundly undeserved privilege, even judged by the standard of how well they do what is generally recognized as being their jobs. After all, even with every year's box office reports driving home the lesson that if they want profits they had better study that market carefully and deliver movies about which the public will be enthusiastic enough to come to the theater they instead stick to their milking of tired franchises, brushing off the losses with references to "back catalog value" that smack of a foolhardy speculator's house of cards--not coincidentally, I think, given that foolhardy speculators are the ones calling the shots in Hollywood in this age of "shareholder value"-minded stupidities and "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley nitwittery.

Kooky Captains, Glasses, Wokeness: The Starfleet Academy Backlash

For me the Star Trek saga properly ended in 2005, with the last episode of Enterprise, if not earlier. (Certainly its best days were well behind it by that point.) This is especially in regard to what made it more than just "another" space opera, the humanistic, socially critical, utopian dimension of the show. The J.J. Abrams cinematic reboot set that aside as it focused on summer blockbuster action, prequelisms, nostalgic appeal, and legitimating itself as part of the Star Trek canon with its use of the parallel universe concept that Hollywood executives have seized on and run with ever since as a prop to their ever-more lumbering franchises. Subsequently Paramount's reboot of the franchise on television crapped all over the humanistic, utopian, socially critical aspect of the show as it eagerly seized on the darker elements of the universe. Thus do we get the grimdark Star Trek: Discovery's devotion of so much time to the Mirror Universe, the decision to make a whole series about the Section Thirty-One the showrunners introduced amid the Federation's bitter war in Deep: Space Nine, and perhaps most striking of all the whole premise of Star Trek: Picard, where the Federation is treated as having been rotten all along, so much so that within Picard's own lifetime it had rotted away to the point that we seem to be getting Turkana IV on a galactic scale in a pointed contrast with what we saw in The Next Generation. Thus where amid the right-wing turn in world affairs so evident by the '80s The Next Generation, the conception of Jean-Luc Picard appeared an act of defiance against the Oliver Norths and Gordon Gekkos, the later Picard represented abject surrender to them and all they represented as, to the ecstasy of all those who had despised all that was humane or progressive in the show (the Ralph Offenhouses call the shots in our time, and the thought of a world beyond "hunger, want, the need for possessions" all "eliminated" is their biggest fear and hate ), it fell in line with the misanthropic pessimism mandated by the leaders of "respectable" opinion, and the despair of so many of those who had ever espoused anything else. Certain that the world cannot go on as it is--they agree with the Wellsian-Stapledonian-scientific world-view vision on which Star Trek was founded up to that point at least--they have also lost all hope that the world can ever be anything else (they agree with the misanthropes to that extent), and as a result all they can picture is ecological and social collapse.

All this continues with the 32nd century-set Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which can seem very much of the moment in its vision of the Federation fallen apart yet again due to technological disaster, with the drama about the survivors picking up the pieces--Luddism added to the unhappy mix in the idea of the "Burn." At the same time, just when one might have thought from the right's crowing over and many others lamenting the death of wokeness that American culture was sparing a little more time for other things the din of battle between the woke and anti-woke over the content of pop culture rises again. Thus do we have a conspicuously kooky and quirky lady in the captain's seat in Holly Hunter's Nahla Ake, and Gina Yashere as her First Officer Lura Thok, with such personae as Tig Notaro as an Academy instructor rounding out a cast that makes it clear that "diversity" was not a kobayashi maru after all--and in the supposedly wokeness-is-dead period went all in on it, with the review pages laudatory (88 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes), as at least a highly vocal portion of the viewership is the opposite. (The audience score stands at 43 percent--a gigantic gap being attributed to review bombing that, even if one may be unsure that it is representative of the audience, at least testifies to some having very strong feelings about the matter.)

Starfleet Academy thus begins to look like it is doing for Star Trek what The Last Jedi did for Star Wars, through comparable creative choices prompting comparable reactions. Thus do we have a franchise that was traditionally male-led not merely putting a female captain at the helm of a ship (hardly controversial stuff thirty years after Voyager) but presenting a more broadly and fully female-dominated ship in a piece of feminist "cultural appropriation" of what was long an object of male fans' affection (as The Last Jedi did with Star Wars). Thus do we also have it making the Person in Charge conspicuously quirky in a manner rubbing a good many fans the wrong way (the way Last Jedi's Admiral Holdo did). Going beyond the parallels to the Star Wars franchise, one may add that, in line with the sensibility prevailing in the medium, there isn't much inclination to make male fans any concessions in the way of the visuals, with this "matriarchy" not having, say, a catsuited Deanna Troi or Seven of Nine, or even the inclusion of any actress comparable to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Rebecca Romjin in the cast, with all that means for the "male appeal" as instead "diversity" and "body positivity" carry the day. Indeed, I suspect that this is what all the fuss about the glasses one female character wears is about--not that spectacles have been wholly unprecedented in this universe (Admiral Kirk wore them in the earlier movies), but rather that (given American attitudes toward glasses wearing) this is yet another dismissal of conventional beauty standards and the male gaze in a show the detractors think already too woke to bear.

Why Don't We Hear More Mainstream Criticism of Reality TV?

The question that is the title of this post may strike some as odd. After all, does the reality TV genre not get subject to a lot of criticism? Do people not perceive it as not merely fake in a way belying the term "reality," but trashy--and exploitative of participants and audience alike? Do they not pour abuse on "stars" of the form such as the members of the Kardashian family?

There is no denying all this, but also no denying that the criticism has been marginalized within the conversation--brushed aside, and even the object of counterblasts, by a press that on the whole treats the phenomenon with respect. Thus even as Dr. Jacob Johanssen testifies to British parliament that "[i]n academic research, the content of reality television is almost exclusively discussed critically," the media dig up "academics" who criticize the critics for the sake of garbage such as Vice's story claiming that "Scholars Say if You Hate the Kardashians You Probably Hate Yourself," such that the deeper and more trenchant criticisms of the genre generally going unheard--and of course, without any effect on contemporary culture whatsoever, the sordid enterprise continuing to lumber on untouched by the criticisms.

That seems to me to warrant some remark. And in this three factors seem relevant. The first and most obvious is the extreme tameness of the press, especially the entertainment press, which is overwhelmingly dutiful to its role of courtier and claqueur to the media business to which it is so close, and indeed apt to be a related party if not a subsidiary. Exactly as might be expected in this Pohl-Kornbluth dystopia in which we live the entertainment media is deeply invested in reality TV (representing as it does a colossal share of their output now, not least because low costs and easy product placement contribute to higher profit margins than it has on scripted fare), and said courtiers and claqueurs are thus obliged to be supportive. In that role they may be allowed to criticize a particular show, or even say something critical of the whole genre, but never in such a way as to seriously and meaningfully attack the bosses' enterprise, not least because the less serious and meaningful attacks at least allowing the illusion of a genuine dialogue, and a safety valve for the resentments some feel, who seeing such statements can feel validated and therefore, if only in a small way, relieved that someone agrees with them and move on with their lives as nothing changes. Indeed, on close inspection one may find that those critical sneers at reality television may in fact be just so much "permission," or even encouragement, to watch "ironically," which still conduces to the viewership sustaining the wretched machine.

There is, too, the matter of just whose values reality TV tends to affirm, and whose values it tends to offend against. Consider the competition shows, for example. Presenting the pursuit of "success" as a tough but fair contest in which merit gets one ahead and those who lack it have only themselves to blame as it exalts those who have "made it" as smarter-than-everyone-else and thus earned the right to sit at a very high table from which they get to not only judge but abuse the inferiors aspiring to even a very little bit of what they have, the Message with which it beats its audience over the head, with its elitism and its moralizing, its cruelty and obscurantism, its often on-its-sleeve exaltation of capitalism and economic individualism, is enough to make a leftist retch, but aligns perfectly with how the conservative pictures capitalism to the world, and perfect propaganda for their vision of economic life. So does it also go with the shows that are this era's equivalent of the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, one psychological study showing that brief exposure to reality TV shows of the Kardashian type makes the viewer identify with the rich, and feel less sympathetic to the poor, and less supportive of programs that help them. For those of progressive sympathies this is proof positive that reality TV is making the world a worse place. But for the right as it presently exists in America--the blatantly, crassly, elitist business right that, without the respect of the classical conservative's recognition of the necessity of some consideration for the least fortunate for social stability's sake, let alone any sense of paternalism or noblesse oblige toward them--this is an excellent reason to support reality TV. The conservative may not be delighted with the medium. (How would the traditionalist preacher of "family values," especially one of certain ethnic and social backgrounds, feel about his daughter living her life in the manner that Kim Kardashian lived hers? Becoming famous in the way that Kim Kardashian did? Need I remind you of a certain video without which few of us would know the name "Kardashian?") But they LOVE the message. And their opinion is as weighty within the mainstream as the opinion of the socially-minded progressive is not, with all that means for this side of the dialogue.

And of course there is the matter of identity politics. Again, in spite of the illiterate and quite stupid insistence that identity politics is left it is in fact anything but, what is today called "wokeness" very much of the right in its philosophical essentials and its practical positions on the issues (hence there being no dissonance in "woke capitalism"). Indeed, it is fair to say that identity politics offends the cultural traditionalism of the avowed, traditionalist, conservative not by confronting them with an alternative set of values the way the left does (rationalistic, universalistic, egalitarian, as against their dismissal of reason, stress on difference, insistence on hierarchy, and demand for respect for the associated institutions and traditions), but by confronting the traditionalist conservative with an Other acting on their own conservatism. It being the case that reality TV's themes (the daily lives of rich girls, dating shows, etc.) and fan base tend to skew female (perhaps by a margin of two-to-one, maybe three-to-one with the soapy "lifestyle"-type shows), and its biggest star being a woman whose course through life has been highly charged from a gender politics perspective (the aforementioned Ms. Kardashian), it is unsurprising that the identity politics crowd rushes to the defense of the form. Thus is it the case that if woke gender theory-espousing feminists cannot be thrilled with much about Ms. Kardashian (many in fact despise her undeniable sex symbol status), a great many of them are ever ready to attack her detractors, to the point of accusing anyone who hates the Kardashians of being a "misogynist" (displaying a looseness in language akin to that of right-wingers tossing about "Communist"--again, not a stretch given identity politics' essential conservatism).

This combination of interest, power and ideology--this iron triangle of business, right-wing politics and identity-mindedness--is why the criticism of reality TV is slight next to what it might be (and in the view of its detractors, what it ought to be), with the alignment remarkable not for its uniqueness but for its pervasiveness across contemporary cultural life.