As a new school year begins the education system is again in the headlines, with much talk of fed-up teachers leaving the profession on such a scale as to warrant the term "crisis"--and the press doing its usual lousy job of explaining the topic. Various pieces have given us various numbers to support their assessment of the situation, but per usual little or none of the context that would clarify their meaning. We are told again and again that x numbers of teachers' quit, that there are so many thousand vacant positions in this or that state. But we could only really know if that signals a crisis if we have something to compare those numbers to--numbers that would tell us what the situation is like in "normal" times.
Indeed, I had to spend a lot of time trudging through a lot of the coverage before I came across Derek Thompson's piece in The Atlantic baldly asserting that "[c]omprehensive national data on teacher-turnover rates (the share of teachers who quit each year) . . . are simply not available, or don't go back far enough to tell us whether this year is different."
In other words, Thompson reports that the statistics that would give us the standard just don't exist because no one has bothered to collect the data, or at least, compute the relevant information.
However, I think the key word there is "comprehensive." While a rigorously constructed time series for the country as a whole would be ideal I have found it easy to locate patchier data covering particular years that may or may not be representative, and particular localities, which suggest a rate of perhaps 8 percent a year. As there are some 3.5 million primary and secondary school teachers in the U.S., that would work out to something in the range of 250,000-300,000 teachers leaving the profession in a normal year. This pattern would seem confirmed in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection that some 270,000 primary and secondary-school teachers would be leaving the profession annually in 2016-2026.
If we go by those estimates then one would expect the standard for a post-pandemic elevation of the rate to mean 300,000+ departing each year, and perhaps many more.
For what it is worth, the Wall Street Journal reports a departure of a mere 300,000 public school staff of all kinds (and therefore, not all of them teachers) in the entire February 2020 to May 2022 period.
It is possible that there are other, different estimates--but so far I have not seen any other statistics purportedly addressing the matter as delineated in precisely that way (departures from K-12 teaching over the whole time frame).
In their absence taking that claim at face value it would seem that quits have actually been few in number relative to a normal period.
I have to admit that I find what may actually be a decline in departures from the profession on the part of teachers deeply counterintuitive, given the elevation of quit rates in general that has given rise to talk of a Great Resignation; given the reality that even before the pandemic there was considerable discontent with conditions in the teaching profession; and that the stresses of the pandemic must have had some negative effect on the willingness of those in the job to stay in it.
However, it may be the case that other factors are offsetting all that.
One may be what has been said by some analysts of the Great Resignation--that much of it is about people leaving a job they don't like to take another, more attractive, job, in the same line of work. Teachers who quit a job at one school and take up a job at another school they think will be more congenial would not count as leaving the profession--even as their departures create difficulties for the schools they left, with the less attractive places to work plausibly suffering disproportionately (and indeed, we are told that poorer school districts, and rural and urban districts, are suffering relative to affluent suburban districts offering better pay and conditions).
Another factor may be that, as their relatively high unionization, and perhaps rising militancy, suggest, many teachers have some inclination to try and bargain collectively for a better deal rather than take their individual chances with the market (certainly as against private-sector computer programmers).
Moreover, one should remember--even if not every writer of such articles seems to do so--that the sense of the situation being one of crisis is as much a matter of what people have been told might happen as what actually has happened. If there has as yet been no "mass exodus" from the profession, some, pointing to an abundance of polling data in which teachers report that they are seriously thinking about quitting, that these accumulating stresses will come to a head in exactly that fashion. The significance of the data is difficult to ascertain, as it is far from clear how many can or will act on such thoughts--but it seems safe to say the entry into this more speculative territory has permitted that much more room for the play of fear and prejudice about the matter, with results all too predictable across the ideological spectrum.
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Top Gun 2's Box Office Run: Further Thoughts
With the second week of August already upon us it seems fair to say that Top Gun: Maverick has taken the box office crown for the season (and perhaps, the year). Not only did it have an extraordinary opening weekend exceeding even the high expectations for it, taking in over $160 million over the 4-day period. Its legs have been extraordinary, especially late in its run, the film's grosses eroding only very slightly from week to week. The result is that where its merely doubling its opening weekend would have been respectable, it has already grossed four times that sum, with its take still climbing--according to Box Office Mojo, some $662 million in the bank as of last Sunday, after an $7 million gross in that eleventh weekend in theaters (a mere 17 percent down from the $8.4 million of the prior tenth weekend). The result is that where even fairly late into its run I had expected it to top out at a (spectacular) $550 million, that late-stage resilience makes it now appear quite capable of finishing north of the (even more spectacular) $700 million mark.
Just why has this film so totally proven an outlier? Certainly it has helped that the media has been very much on its side. Nevertheless, the public had to be responsive to the push--and it was rather more so than I expected given what seemed to me the film's many liabilities in the present market (the sheer passage of time since the first Top Gun, the exhaustion of '80s nostalgia after so many years of its exploitation, the habituation of the public to more fantastical and CGI-driven blockbusters, etc.). Where this is concerned some have made much of the fact that Paramount eschewed the recent practice announcing a streaming date for the film, discouraging a critical part of the audience from just waiting and catching their film at home a few weeks later, increasing theatrical attendance. Perhaps. However, it seems to me that there is at least one obviously important factor generally getting overlooked, namely the weakness of the competition this summer. Instead of the usual eight-plus big action movies we typically saw through 2019 the summer of 2022 had just four, with the other three less than stellar performers by summer champion standards--helping clear the way for Top Gun 2 to do as well as it did by encouraging repeat business that would probably not have happened had there been more choices for fans of big-screen action.
Just why has this film so totally proven an outlier? Certainly it has helped that the media has been very much on its side. Nevertheless, the public had to be responsive to the push--and it was rather more so than I expected given what seemed to me the film's many liabilities in the present market (the sheer passage of time since the first Top Gun, the exhaustion of '80s nostalgia after so many years of its exploitation, the habituation of the public to more fantastical and CGI-driven blockbusters, etc.). Where this is concerned some have made much of the fact that Paramount eschewed the recent practice announcing a streaming date for the film, discouraging a critical part of the audience from just waiting and catching their film at home a few weeks later, increasing theatrical attendance. Perhaps. However, it seems to me that there is at least one obviously important factor generally getting overlooked, namely the weakness of the competition this summer. Instead of the usual eight-plus big action movies we typically saw through 2019 the summer of 2022 had just four, with the other three less than stellar performers by summer champion standards--helping clear the way for Top Gun 2 to do as well as it did by encouraging repeat business that would probably not have happened had there been more choices for fans of big-screen action.
The Summer 2022 Box Office: A Hopefully Not-Too-Early Assessment
With August upon us the summer film season is fast drawing to a close--the more in as the last really big release, Thor: Love and Thunder, is already a month behind us, making it not too early to make some assessment of how the season has gone that will look better than premature and wildly off the mark come the "official" end of summer on Labor Day Weekend.
A bit of simple math indicates that in the months of May, June and July the North American box office took in some $2.9 billion. How does that stack up against prior years? Simply adjusting the Box Office Mojo numbers for inflation as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics one gets an average of about $4.2 billion for the May-July period in 2015-2019--with the figure arguably conservative because of how simply bumping the first summer release back into early April, as an ever more aggressive Disney-Marvel did with Avengers 3 and 4 in 2018 and 2019, takes a big chunk out of the summer's earnings. (Avengers: Endgame picked up $427 million in the last five days of April 2019, which if added to the year's total would have raised it by about an eighth--from $3.35 to $3.8 billion before the adjustment for today's higher ticket prices--and of course 2022 saw nothing of the kind.)
The result is that this year the box office did about two-thirds as well as the average for those years. It might be added that July did a better than that--its $1.13 billion take about three-quarters of the July average for 2015-2019 (of $1.46 billion). That is far superior to how it did back in 2021, when you had MCU movies, F9 and the rest making at best half their expected earnings (and the whole three month period barely equaled the July earnings, with just under $1.2 billion in current dollars). But to claim that the situation has returned to the pre-pandemic norm would still be exaggerating things a good deal.
Of course, in considering that fact one has to admit that the release slate was not quite the same as in those prior years. Where 2015-2019, on average, had eight really big, brand name, live-action action-adventure films playing in theaters in the relevant period (DC/Marvel superhero stuff, spy-fi stuff of the Mission: Impossible/Jason Bourne/Fast and Furious franchises, etc.), 2022 had only four by my count (Dr. Strange 2, Top Gun 2, Jurassic World: Dominion, Thor 4), and of these only Top Gun 2 went "above and beyond" expectations (while Dr. Strange was merely respectable, Jurassic World 3 the weakest earner in the trilogy, and Thor arguably an underperformer). And it seems to me that there is at least an argument to be made that the comparative weakness of the summer slate reflects justifiable caution on the part of the studios as much as it does a cause of the summer's lackluster grosses by pre-pandemic standards.
A bit of simple math indicates that in the months of May, June and July the North American box office took in some $2.9 billion. How does that stack up against prior years? Simply adjusting the Box Office Mojo numbers for inflation as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics one gets an average of about $4.2 billion for the May-July period in 2015-2019--with the figure arguably conservative because of how simply bumping the first summer release back into early April, as an ever more aggressive Disney-Marvel did with Avengers 3 and 4 in 2018 and 2019, takes a big chunk out of the summer's earnings. (Avengers: Endgame picked up $427 million in the last five days of April 2019, which if added to the year's total would have raised it by about an eighth--from $3.35 to $3.8 billion before the adjustment for today's higher ticket prices--and of course 2022 saw nothing of the kind.)
The result is that this year the box office did about two-thirds as well as the average for those years. It might be added that July did a better than that--its $1.13 billion take about three-quarters of the July average for 2015-2019 (of $1.46 billion). That is far superior to how it did back in 2021, when you had MCU movies, F9 and the rest making at best half their expected earnings (and the whole three month period barely equaled the July earnings, with just under $1.2 billion in current dollars). But to claim that the situation has returned to the pre-pandemic norm would still be exaggerating things a good deal.
Of course, in considering that fact one has to admit that the release slate was not quite the same as in those prior years. Where 2015-2019, on average, had eight really big, brand name, live-action action-adventure films playing in theaters in the relevant period (DC/Marvel superhero stuff, spy-fi stuff of the Mission: Impossible/Jason Bourne/Fast and Furious franchises, etc.), 2022 had only four by my count (Dr. Strange 2, Top Gun 2, Jurassic World: Dominion, Thor 4), and of these only Top Gun 2 went "above and beyond" expectations (while Dr. Strange was merely respectable, Jurassic World 3 the weakest earner in the trilogy, and Thor arguably an underperformer). And it seems to me that there is at least an argument to be made that the comparative weakness of the summer slate reflects justifiable caution on the part of the studios as much as it does a cause of the summer's lackluster grosses by pre-pandemic standards.
Has Top Gun 2 Really "Saved the Movies?"
In Indiewire Tom Brueggemann made the case that Top Gun 2 has "saved the movies." His argument goes that in a Hollywood which has thrown over stars for franchises, and these overwhelmingly of the CGI-loaded "media" sci-fi type (comic book superheroes, Star Wars, etc.), Top Gun: Maverick has scored far and away the summer's and the year's biggest success with an old-fashioned star-driven vehicle without the superhero and other trappings--suggesting there is still room for other kinds of content.
It is an interesting idea. But I couldn't help noticing that where those other films Mr. Brueggemann talked about as having previously achieved the feat--Easy Rider, Jaws, Star Wars, etc.--generally brought something new to the screen, Top Gun 2 was pointedly old-fashioned --and, I think, hardly proved that its old-fashioned success was replicable. It seems telling that we are talking about a movie not with some newly minted star (there aren't any, and it's far from clear that there can be) but a star of the '80s who has sustained his career in part through franchise films (the Mission: Impossible sequels keeping his name on the marquee through thick and thin, while in 2017 he got involved with Marvel's Dark universe via the remake of the remake of The Mummy), without which he might not still be a star. It also seems telling that the film is still an action movie sequel milking '80s nostalgia, not so different on that level from, for instance, many of Michael Bay's Transformers movies--what is old here less completely a throwback than it may seem at first glance.
Indeed, I suspect that rather than bringing back the old-style star-driven film the movie will be remembered as a last hurrah for that type of film, not least because I do not see the studios rushing back to the old star-driven model, put off by its comparative unpredictability, as well as for lack of prospects as promising as a Tom Cruise-starring sequel to Top Gun. (As we have seen time and again, putting other '80s stars into follow-ups to their hits of that era—Stallone in a new Rambo, Schwarzenegger in a new Terminator--does not get the studios very far, and nor will putting Cruise in Rain Man Revisited or Jerry Maguire II.) In fact, its principal legacy that way will probably be to induce Paramount to convert Top Gun into yet another franchise while it is still hot—with what result, I cannot say.
Indeed, I suspect that rather than bringing back the old-style star-driven film the movie will be remembered as a last hurrah for that type of film, not least because I do not see the studios rushing back to the old star-driven model, put off by its comparative unpredictability, as well as for lack of prospects as promising as a Tom Cruise-starring sequel to Top Gun. (As we have seen time and again, putting other '80s stars into follow-ups to their hits of that era—Stallone in a new Rambo, Schwarzenegger in a new Terminator--does not get the studios very far, and nor will putting Cruise in Rain Man Revisited or Jerry Maguire II.) In fact, its principal legacy that way will probably be to induce Paramount to convert Top Gun into yet another franchise while it is still hot—with what result, I cannot say.
Is the MCU Finally Wearing Out its Welcome?
In spite of that the Marvel machine will persist, however--Disney far too invested to back off, the more in as it has already floundered with the Star Wars universe that it tried so hard but ultimately failed to make a second Marvel-like success.
Friday, August 5, 2022
Reflections on Jack London's Martin Eden
When I first picked up Jack London's Martin Eden my first thought was of its being an inversion of his earlier The Sea-Wolf. Where that novel saw a cultured bourgeois plunged into the world of rough sailors and forced to survive in it, Martin Eden had a rough sailor plunged into the world of the cultured bourgeoisie and trying to survive in that. And certainly the novel is describable in such terms--and successful in such terms. Indeed, as a portrait of a working-class man coming into contact with "culture" the treatment of the eponymous character in Martin Eden is far, far more convincing and powerful than E.M. Forster's handling of Leonard Bast in Howard's End--the Bloomsbury crowd of which Foster was a part existing in a milieu so genteel that a persuasive image of a lower-class person was beyond the power of these "great" writers.
However, the novel is also much more than that, with perhaps its biggest surprise its being far and away the most realistic, and truthful, treatment of what it actually is to be a writer—of what it is like to write professionally, and of how society treats those who make the attempt, when they have not become "successful," and when they have become "successful"--that I have ever encountered in literature, period; infinitely more truthful than the utter garbage with which hacks as ignorant as they are insincere, talentless and unskilled, but who got all the breaks in spite of that, fill up our books and screens (where being a writer consists of wearing a smug expression on one's face as they autograph copies of their latest for starstruck fans), and the quite stupid lies with which the whole industries built around exploiting the dreams of authorship that pay far better than authorship ever did ceaselessly ply the public (summed up in five of the most insidious words in the English language, "You can do it too!").
That truthfulness is in large part a matter of the fact that where those writers tend to be at their most stupid, cowardly and dishonest when dealing with the matter of publishing--with these usually what we see is a writer finishing a manuscript, or maybe just beginning it, and BAM!, there they are in that bookshop signing those copies--Jack London, who unlike those people who are not even relevant now is genuinely relevant over a century later because he was not stupid or cowardly or dishonest, faces up to the reality fully. He forthrightly acknowledges that it is one thing to write, another to get published, still another to actually make a living from getting published--with the second challenge, and still more the third, so immense as to make the problem of merely producing a piece of writing, even high quality writing, appear trivial by comparison, especially for those who approach that world as most do, from outside, as outsiders who do "not know any editors or writers," or even "anybody who had ever attempted to write." Indeed, where even the few who admit the existence of obstacles tend to pass over the struggle to surmount them in a few words here it is lengthily dramatized as the heart, meat, core of the days of Eden's life during the period of the story, and treated not as the low comedy so many would make of it, but with the utmost--indeed, tragic--seriousness.
When Martin starts out, the very image of the neophyte, not only was there "nobody to tell him, to hint to him, to give him the least word of advice" about the rules. (Martin actually has to figure out for himself that he must type out the work rather than send it written in longhand--just one little reminder that, contrary to what certain Establishment idiots say, there is no "apprenticeship" to speak of in this process.) It was also the case that, submitting his work over and over and over again Martin "began to doubt that editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it was, a machine . . . a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps." Thus Martin
London shows us, too, the obscene amount of time taken up by that process of merely "feeding the machine" rather than actually writing, and the way that those supposedly small expenses of submission like postage add up, sufficiently so in his case to mean genuine hardship, with absolutely nothing to show for it--just one of many reasons why while he is at the effort there never seems to be time enough in the day, every other interest and pleasure getting crowded out. He shows us the confusion and frustration and sense of injustice the writer feels at seeing so much mediocrity and outright drivel in print, while work no worse and maybe much better gets only the cold contempt of those rejection slips. He shows us what happens when that writer turns their hand to nonfiction, and equally "pour[s] their soul" into it, regardless of what they can offer, the fact that they are a "nobody" rather than a "well-known specialist" retailing the conventionalities of their field makes what they have to say meaningless in any editor's eyes--nothing that he does ever seeming to make any difference whatsoever, offer any escape from "the process" and its horrible and invariably disappointing "machinelikeness."
Meanwhile, in the extreme opposite of those speeches in which tearful award-winners fulsomely give thanks to every person they have ever met in their entire lives for their unremitting support as they clutch their little statuettes, through it all no one supports Martin, no one believes in him, no one is interested. Those who at least attempt to be polite, like his sister, do not understand his work, let alone why he does it--what it means to him, why he cannot fit the square peg that is himself into the round holes society offers the vast majority of its members, why he cannot just reconcile himself to a workaday existence as his lot in life--just telling him to "get a job" (in spite of the fact that he is in no way living off of any of them, in no way a burden to them). Where in a more romanticized recounting of such a story the woman he loves would have been his sole support, here the woman he loves is like all the rest, and indeed more emphatic than all the rest in offering only disinterest and discouragement, endlessly trying to persuade him to give all this up and just "get a job." ("Their highest concept of right conduct . . . was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job!" The reader with any sympathy or empathy for Martin quickly gets as sick as he does of hearing others say it to him--while his experience in the resort laundry underlines just how foolish and glib is so much of the talk about day jobs and writing in one's "spare time.")
No matter how hard he worked at his writing it did not matter, he was "lazy"; and no matter what he produced it did not matter if there was no sale, their respect for the judgments of editors total--and their respect for him the extreme opposite. The editors who may not have existed at all, the editors with their soul-crushing "cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped" rejection slips--they must be right, no one trying to see things his way, no one taking his side any more than they share his enthusiasm, endlessly justifying the shabby and cruel way in which he is being treated.
The indifference of the world, the absolute failure of effort to improve his own lot, the disrespect with which his toil is treated, makes a cruel mockery of the middle-class verities about delayed gratification, hard work, and the rest--and while I suspect that few indeed get past the experience of the first half of the book, in which Martin has sold absolutely nothing, there is no less truth in the second half, in which Martin starts to make sales. There is how it may be a long time between that positive reply and actually getting the money promised--perhaps so long a time as "never." There is the way that first little success or two, rather than a watershed, so frequently proves to be nothing of the kind, followed up by nothing else for a long time--and in that time that writer clings desperately to that tiny success too small to improve their situation in any way. If more checks come, eventually, the "old-time thrill at receiving" a check would be gone, for it would no longer be "pregnant with promise of great things to come," just a bit of money that might let them pay a bill so that they can continue grinding along in poverty.
And there is in that a hint of how the long train of disappointments, the brutalization of it all, far from making the victory sweeter in the manner of the "uplifting," aspirational garbage which Martin himself sees through early on, deprives later success of any sweetness it may have. Indeed, while stories of artists, fiction and nonfiction, always seem to me to become unreal when they tell of how they become "successful"--the grit and the texture of the early part of the story falling by the wayside as they seem to lose touch with reality, because in a sense they have (their head turned by what has happened to them, their self-awareness failing them), there was for me palpable truth in that last act in which Martin genuinely does find success--when the material that had so often been insulted in the past inexplicably, suddenly, brings him large paydays. Where most in such a situation, in life as in fiction, think "At last my hard work and perseverance have paid off! At last my genius has been recognized!"
Martin, being a deeper thinker and more feeling human being, has a different reaction. The profound disconnect between the effort he put in and the quality of his work, and the way the world treats him, has swung from one extreme to the other, plays its part in destroying him. Thus does Martin think again and again in that last act about how when he was doing that celebrated work, when he had even finished that work, he received only contempt, now that he had riches and fame everyone sought after him, everyone honored him, because it was riches and fame they sought after and honored, not his work--this the "bourgeois valuation of a man" that has the bourgeoisie showering dinner invitations upon him. (Back when "he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine . . . no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners . . . dinners were thrust upon him right and left.") Indeed, the very Morses who had disdained his earlier, honorable courtship of their daughter, contrived against it and compelled her to break it off peremptorily at the first opportunity, were, now that he was a man of fortune, ready to pimp her to him (her brother Norman escorting her to Martin's hotel, where she goes up to his room and lies about having defied her family to see him, offering him "free love" if that is all he will accept) in the ultimate commentary on what thinkers like London thought of the highly touted "bourgeois morality" in sex.
It all disgusts and demoralizes him. Everything he had believed in, his values and goals and accomplishments, are deprived of meaning--the admiration he felt for those who lived in what at the start seemed to him that higher, more beautiful world of not just material comfort but culture, the faith he had in his work and the possibility that others might value it as he did, the love he had for Ruth, or thought he had (Martin realizes in that shabby last meeting that he had loved "an idealized Ruth . . . an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems," and never "[t]he real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind") in the earlier part of the tale when in relation to all these things he seemed eons younger and more naive. The end of all that is the end of his capacity to create, which leaves him at an end, literally. "What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own life?" Martin asked earlier in the narrative--but that is exactly the course he ends up following.
Indeed, thinking again of The Sea-Wolf I cannot help thinking of how in that book Humphrey Van Weyden, thrust into horrible circumstances aboard the ship the Ghost, managed to not just survive but triumph heroically. By contrast, Martin Eden (whom it would seem from the hints of his recollections of such episodes as his voyage on the John Rogers had himself survived horrors to compare with it), thrust into "bourgeois civilization," failed to do so. Of course, this was most fundamentally a matter of London's world-view, and especially his stance toward Nietzschean would-be superman-type individualism. It was not Humphrey who held such views, but the Ghost's captain Wolf Larsen, who extraordinary a man as he was in mind, body and will, was utterly destroyed in the end by the falsity of the ideology by which he endeavored to live--as Martin Eden was to be, that would-be superman, even in excellent physical health under conditions of life that could only be called luxurious, unable to endure in a world deprived of all meaning for him. Yet it also seems to me a suggestion that, horrific as life aboard the Ghost was, it was in at least some critical way less vile than that world in which Martin made his way, his triumph in which proved his undoing.
And thinking of that I find myself remembering the other book I mentioned at the outset of this review, Forster's Howard's End. Where Howard's End remains so esteemed that it is a byword for higher culture even for those who have never come within a million miles of actually reading Forster, most, in London's own country, at least, seem to remember London mainly as a teller of animal stories--and it seems that this has more than a little to do with London's truths being of a kind the opinion-making Establishment critics have not been prepared to accept, and indeed become less able to accept over time. This seems to me to validate EVERY SINGLE WORD London had to say about them in this book. Indeed, considering that fact it seems all the more fitting that one of Martin Eden's themes is how little intellect is actually to be found among society's designated intellectuals, how little culture among the designated cultured--and how much more of both these things can sometimes be found in working-class ghettoes than in the snobbish salons of the ever-middlebrow haute bourgeoisie.
However, the novel is also much more than that, with perhaps its biggest surprise its being far and away the most realistic, and truthful, treatment of what it actually is to be a writer—of what it is like to write professionally, and of how society treats those who make the attempt, when they have not become "successful," and when they have become "successful"--that I have ever encountered in literature, period; infinitely more truthful than the utter garbage with which hacks as ignorant as they are insincere, talentless and unskilled, but who got all the breaks in spite of that, fill up our books and screens (where being a writer consists of wearing a smug expression on one's face as they autograph copies of their latest for starstruck fans), and the quite stupid lies with which the whole industries built around exploiting the dreams of authorship that pay far better than authorship ever did ceaselessly ply the public (summed up in five of the most insidious words in the English language, "You can do it too!").
That truthfulness is in large part a matter of the fact that where those writers tend to be at their most stupid, cowardly and dishonest when dealing with the matter of publishing--with these usually what we see is a writer finishing a manuscript, or maybe just beginning it, and BAM!, there they are in that bookshop signing those copies--Jack London, who unlike those people who are not even relevant now is genuinely relevant over a century later because he was not stupid or cowardly or dishonest, faces up to the reality fully. He forthrightly acknowledges that it is one thing to write, another to get published, still another to actually make a living from getting published--with the second challenge, and still more the third, so immense as to make the problem of merely producing a piece of writing, even high quality writing, appear trivial by comparison, especially for those who approach that world as most do, from outside, as outsiders who do "not know any editors or writers," or even "anybody who had ever attempted to write." Indeed, where even the few who admit the existence of obstacles tend to pass over the struggle to surmount them in a few words here it is lengthily dramatized as the heart, meat, core of the days of Eden's life during the period of the story, and treated not as the low comedy so many would make of it, but with the utmost--indeed, tragic--seriousness.
When Martin starts out, the very image of the neophyte, not only was there "nobody to tell him, to hint to him, to give him the least word of advice" about the rules. (Martin actually has to figure out for himself that he must type out the work rather than send it written in longhand--just one little reminder that, contrary to what certain Establishment idiots say, there is no "apprenticeship" to speak of in this process.) It was also the case that, submitting his work over and over and over again Martin "began to doubt that editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it was, a machine . . . a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps." Thus Martin
poured his soul into stories . . . [and] poems, and intrusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put the proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mail-box. It travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.It was just "like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum," with "the rejection slips . . . complet[ing] the horrible machinelikeness of the process . . . slips printed in stereotyped forms . . . he had received hundreds of them--as many as a dozen or more on each of his earlier manuscripts." It is so dispiriting that he thinks to himself that "[i]f he had received one line, one personal line, along with one rejection of all his rejections, he would have been cheered," but he never saw such a line, "not one editor . . . giv[ing] that proof of existence," so that Martin "could conclude only that there were no warm human men at the other end, only mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the machine."
London shows us, too, the obscene amount of time taken up by that process of merely "feeding the machine" rather than actually writing, and the way that those supposedly small expenses of submission like postage add up, sufficiently so in his case to mean genuine hardship, with absolutely nothing to show for it--just one of many reasons why while he is at the effort there never seems to be time enough in the day, every other interest and pleasure getting crowded out. He shows us the confusion and frustration and sense of injustice the writer feels at seeing so much mediocrity and outright drivel in print, while work no worse and maybe much better gets only the cold contempt of those rejection slips. He shows us what happens when that writer turns their hand to nonfiction, and equally "pour[s] their soul" into it, regardless of what they can offer, the fact that they are a "nobody" rather than a "well-known specialist" retailing the conventionalities of their field makes what they have to say meaningless in any editor's eyes--nothing that he does ever seeming to make any difference whatsoever, offer any escape from "the process" and its horrible and invariably disappointing "machinelikeness."
Meanwhile, in the extreme opposite of those speeches in which tearful award-winners fulsomely give thanks to every person they have ever met in their entire lives for their unremitting support as they clutch their little statuettes, through it all no one supports Martin, no one believes in him, no one is interested. Those who at least attempt to be polite, like his sister, do not understand his work, let alone why he does it--what it means to him, why he cannot fit the square peg that is himself into the round holes society offers the vast majority of its members, why he cannot just reconcile himself to a workaday existence as his lot in life--just telling him to "get a job" (in spite of the fact that he is in no way living off of any of them, in no way a burden to them). Where in a more romanticized recounting of such a story the woman he loves would have been his sole support, here the woman he loves is like all the rest, and indeed more emphatic than all the rest in offering only disinterest and discouragement, endlessly trying to persuade him to give all this up and just "get a job." ("Their highest concept of right conduct . . . was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job!" The reader with any sympathy or empathy for Martin quickly gets as sick as he does of hearing others say it to him--while his experience in the resort laundry underlines just how foolish and glib is so much of the talk about day jobs and writing in one's "spare time.")
No matter how hard he worked at his writing it did not matter, he was "lazy"; and no matter what he produced it did not matter if there was no sale, their respect for the judgments of editors total--and their respect for him the extreme opposite. The editors who may not have existed at all, the editors with their soul-crushing "cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped" rejection slips--they must be right, no one trying to see things his way, no one taking his side any more than they share his enthusiasm, endlessly justifying the shabby and cruel way in which he is being treated.
The indifference of the world, the absolute failure of effort to improve his own lot, the disrespect with which his toil is treated, makes a cruel mockery of the middle-class verities about delayed gratification, hard work, and the rest--and while I suspect that few indeed get past the experience of the first half of the book, in which Martin has sold absolutely nothing, there is no less truth in the second half, in which Martin starts to make sales. There is how it may be a long time between that positive reply and actually getting the money promised--perhaps so long a time as "never." There is the way that first little success or two, rather than a watershed, so frequently proves to be nothing of the kind, followed up by nothing else for a long time--and in that time that writer clings desperately to that tiny success too small to improve their situation in any way. If more checks come, eventually, the "old-time thrill at receiving" a check would be gone, for it would no longer be "pregnant with promise of great things to come," just a bit of money that might let them pay a bill so that they can continue grinding along in poverty.
And there is in that a hint of how the long train of disappointments, the brutalization of it all, far from making the victory sweeter in the manner of the "uplifting," aspirational garbage which Martin himself sees through early on, deprives later success of any sweetness it may have. Indeed, while stories of artists, fiction and nonfiction, always seem to me to become unreal when they tell of how they become "successful"--the grit and the texture of the early part of the story falling by the wayside as they seem to lose touch with reality, because in a sense they have (their head turned by what has happened to them, their self-awareness failing them), there was for me palpable truth in that last act in which Martin genuinely does find success--when the material that had so often been insulted in the past inexplicably, suddenly, brings him large paydays. Where most in such a situation, in life as in fiction, think "At last my hard work and perseverance have paid off! At last my genius has been recognized!"
Martin, being a deeper thinker and more feeling human being, has a different reaction. The profound disconnect between the effort he put in and the quality of his work, and the way the world treats him, has swung from one extreme to the other, plays its part in destroying him. Thus does Martin think again and again in that last act about how when he was doing that celebrated work, when he had even finished that work, he received only contempt, now that he had riches and fame everyone sought after him, everyone honored him, because it was riches and fame they sought after and honored, not his work--this the "bourgeois valuation of a man" that has the bourgeoisie showering dinner invitations upon him. (Back when "he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine . . . no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners . . . dinners were thrust upon him right and left.") Indeed, the very Morses who had disdained his earlier, honorable courtship of their daughter, contrived against it and compelled her to break it off peremptorily at the first opportunity, were, now that he was a man of fortune, ready to pimp her to him (her brother Norman escorting her to Martin's hotel, where she goes up to his room and lies about having defied her family to see him, offering him "free love" if that is all he will accept) in the ultimate commentary on what thinkers like London thought of the highly touted "bourgeois morality" in sex.
It all disgusts and demoralizes him. Everything he had believed in, his values and goals and accomplishments, are deprived of meaning--the admiration he felt for those who lived in what at the start seemed to him that higher, more beautiful world of not just material comfort but culture, the faith he had in his work and the possibility that others might value it as he did, the love he had for Ruth, or thought he had (Martin realizes in that shabby last meeting that he had loved "an idealized Ruth . . . an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems," and never "[t]he real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind") in the earlier part of the tale when in relation to all these things he seemed eons younger and more naive. The end of all that is the end of his capacity to create, which leaves him at an end, literally. "What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own life?" Martin asked earlier in the narrative--but that is exactly the course he ends up following.
Indeed, thinking again of The Sea-Wolf I cannot help thinking of how in that book Humphrey Van Weyden, thrust into horrible circumstances aboard the ship the Ghost, managed to not just survive but triumph heroically. By contrast, Martin Eden (whom it would seem from the hints of his recollections of such episodes as his voyage on the John Rogers had himself survived horrors to compare with it), thrust into "bourgeois civilization," failed to do so. Of course, this was most fundamentally a matter of London's world-view, and especially his stance toward Nietzschean would-be superman-type individualism. It was not Humphrey who held such views, but the Ghost's captain Wolf Larsen, who extraordinary a man as he was in mind, body and will, was utterly destroyed in the end by the falsity of the ideology by which he endeavored to live--as Martin Eden was to be, that would-be superman, even in excellent physical health under conditions of life that could only be called luxurious, unable to endure in a world deprived of all meaning for him. Yet it also seems to me a suggestion that, horrific as life aboard the Ghost was, it was in at least some critical way less vile than that world in which Martin made his way, his triumph in which proved his undoing.
And thinking of that I find myself remembering the other book I mentioned at the outset of this review, Forster's Howard's End. Where Howard's End remains so esteemed that it is a byword for higher culture even for those who have never come within a million miles of actually reading Forster, most, in London's own country, at least, seem to remember London mainly as a teller of animal stories--and it seems that this has more than a little to do with London's truths being of a kind the opinion-making Establishment critics have not been prepared to accept, and indeed become less able to accept over time. This seems to me to validate EVERY SINGLE WORD London had to say about them in this book. Indeed, considering that fact it seems all the more fitting that one of Martin Eden's themes is how little intellect is actually to be found among society's designated intellectuals, how little culture among the designated cultured--and how much more of both these things can sometimes be found in working-class ghettoes than in the snobbish salons of the ever-middlebrow haute bourgeoisie.
Canceling Batgirl
I have long since stopped paying much attention to what is said about movies that has not been long since completed and so close to a proper, firm, reasonably unmovable release date as to be virtually immovable--in part because since the outbreak of the pandemic things have gone according to plan that much less often, making early claims about them (a good many of which are stupidities and outright lies anyway) much less meaningful.
Still, the news about Batgirl caught me by surprise. This film, which has a budget I have seen reported as variously in the $70 million to $100 million range was actually in post-production when Warner Brothers Discovery (the parent company of the backer, Warner Brothers) decided it was not going to come out. At all. Even on streaming.
Why has this been the case? Apparently the film, which cost as much as it did because of pandemic-related disruption and delay, is, according to the logic now prevailing with a recently changed company management at WBD, "neither big enough to feel worthy of a major theatrical release nor small enough to make economic sense in an increasingly cutthroat streaming landscape." Basically, the company is walking back from the idea of Warner Brothers making expensive content for streaming, instead reemphasizing theatrical release--where this relatively modest production (next to the "tentpoles" that cost several times as much to make) is a weak prospect, such that the additional cost of finishing post-production, marketing, distributing it (easily equaling or exceeding what has already been expended), would likely mean a much worse bottom line than if it had simply cut its losses and taken the tax write-off.
All of this seems to me plausible enough. As we have seen since the pandemic streaming, in any form (e.g. $30 surcharges), is no substitute for theatrical revenues--while the streaming market is indeed saturated. (Remember how Netflix has been taking that beating?) Meanwhile that theatrical release market has been ever more dominated by the really big blockbusters, meaning a comparatively "small" superhero film, in another saturated market, would have a tough time scoring back even that "small" budget. After all, if what is said about the numbers so far is accurate the movie, which may run the studio $200 million when marketing and distribution costs are all counted in, might need to make as much as a half billion to break even on its theatrical run--which would be a long shot even in good times, which these are not. The American box office remains well short of its normal dynamism, and the global box office too (with the Chinese government less likely than before to let Hollywood into its colossal and increasingly critical market).
And just as the prospects are poorer, so is the studio's capacity to take the hit in light of the financial beating that Warner Brothers, like every other studio these days (I dare say, like just about every other company these days), has been taking for over two years as a result of the neverending troubles of the not-so-roaring 2020s (reflected in $3 billion in debt across its divisions, while interest rates head up in a way unseen in decades). Taken altogether this would seem to rather predictably compel a more than usually ruthless attitude on the part of management, perhaps especially in relation to a DC universe that may still look like their best bet for real profitability over the short, medium and even long-term.
So the decision seems to have run: show that the company's new management is serious about its announced strategy, take the tax write-off, and avoid adding yet another black mark to the WB's track record with DC.
Still, if I entirely get the business logic it still seems to me mind-boggling that a near-$100 million movie will get buried like this--the fact that between the commercial logic of the blockbuster, the pandemic and the other factors discussed here the business has come to this pass bespeaking a depressing decadence about the way movies get financed and made these days. The one movie discussed here may or may not represent any great loss to world cinema, but the fact that this is how the game is being played can only make things harder on those trying to actually make movies--and they were more than crushingly, heart-breakingly hard already.
Still, the news about Batgirl caught me by surprise. This film, which has a budget I have seen reported as variously in the $70 million to $100 million range was actually in post-production when Warner Brothers Discovery (the parent company of the backer, Warner Brothers) decided it was not going to come out. At all. Even on streaming.
Why has this been the case? Apparently the film, which cost as much as it did because of pandemic-related disruption and delay, is, according to the logic now prevailing with a recently changed company management at WBD, "neither big enough to feel worthy of a major theatrical release nor small enough to make economic sense in an increasingly cutthroat streaming landscape." Basically, the company is walking back from the idea of Warner Brothers making expensive content for streaming, instead reemphasizing theatrical release--where this relatively modest production (next to the "tentpoles" that cost several times as much to make) is a weak prospect, such that the additional cost of finishing post-production, marketing, distributing it (easily equaling or exceeding what has already been expended), would likely mean a much worse bottom line than if it had simply cut its losses and taken the tax write-off.
All of this seems to me plausible enough. As we have seen since the pandemic streaming, in any form (e.g. $30 surcharges), is no substitute for theatrical revenues--while the streaming market is indeed saturated. (Remember how Netflix has been taking that beating?) Meanwhile that theatrical release market has been ever more dominated by the really big blockbusters, meaning a comparatively "small" superhero film, in another saturated market, would have a tough time scoring back even that "small" budget. After all, if what is said about the numbers so far is accurate the movie, which may run the studio $200 million when marketing and distribution costs are all counted in, might need to make as much as a half billion to break even on its theatrical run--which would be a long shot even in good times, which these are not. The American box office remains well short of its normal dynamism, and the global box office too (with the Chinese government less likely than before to let Hollywood into its colossal and increasingly critical market).
And just as the prospects are poorer, so is the studio's capacity to take the hit in light of the financial beating that Warner Brothers, like every other studio these days (I dare say, like just about every other company these days), has been taking for over two years as a result of the neverending troubles of the not-so-roaring 2020s (reflected in $3 billion in debt across its divisions, while interest rates head up in a way unseen in decades). Taken altogether this would seem to rather predictably compel a more than usually ruthless attitude on the part of management, perhaps especially in relation to a DC universe that may still look like their best bet for real profitability over the short, medium and even long-term.
So the decision seems to have run: show that the company's new management is serious about its announced strategy, take the tax write-off, and avoid adding yet another black mark to the WB's track record with DC.
Still, if I entirely get the business logic it still seems to me mind-boggling that a near-$100 million movie will get buried like this--the fact that between the commercial logic of the blockbuster, the pandemic and the other factors discussed here the business has come to this pass bespeaking a depressing decadence about the way movies get financed and made these days. The one movie discussed here may or may not represent any great loss to world cinema, but the fact that this is how the game is being played can only make things harder on those trying to actually make movies--and they were more than crushingly, heart-breakingly hard already.
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