The Failure of One Movie, or of a Generation of Filmmakers? David Walsh Discusses Megalopolis

Seeing that David Walsh had reviewed Megalopolis I wondered whether his judgment would challenge the generally negative judgment of the critics. However, the very subtitle of his review makes clear that where the movie's quality was concerned he did not, declaring it a "weak, terribly confused fable about modern-day America." For his part Walsh makes clear that he does not think the movie's being a "fable" is the problem--such in his view capable of "be[ing] revealing and illuminating, bringing out truths in generalized, clarifying form." The film's fault is not that it is a fable but that the fable is "crude and poorly done" in virtually every respect, "technical" ones included, Walsh specifically citing "script," "staging," "acting," "dramatic coherence," and "overall look and 'feel'" before coming to the matter of "social insight," which seems to be really the fatal thing here given the subject matter that Coppola elected to take up (the central conflict in the story between an inventor-architect's aspiration to rebuild a troubled "New Rome" as "Megalopolis" using revolutionary new materials, and the machinations of powerful enemies intent on stopping him, who whip up a reactionary mass movement in opposition). Walsh regards Coppola's evident concerns with fascism and dictatorship as "legitimate" but also thinks that in the movie Coppola "confront[s] a complex society’s immensely complex dilemmas" with "lazy, self-indulgent banalities worthy of the 1970s' 'counterculture'" and indeed a social vision readable as comprised wholly of residues of it, namely "an unhealthy combination of bohemian self-indulgence, quasi-mysticism and extreme . . . individualism." To Walsh this seems especially evident in the tale's centering on "a persecuted, tortured intellectual 'genius'" far above a populace presented here only "as easily manipulated fodder for right-wing demagogues" "retaining his prominence on the world stage and directing its future evolution" being the sole hope of salvation for a world in crisis (which comes off as self-indulgent given how Coppola seems to only too obviously and strongly see himself in the film's "persecuted, tortured intellectual 'genius,'" Adam Driver's inventor-architect Cesar Catalina). Indeed, Walsh proceeds from there to argue that those few critics who have had positive words for the film--it is these and not the far more numerous detractors that he concerns himself with--praise exactly those elements he found unsatisfactory about it, reflecting how they, too, are captive to the same unfortunate way of looking at the world.

Considering that I think of how one of Walsh's themes as a critic has long been the way which artists' outlook and the work that follows from it reflects their times--and his view of American film having suffered since the '70s from how deadly the last half century has been for any sort of critical, socially-informed perspective, with all the implications this has had for those artists whose subject is human beings. If a half century ago artists like Coppola had displayed a measure of genuine social criticism and dissent in the years since they made their peace with the world they so miserably failed to change, and looked to their own enjoyments in it, as the weakest and least satisfying in their outlook came to the fore. The result was that even what passed among them for social concern was "noisy, energy-consuming thrashing about" reflecting fears for their expectations of "continu[ing] to function 'freely' (and prosperously) in a decaying and threatening world."

Of course, Walsh has repeatedly given his readers the impression over the past couple of years that, amid all that has been happening in the world, artists were beginning to really look about themselves again and think hard about what they saw. Indeed, Walsh wrote glowing reviews to two films in 2023 by filmmakers whose works he had consistently panned in the past--Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things, and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Meanwhile if Walsh's annual Oscar coverage these past many decades has generally treated the ceremony as a thing to be endured rather than enjoyed by any really thinking and feeling person, he seemed to see what was very possibly the emergence of a different spirit in the ceremony earlier this year (where it seemed to be a good sign that the two movies by Lanthimos and Nolan, in his view deservedly, between the two of them took home eleven statues, including Best Picture, Best Director, three of the four acting prizes, and Best Adapted Screenplay, as the makers of the generally less worthy fare competing with them generally ended up with consolation prizes). In Walsh's judgment, however, rather than Megalopolis being one of the "green shoots" portending a recovery in American cinema, the film as he describes it is instead a monument to the decadence of the past years he has so often described, in which what was least satisfying in Coppola's work even at its Godfather/Apocalypse Now best (the "murkiest and least coherent, and most self-aggrandizing, elements") is pretty much all the director has to offer now. Indeed it can seem to say something that where Walsh so often closes a review of a really unsatisfactory film or ceremony with an evocation of American filmmaking's healthier situation in the past, and the hints of movement toward something better today, his review of Megalopolis closes with its damning judgment of this movie, Walsh offering nothing beyond that at review's end.

David Walsh Reviews Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: Some Reflections

In recent years film and culture critic David Walsh and his colleagues have attended to fewer and fewer major Hollywood releases, frequently going for months without reviewing a single such movie--while their publishing a review of a big "blockbuster" has become especially rare. This year has been no exception. There was a more than five month gap between their review of Alex Garland's Civil War back in April, and their belated publication of their only review of a major Hollywood film of the summer, Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters, at the start of October.

This may seem just as well given that there has been a very great deal else for them to write about in this era of "polycrisis," during which the arts have reflected the troubles in the larger world--with the institutions of the art world facing existential crisis (prominent museums, symphonies, schools withering and dying for lack of funding, and even megabuck film studios floundering) amid post-pandemic economic stress, government austerity, culture war; with artists and members of associated occupational groups finding it ever harder to make a living and being driven to strike action the same way so many other workers are (most recently, in the video game industry); with the horrific events of our times driving artists to take public stands, and those conventional wisdom flatters by calling "leaders" once more showing their colossal hypocrisy in the battles over free speech that rage in their wake; among much, much else. Indeed, if their review page covered previous Mad Max and Planet of the Apes and Deadpool films, their sequels could hardly seem worth the trouble amid all that, making their taking a pass on writing about them quite natural--the more in as from a critical standpoint such as their own there is often not very much to say about them. Indeed, it seems telling of their feeling about the poverty of American filmmaking today that Walsh and his colleagues recently had time for a series of articles to the movies of 1974.

Still, North American audiences do every now and then get a really big-budget, highly-publicized wide release made by people who are at least aspiring to present them with something more than another Big Dumb Blockbuster, at the very least a Big But Not So Dumb Blockbuster (whether successfully or unsuccessfully). Dealing with these Walsh and company usually do rise to the occasion--with Josh Varlin's appraisal of both parts of Denis Villeneuve's Dune outstanding, and Jacob Crosse and Patrick Martin's coverage of Civil War one of the rather small portion of the outpouring of reviews of that film that seemed to me truly worthwhile.

Francis Ford Coppola's Neo-Roman science fiction epic Megalopolis is another such film, and after its release last month Walsh undertook its review. Alas, his assessment was not positive--but certainly more interesting than most of what I have seen of the outpouring of negative comment, not least for what the film seems to say about a whole epoch in the history of filmmaking.

Announcement: This Blog Has Nothing to Do with Fake Countries

Apparently one of the many hobbies people pursue together on the Internet is make up fake countries with fake histories. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the similarity of the name to Anthony Hope's famous "Ruritania" and all that has been associated with it (and to "Raritan," a river, bay and borough in northeastern New Jersey within the New York Tri-State Area) "Raritania" seems a popular choice of name for such countries, profiles of at least two of them cropping up high in the search rankings when I type in this blog's name.

I hereby announce as officially as anything can be announced here that this blog, which was established in and has been continually operating since 2008, has no connection whatsoever with any of those imaginary countries. It is simply the personal blog of an individual, its owner and sole writer--myself.

How Much Money Might Joker 2 Lose?

Joker 2 opened in North America with a mere 30 percent of even the low end of the figure at the bottom end of the range in the forecast that Boxoffice Pro issued a mere month before the movie's release (just $37 million, against the $115 million that had been the "floor" of their expectation). After that no one seems to have thought "legs" might save the movie, but the movie's first-to-second weekend drop confirmed the expectation of the collapse continuing--the figure a rarely seen 81 percent--with the third weekend seeing another drop almost as bad (68 percent). Thus after ten days in release the movie had made a mere $52 million, after seventeen days just $56 million. (By contrast even that likely biggest loser of last year, the similarly DC debacle The Flash, managed $55 million in its first three day period, and had just under $100 million when its third weekend take was in.)

At this rate Joker 2 may not even reach the $60 million mark domestically, while it is hard to picture it getting very far over the $200 million mark globally. Assuming the studio keeps half of that it will end up with $100 million or so net, while (barring this being one of those movies that fails in theaters but explodes in post-theatrical venues) doing only as well in streaming and the other post-theatrical arenas, leaving it with a net not much above $200 million, against outlays that may have been in the $300 million+ range. That works out to a $100 million+ gap, with a recent Variety report indicating the loss as possibly twice that ($150-$200 million).

The worst loss posited for any movie so far this year (even the commercial catastrophe of Furiosa, the loss on which was reportedly in the $75-$95 million range), this makes it a very strong candidate for the top of Deadline's list of the year's biggest losers next spring. However, that is far from the whole story, the film's performance also a reminder of the prospect that the entertainment press does not want to talk about, namely that the theatrical market has changed structurally. On average the public goes to the movies twice a year now instead of the 3-4 times they went in the 2010s and the 4-5 times they went before, all of which has made them pickier about what they give those trips to the theater over to--all as the old blockbuster model may be failing in getting them to do that. Admittedly Joker did not fit that model very closely, and the sequel may have been even further removed from that model still (with its distance from the pretense of being an origin story for a supervillain, its sharp generic shifts from the original, etc.), but the expectation that people would show up for Number Two because they responded to Number One is very much part of that model, and part of what the backers were counting on, and did not work this time--though I doubt anyone who counts for very much in the film world will take the lesson. Instead they will cleave to the old saws about keeping the creatives under tight control rather than letting them chase visions, as, drawing confidence from Deadpool's delivering the boffo b.o. they were so desperate to see a franchise film make (the $1.3 billion they might have hoped the Joker would make), they go on trying to shamelessly milk any and every franchise they can for generic material--and then make excuses for people not showing up irrelevant to the real issue.

Joker 2's Fortunes: An Analogy

A relatively low-budgeted, noirish, drama of a marginal, lonely, man losing his shaky grip on reality who crosses paths with a candidate seeking office in a decaying "Gotham" in post-post-war boom America culminating in chaotic violence becomes a critical darling (Best Picture nominee!), and good-sized box office hit. Flush with success the movie's now lionized director brought back its star for his next film, which is a musical with a way bigger budget--and the movie fails catastrophically with critics and audiences alike, as the entertainment press reported that the "auteur," misusing the considerable good will his prior success had won him, was out of control and made a horrible mess of things.

That description could be of Martin Scorsese going from Taxi Driver to New York, New York. However, it could also be of Todd Phillips going from (the Martin Scorsese-inspired and Martin Scorsese-produced and, I thought, Martin Scorsese-imitating-to-a-fault) Joker to its recently released sequel, an analogy that has been on my mind ever since I heard Joker 2 would have a musical element, but which only a few seem to have drawn, and that only recently.

Perhaps this is because the movie was something of a low point for the still highly lionized Scorsese, all as that particular film, in spite of the fact that Scorsese's productivity and good repute have outlasted those of so many of his contemporaries, contrasts with how many of the less successful films of the stars of the Hollywood new era (most obviously Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, but also others like William Friedkin's Sorcerer) never enjoyed redemption in the eyes of the critics, and has lapsed into obscurity.

Or perhaps they thought of the analogy, but didn't speak up about it in public, because citing the notorious flop would have been at odds with their role as Les Claqueurs du Cinema. (Granted, King of Comedy was a commercial failure at the time, but it is at least pretty well respected as the gap in the Rotten Tomatoes score shows--King having an 89 percent fresh rating against the 57 percent rotten rating of the poorly regarded New York, New York.)

In either case it just did not come up much, but will probably come up more in the years ahead when people talk about the film--especially if Joker 2, like New York, New York, does not find its way to the kind of redemption for which those few who have spoken in praise of the film might regard as its rightful due.

Finding Interest in the Quotidian

It has been the longstanding view in modern times that really serious artistic work is "realistic," with work that conspicuously departs from reality justly marginal--better-suited to, for example, children than adults, and people who are less than totally adult in some sense (the "nerd" who likes cartoons and video games, certainly, seen as less fully adult than their peers, and the inverse of the "cool" kid who appears more autonomous and sophisticated and grown-up than their peers). There have always been exceptions, of course, but the point is that they have been exceptions, this very much the rule.

Much of this may seem a matter of the general silliness that we get when people of conventional mind try to make distinctions about what is proper and what is not--which produce such absurdities as the idea that Fantasy Football is a pastime worthy of adults, but not playing football on a video game console. But it may be that there are more substantial factors inclining the young more toward the fantastic, the not so young toward the realistic--and especially the everyday. The young lead very limited lives, and the big wide world of which they have seen less--and the worlds beyond that--may have an attraction for them that they do not to a more experienced, more world-weary adult who has already seen a bit of the world, often on terms that have not been particularly pleasant, and been disillusioned by it, so that such things as long journeys to faraway places have not the same romance for them.

That sounds negative, and I have no intention of pretending it is not, but at the same time I do not think all the factors are negative ones. Alongside what they lose is there what probably is more likely to come with age than in any other way, the ability to take an interest in the little things, and the everyday things--mastery of the handling of the details of which is, after all, an area where realism has been stronger than those forms of fiction which incline to flights of fancy.

The Waning of Nostalgia for the Rat Pack

I remember that in the late '90s there was a resurgence of interest in the old "Rat Pack" and its members and their works. Thus did we see, for example, a homage of sorts to the group in Doug Liman's Swingers, the Steven Soderbergh remake of Ocean's Eleven that launched a whole cinematic franchise, and such oddities as Larry Bishop's Mad Dog Time, as Ray Liotta played the actual Frank Sinatra in HBO's film The Rat Pack. (Meanwhile remembrances of the group cropped up in a good many smaller ways--as with Brent Spiner's rendition of Dean Martin's "Sway," as seen in the film Out to Sea--itself a piece of nostalgia in its reunion of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.)

The boom in Rat Pack nostalgia waned, but something of it seemed to come back a decade or so later, helped perhaps by the obsession of a culturally influential stratum with the aesthetic of the '50s as Mad Men became a hit.

However, a decade after there was no repeat of that. The only really significant usage of the Rat Pack's work in pop culture in the late '10s was in Todd Phillips' Joker--a film which, significantly, was itself a throwback (to the work of Martin Scorsese in the '70s and early '80s), and in which the particular theme of "Send in the Clowns" was highly relevant (and probably the reason the film also used Sinatra's rendition of "That's Life" in the end credits).

Some might see cultural politics in that, identifying nostalgia for the Rat Pack with a kind of machismo of which the mainstream has been less and less approving, with the #MeToo era a low point for such tolerance. However, one can also see it as a matter of how in popular memory even as grand a legacy as that of Frank Sinatra and his cohorts fades--perhaps the more quickly with pop culture getting ever more fragmented, and popular memory getting shorter all the time.

The Copyright Nazi Sheds Alligator Tears for the Struggling Artist

It is rare that anyone in this society expresses sympathy for the struggling artist. Quite frankly, with very few exceptions, no one cares about struggling artists but the struggling artists themselves--not even their more successful brethren. (As Balzac put it when writing of the publishing world in Lost Illusions, "the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as" they, for where a "bookseller sees a possible loss of money" in a newcomer's manuscript, a successful author sees--"dreads"--in the newcomer "a possible rival," with the result that "the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you.")

The result is that such expressions of sympathy from people who were not struggling artists have tended to get my attention in the past--until time and again the reference to the troubles of artists proved to be just a hook for another rant about the glories of copyright and attack on anyone not taking a maximalist view of such rights as scum. That said, I will not get into the rights and wrongs of copyright here--but the plain and simple matter of the fact is that sterner enforcement of copyright laws is just not going to do much for the newcomer. Such laws defend the interests of those who possess intellectual property. They do nothing for those who have yet to produce any of commercial value. The standard copyright supporter's position is that a strong copyright regime incentivizes the creation of such property--but those struggling artists need a lot more than that if they are to do so successfully, and those professing concern for them show no interest in that whatsoever.

After all, if we grant what copyright's supporters say, and that a more stringent copyright regime does leave, for example, publishers with fatter profits, what are they likely to do with them? Give newcomers more chances? Only those who have no understanding of publishing, business or the neoliberal age can imagine that they would prefer this to a course of new mergers and acquisitions, or financial engineering, because publishers exist to make money, not produce books (and not even necessarily make money by producing books if they can get more, faster, with greater certainty in some other way)--the monuments that young authors rear with their life's blood, as Balzac put it, to them "simply a good or a bad speculation," and in the view of publishers, generally a bad one, whatever the merits of the work. Alas, a refusal to acknowledge such facts is a requirement in those given platforms from which one can reach an appreciable audience in our time, helping make the reference to the interests of struggling writers the cynical thing that it is.

What Irony is Really About: Superiority Without Responsibility

The word "irony" is much misused, so much so that reflecting the situation the writers of Teen Titans Go! actually had one episode in which such misuse by other members of the team had Robin devoting much of one of their adventures to explaining the concept, to the point of giving them an eighth grade English class explanation of the differences between verbal, dramatic and situational irony (as they went through one of their adventures, of course).

Sound as far as it went, it was also consistent with the fact that even those who actually use the word "irony" with impeccable correctness from the standpoint of denotation and syntax are not often sensitive to what it means to look at others and their troubles "ironically," namely the sense of superiority without responsibility involved, for instance, "I can see that this person is heading for a fall, but I can just sit back and enjoy that."

It is the outlook of the self-satisfied aristocrat without respect, sympathy, empathy for lesser beings, whose destruction he takes as entertainment, and the history of art being what it is, pervasive across our inheritance of higher culture, widespread today, and altogether absolutely irresistible to a middlebrow mind--which is why we see so much of it about, all as it is a rare occurrence that anyone points out that this might not be an entirely healthy state.

"But He's So Smart!"

It does not seem uncommon for a certain sort of person to defend a position on the basis of its endorsement by some public figure alleged to have a higher than normal level of intelligence.

"But he's so smart!" they will say when anyone challenges them on this.

It is a case of that very basic logical fallacy, the "appeal to authority," one that is the more blatant because alleged high general intelligence is the source of the authority on what may be a very specialized topic, addressing which high intelligence may simply not mean much unless it has been trained and informed and, of course, put to use on the problem in a serious way, which is far from always being the case. The intelligent may on average be better-equipped to form a rigorously thought-out opinion, but they have their areas of special concern, and there are so many issues in the world, and only so many hours in the day, while even the greatest intelligence is uneven in its performance across the full gamut of mental tasks and subject matter, and even among the intelligent few are capable of wholly setting aside prejudice and self-interest. And they often offer opinions in line with all these limitations--even the genuinely accomplished offering only banalities and worse when they speak about something outside the area of their special expertise (and alas, not realizing it themselves).

The illogic of the approach is underlined by the selectivity of the approach, and its vulnerability. Those who appeal to the authority of intelligence in, for example, citing tech billionaires' statements in support of unrestricted capitalism cannot on this basis respond when someone cites that supreme icon of the Cult of Intelligence, Albert Einstein, in defense of the opposite--remembering that he published "Why Socialism?" in the very first issue of the Monthly Review. Indeed, taking that into account it becomes very easy to argue that tech billionaires (even if one accepts the far from unimpeachable claims for their "superior" intelligence) support capitalism not because they have reasoned out that this is best for society, but because they are billionaire capitalists who, perhaps knowing and caring nothing about anything else, are selfishly defending their positions of extreme privilege.

That Cheerful "Think Again!"

I have always found the rhetorical device of stating some misapprehension supposedly existing among their audience and then saying or writing "Think again!" at the end exceedingly obnoxious.

There is not only an often unwarranted assumption that the audience is thinking the thing they will presume to show to be false because they know so much more than the idiots in the audience do (especially offensive when the misapprehension in question is something only the deeply ignorant or profoundly stupid are likely to believe), but the cheery self-satisfaction in slapping them in the face with their presumed misapprehension with that "Think again!"

"Think that eating a tub of fried lard every day is good for your health? Think again!"

Think that's good writing?

Think again!

The Obnoxiousness of Prefacing a Statement with the Word "Look"

A great many people seem to find a person's starting their statements with the word "Look" off-putting.

A significant part of it is likely the strong association of the tendency with a tone of exasperation, and condescension, which can seem at the least graceless and very easily insulting, which is inseparable from the fact that the exasperated, graceless, insulting person who has resorted to this usage is presuming to tell another person what to do. To command them. If someone can't stand being told what to do even by a person indisputably authorized to do so, how are they going to feel when someone with no grounds for bossing them about that way starts speaking to them in that manner? Especially when they are, as is very likely the case, dictating to them not simply what they are to do but how they are to see the world, forcing their self-serving subjectivity upon their own?

It is no accident that in an interview that is other than the usual flattering promotion by a courtier a cornered rat of a politician, lacking much in the way of self-awareness or alertness to the subtleties of the English language, or respect for the intelligence of an audience in many cases likely to be far smarter than they, so often begins an answer to their interlocutor with that word "Look"--a fact which does nothing to make the unpleasant usage seem any more genial to those who have to hear it.

How Much Research Do Writers Really Do?

Considering the matter of writers' writing from fiction--a tendency so extreme that they do so even when they are writing about that professional activity they know personally, writing--it seems that a good explanation is, besides the demand that they produce work according to formula to get their paychecks, their essentially impressionable natures.

Of course, considering that one might come to that question of the research writers are supposed to do.

This has always been much on my mind because the writers I gravitated toward tended to write "information-heavy" narratives, much of the interest of which was their showing us something of the world, which they often treated in "big picture" fashion, doing which well often entailed a very heavy burden of research. Even as I found myself reading fewer techno-thrillers and more science fiction, and then less science fiction and more of what we call "classics," this stayed with me--such that even as my personal reading consisted more than before of Capital L literature, it was people like Balzac and Zola and Sinclair and Dreiser who got my time and my respect.

These days I suspect that figures like them, who are pretty unfashionable these days (today literary critics are apt to ignore Balzac, mock at Zola's science-mindedness, deride Sinclair for "message," treat Dreiser as "a dead dog"), are also unrepresentative in this way, most writers doing very little research at all. There are often practical reasons for that, especially for those who find their ability to make enough money to live on are driven to work at high speed, with all that means for the opportunity to properly research their subject matter. However, that impressionability seems to have given them that other way of thinking about their subject matter even when they were not so pressed--with the crummy result that fills up our bestseller lists with dreck, as I find myself far more interested in Balzac and Zola and Sinclair and Dreiser than the works our retailers are ceaselessly trying to foist upon us today.

Why Do Writers So Often Write From Other Fiction Instead of Life?

Where the answer to the question that is this post's title is concerned my thought had long been that it was a matter of plain and simple laziness--hacks taking the path of least resistance, and relentlessly encouraged in this by the Dauriats of the industry, whose determination to pay for what is most easily sold within the market they have created through the exercise of their power to the crassest ends leaves them open to only a painfully limited range of material.

Yet considering the view that artists are a "sensitive" lot working in unconscious and impressionistic rather than conscious and analytical ways suggests that there is something more. They go by their impressions--and the reality is that, in a mediated world, their impressions will be mediated ones, especially in regard to anything outside what is usually rather a narrow range of personal experience. Depicting, for example, police investigations, they are apt to have a head full of episodes of procedurals, and so this unavoidably influences what they are likely to write when they pen an episode of a procedural themselves--easily producing results like those atrocious episodes of Castle which I watched unsure of whether I was supposed to be taking it as a parody or not.

Of the Term "Useful Idiots"

The term "useful idiots" to denote a person whom a cynical operative dupes into supporting a political agenda not their own apparently dates back to the article "Party Spirit in France" in the June 11, 1864 edition of Britain's The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art. The usage specifically referred to "a supremely foolish" citizen who gave Olivier Émile Ollivier, a formerly republican statesman increasingly siding with Napoleon III in these years of the "Second Empire," a convenient chance to defend his (to many, treacherous) actions.

However, the term has since been almost universally treated as a coinage of the Russian revolutionary and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, and in the associated memory used as both exemplifying the view of leftist leaders as vile cynics whose only motive is gaining, holding onto or increasing their personal power, and anyone who not merely followed them but was simply "soft" on the left as at best the dupes of such.

All of this, of course, is in spite of the inconvenient fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Lenin ever said any such thing, or even anything from which such a meaning could be extracted. However, as the ubiquity of the belief that he did indicates the attribution is almost never questioned. Equally, anyone who says that Margaret Thatcher called any man riding a bus past the age of twenty-five is likely to have a right-winger immediately screaming in their face that "She never said that!" Not that "There's no proof that she ever said that," but a very confident "She never said that!" (Indeed, even when Thatcher was so obviously on the record as having said something similarly callous and insulting to working people, as with her notorious "There is no such thing" remark in reference to the existence of society her supporters, unable to say "She never said that!"--indeed, the Margaret Thatcher Foundation itself has the full text of the relevant interview up on their web site--insist "She never meant that!" when the easily checkable context, evident in the transcript on the web site, makes it all too clear that she meant exactly what she sounded like she meant, and indeed came off as even more sneering toward the disadvantaged when we do check the context and see her mocking the homeless for expecting help.)

One cannot call this respect for the facts, only respect for the piety of the politically orthodox, and the prejudices that go with that, making for an easy attitude toward the difference between fact and fiction in the one case, and pseudo-sticklerism for the facts in the other, each equally propagandistic.

Of "Writer's Block" in Bad Fiction

One of the more irritating clichés of the writing life as depicted in pop culture is the ceaseless reference to "writer's block." The writer in question, perhaps in the middle of some project, perhaps after the completion of some project, simply cannot write another word.

Certainly writers do get "stuck" in their writing, for any number of reasons--stress and self-doubt as ever-present as they are unhelpful. Yet we see so much of it in pop cultural depictions of writing because it is so much easier to present to an unsophisticated audience than the multitude of other difficulties that writers face in their work--all as they would much rather present writers having trouble writing than writers who have no problem producing the words, but finding no takers for them, and still less succeeding in making any living from them, precisely because they have been so cowardly about telling the truth about their own business.

Alas, they are not necessarily worse than the practitioners of other profession that way.

Sonya Saraiya on David Fincher's The Social Network

A decade after its release Sonya Saraiya revisited David Fincher's The Social Network in a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair. As it happened her remarks about the film were less interesting than her remarks about Facebook in the real world--a thing that I suppose can't be helped given the profound limitations of the film.

There was, for example, her remarks about just how "toxic" her experience of the site was as she found herself subject to the post-graduation bragging of acquaintances about their new gigs, turning it into "a platform of envy--a poisonous, insidious sort that turned all of that anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression." Indeed, Saraiya initially thought Fincher's "Facebook" movie would be about what it was actually like to be a Facebook user, and what they felt during it--"that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness," "the mingled pride and disappointment of seeing your life laid out in blue and black type," "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."

Of course, the film had nothing to do with that, the movie not "Facebook: The Movie" but a much more personal story about Mark Zuckerberg becoming a tech billionaire. Saraiya reads it as a morality tale about ambition and money coming in ahead of principle and loyalty and friendship, but it is undeniable that the movie, in spite of the rather pathetic whining of some of Silicon Valley's courtiers in the press, is fundamentally a hyperbolic glorification of Zuckerberg. And indeed, referencing a piece the film's screenwriter Sorkin wrote for the New York Times some years later Ms. Saraiya suggests that "Sorkin is still too dazzled by the skills of a tech genius . . . to really blame Zuckerberg for what Facebook has become."

Why, precisely, is that the case? Reading that I find myself thinking about what Upton Sinclair had to say about artists, and what makes so many of them so obsequious to the rich and powerful and those in authority in Mammonart--their "sensitivity," their "impressionability," such that so many an artist "feels a real awe for authority," and sure "his sovereign is bigger in spirit . . . making him bigger in body," even when they are not in any direct way necessarily being paid to glorify them, the way they so often are.

So it would seem with Sorkin in relation to Zuckerberg--to his discredit.

I wonder: can Mr. Sorkin handle that truth?

Remembering David Fincher's The Social Network

I remember that when I heard that Aaron Sorkin was writing and David Fincher helming a film about the creation of Facebook my thought was "Who the hell wants to see that?"

As happened every so often I was wrong about that, the film actually proving a commercial success. (It was also a critical success, but never mind the opinions of courtiers or claqueurs for now.)

What interests me about that success as I look back is the apparent receptivity of the public to the particular crapola Sorkin and Fincher had to sell (for it is indeed crapola). Film critic Kevin Kearney (one of a few to comment on the film that I think can safely be considered neither courtier nor claqueur) summed it up well when he wrote that the film's makers try "to channel the enthusiasm of youth capitalism" and enthusiasm about "revolutionary potential of Internet" that were "associated with the 'dot-com' speculative bubble of the late 1990s," and the associated "market populist" crapola that, as Mr. Kearney puts it, "substitut[ed] a number of red herrings for the great social issues," as with "the upstarts with computer skills vs. the wealthy stuffed-shirts, the young vs. the old, the hip vs. the boring, and so forth" in a film that, whatever its pretensions, "blithely devot[ed] itself to sex, status and the art of being cool."

As I said, CRAPOLA!

All as, being what it is, the film has not aged particularly well, Americans these days looking rather more critically than before at the propaganda, such that even writers for a publication like Vanity Fair admit the film's having aged badly as the realities that flew right over the heads of Sorkin, Fincher, et. al. grow harder and harder for even the more credulous members of the public to ignore by the year, the month, perhaps even the week.

Speculating About the Demographics of Hate-Watching

Let us, for the moment, accept the claims that there is a good deal of hate-watching out there (by which I mean really watching things they hate, rather than just saying they do).

Alas, even as the relevant media analysts insist that more people are doing so, they are fuzzy on who is doing so--all as it seems plausible that not everyone does so equally. (Certainly I don't bother with hate-watching. My personal response to seeing something I don't like is to simply change the channel or terminate the stream--if I have even made the mistake of bothering to turn on something I end up hating in the first place--and I find that I get more and more inclined to do this all the time.)

Might it be that hate-watching is something we see more among, for example, college graduates of the coastal cities of middlebrow attitudes and the people who imitate them, with all the addiction to elitism and snobbery and irony (I refrain here from using stronger words) that goes with that?

It doesn't seem implausible.

Alternatively might it be that hate-watching is something we see more among those demographics which may not like the ways in which television has changed in recent decades? For example, the shift away from casual and easy viewing to insanely overpraised Midcult pretension? Or who dislike the way the ever more pervasive and strident status politics of our time seem ever more constantly manifest in what is supposed to be the entertainment to which people look to take their minds off their troubles and relax? (I certainly suspect that what I have said about TV commercials carries over to TV more broadly, and it is undeniable that a lot of people are not loving it.) Could it be that rather than, for example, taking refuge in the more pleasing TV of a past era, at least for some of the time, they prefer to bash the present?

That doesn't seem implausible either. And it all seems to me to be worth a bit of consideration from those who study such things.

Do People Really Hate-Watch So Much?

These days we hear ceaselessly of "hate-watching." This is not merely a matter of people watching things they don't like (because their partner wants to watch and makes them sit through it), but of people deliberately watching things they don't like for the pleasures to be had in despising them.

It seems plausible that a good many people are only saying they are "hate-watching"--perhaps because they are embarrassed to admit they actually enjoy the trash they are consuming (as with those who "watch ironically").

Yet it is not wholly inconceivable that more of this may be going on, partly because of the pathetic desire of some to feel superior to something, anything, at all, partly because the Internet offers no shortage of cesspools in which to wallow in one's own nastiness about the safely petty, partly because of the increasing tendency to distracted rather than engaged viewing encouraged by a host of factors (like people catching TV anywhere and everywhere on their smart phone rather than sitting down for a proper watch).

Still, one can picture something more serious going on. It may be that more people are so exhausted or stressed out that they can't get into anything really enjoyable, and find it easier to get pleasure out of mocking something bad rather than enjoying something good--perhaps all the more in as there is less casual, "easy," viewing in recent scripted production, and so many people take in so much of the execrable reality television that really does deserve all the insult that can be thrown at it. It may also be a matter of the extreme distance between what even people who are not incapable of enjoying a show or a movie actually experience when they see contemporary offerings as against what the increasingly loud claquing of the critics tells them they are supposed to be experiencing. (There was once a time when people laughed at the TV critics' unhinged outpourings of praise for The Sopranos, but alas this is standard now.) And it may be that what gets made now, reflecting our cultural politics, is inherently divisive--in contrast with the blander, more general audience-oriented fare of the past, pandering to some while showing utter contempt for the tastes of those outside the target audience, all as some are not just ready but eager to make a culture war out of anything and everything, and so rather than changing the channel on what they can't stand staying so that they can fight the good fight over at the review aggregators and everywhere else online.

Of the Supermarket Self-Checkout Machine: A Few Thoughts

The use of self-checkout machines in supermarkets says a lot about the manner in which business has employed automation--just as does its use of the phone tree in customer service. It is more eager to reduce its reliance on human workers than to maintain a tolerable quality of service, and to that end prone to rush systems not yet ready for use into the workplace, and leave their remaining employees, and their customers, to suffer the resulting problems.

The courtiers of business in the press, the kind who call a Jack Welch or a Ken Lay or a Sam Bankman-Fried a "genius," use words such as "innovation," "entrepreneurship" and "leadership" to denote such things.

Real people use . . . other words to describe the practice.

The User-Unfriendliness of Our Information Technology

Aubrey Plaza recently gave an interesting interview to the Wall Street Journal in which she owned up to never having seen the season of The White Lotus for which she has been nominated for an Emmy because she could not work the password system for the relevant streaming service.

Some may be tempted to laugh at Ms. Plaza, but I applaud her for admitting something that more people should be frank about, namely the extent to which functional people are being defeated by supposedly simple technological tasks, which seem less and less simple. Even as the general level of verbal and numerical literacy show every level of declining the standard of computer literacy expected of the user seems to be ever-increasing, reflected in how these days it seems that if you Google any problem you will find casual advice to go poking about in your registry editor to resolve the most minor-seeming issues--as if this were not a good way to brick your computer, especially if you are not an expert in such things, but have little alternative as the "easy" fixes seem to fix less and less all the time.

It is not what we expect--the conventional expectation that technologies grow more user-friendly, not less, with time, and it seems fair to discuss why this has not happened here the way it has with, for example, cars.

One plausible reason is the geometric increase in the performance and complexity of personal computers as against just about everything else, with the standardization of Internet connectivity, home networks and much else playing its part--and the ever-rising burden of cyber-security.

However, one can also argue for other less justifiable factors--as with that sign of decadence in product development, the creation of lots and lots of features that no user really wants or needs but which add to the complexity of the system so as to potentially cause additional problems, simply to justify selling a new thing rather than more of the old thing.

Less innocently there is operating system makers' obscene obsession with spying on everything computer users do in a manner George Orwell could not even begin to imagine, and locking them into "ecosystems" of their crappy products. (Thus is it the case that you can't just get the computer out of the box and turn it on and use it with the option of creating an account if you want to do so later on--rather you are required to create an account as part of a set-up process. In said process you are pressed to network with the computer all the company's other devices, never mind whether you actually own them or not. And you are barraged with advertising for their other wares before you can finish the set-up process--which, if you are canny, will include rooting around through their system's settings unchecking box after box after box to, as much as is possible, deny the company permission to take your information and lock it up in the clouds. And on and on it goes.)

It does not seem at all unreasonable to think all this has something to do with the notorious failure-proneness of our computers today--which leaves us devoting 10 to 20 percent of our computer time to just coping with problems according to a recent Danish study.

Put into automotive terms it is as if we were still in the days when idiots of the kind Booth Tarkington seems to have found so charming taunted motorists trying to repair their vehicles after they broke down by the side of the road with shouts of "Git a hoss!"--with the difference that where then cars were toys for the rich, today everyone is required to use a computer just to get through the day.

No, it isn't Your Imagination--The Internet Really is That Right-Wing

While once upon a time we heard much market populist claptrap about the web giving voice to the voiceless as we now know the way the Internet functions and is utilized--how its apparatus is run and why, and who uses it and how--favors the easily communicated and therefore familiar and well-established idea, those with money and legacy media access, those on the right side of major corporations of the media and other varieties with all their strictures, and those who appeal to a privileged audience--all of which, of course, works out to the right having a much easier time than the left using the Internet to promote its ideas. The unsurprising result is that online many do find themselves feeling that the web has a right-wing bias, with the right's complaints about Big Tech not being in their corner only affirming the fact--because we actually hear so much of their complaints, in contrast with a left whose complaints get far, far less hearing anywhere that anyone who does not deliberately seek them out is likely to come upon them.

What seems more debatable is just how much difference this has made. Looking at the twenty-first century one may regard the right, and especially those relatively far to the right, as having gone from triumph to triumph during it as any remotely progressive tendency suffered the extreme opposite. How much, one may wonder, has this been a result of how people live online?

It is a very large question--but it also seems to a very worthwhile one given the political direction of the era.

The Overlooked Legacy of Vladimir Zhirinovsky?

After his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 23 percent of the vote in Russia's parliamentary (Duma) election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky got a lot of press in the Western news media--because his party's near-quarter of the vote for Russia's legislature went with Zhirinovsky's image as an ultra-nationalist fascist "crazy man" who spoke of such things as Russia retaking Alaska from the U.S. by force and using large fans to blow radioactive waste into the Soviet Union's ex-Baltic republics, all while keeping the press in soundbites and anecdotes that were obscene or threatening or violent. Especially given the tendency to draw comparisons between post-Communist Russia and Weimar Germany, not least in perceptions of a country suffering profound political disorientation amid world-historical defeat and economic calamity possibly leading to the triumph of the extreme right, many thought it possible that Zhirinovsky or someone like him would become Russia's next President.

Of course, the next election saw Zhirinovsky's party's position in the country's parliament collapse as the Communists emerged as the principal opposition, and Yeltsin won the election of 1996, while the country started stabilizing politically and economically about the turn of the century. Zhirinovsky and his party remained in parliament, but they never recovered their early '90s-era position in Russian politics, or their hold on the world's attention. (Indeed, Google's Ngram viewer shows how mention of Zhirinovsky plummeted after 1996.) An occasional piece of theatrics on his part still grabbed attention, but for its intrinsic interest, or evocation of back when he was taken more seriously, rather than because anyone thought "This is the next Iron Man of Russia." And indeed, Zhirinovsky's death in 2022 seems to have been almost unacknowledged by the media in the West.*

Still, looking back from 2024 I am struck by how the combination of political stances like Zhirinovsky's theatrics and vulgarity have since become standard for what cowardly members of the press euphemistically call "populists." I doubt that those who have blighted the world in recent decades by becoming heads of government sought to deliberately imitate him, but they certainly thought along similar lines, played to the public in similar ways, and redefined political culture in the process, such that Zhirinovsky could seem to have been ahead of the curve, and in his conduct a glimpse of what the twenty-first century had in store for us had we but understood--Zhirinovsky conquering the world, so to speak, through personal style rather than any military force at his command.

* Admittedly this may have been partly because of the cause--the COVID pandemic. It seems that the press, which early on turned to downplaying the pandemic, has not been overeager to call attention to the deaths of public figures as a result of said virus.

Selectively Remembering Jane Austen

Just as it seems that some new remake of one of Jane Austen's novels (and often, several of them) in production at any one time so do we see the story of Ms. Austen's life told again and again--the author played by Olivia Williams, Anne Hathaway and others over the years. In the depictions it seems that the tendency is to portray her as essentially like the heroines of her novels--minus the happy ending, as if Elizabeth Bennett never got Mr. D'Arcy.

There are some grounds for such a conception. Still, if Ms. Austen was, like her heroines, a daughter of marginal provincial gentry, and concerned primarily with their domestic affairs to such a degree that it is common to say that one can read her books without noticing that the Napoleonic Wars were going on (perhaps the more in as people are more likely to read Pride and Prejudice than Persuasion, or Mansfield Park), this was hardly a matter of her having been somehow unaware of goings-on in the wider world, or indeed their being remote from her own life because of a relatively lowly station. After all, Austen had brothers serving in the Royal Navy as ship commanders during that conflict, with her brother Francis getting a knighthood for his part in the war before Waterloo (this conflict just the early phases of careers that saw both become Admirals, and Francis Admiral of the Fleet), while their sister Jane is known to have drawn on their knowledge of naval affairs during her work (for instance, learning about "prize money" so that she could include it in Persuasion). Such things seem less surprising when one considers their assorted wealthy and prominent connections--Warren Hastings, who is compared with only Robert Clive as a conqueror of India for Britain, a friend of the family.

In my experience one gets even less inkling of Austen having had such a life from the stories told about Austen than those Austen told by Austen in her books. And I suspect few care to have it otherwise, preferring as they do that image of a sort of real-life Ms. Bennett to that worldlier side of her background--leaving it the kind of thing rather more likely to be raised by an Upton Sinclair as he cast a respectful but more than usually historically-minded eye upon her work than to those who read her work to escape into a world they imagine to have been more genteel than their own.

Stanley Kubrick and the "F" Word

Some time ago I looked over those charges and countercharges about the politics of A Clockwork Orange between its director Stanley Kubrick and the journalists of the New York Times at the time of the movie's release (back when they really did have liberals writing for them). Going by Kubrick's remarks there seemed to me no question of his, at least at the time, having been a right-winger, certainly if one takes as the standard for that the fundamental matter of human nature at the individual and group levels, and what it means for whether society can be rationally changed to produce a freer, more egalitarian, more thriving order. (Indeed, Kubrick joked in one interview that he gave at the time that if he went on he was "going to sound like William Buckley.") However, Kubrick took great umbrage at the use of the word "fascism" to describe his film, and at least by implication himself. Especially given the way in which he argued (he attacked those who used the term, rather than trying to disprove them) one could wonder whether he was simply reacting against having the highly charged label applied to him, even if it was being applied fairly (fascists often do object to being called fascists, because of the term's charge for many), or whether he really did have grounds for being thought not a fascist.

Certainly the pessimistic view of human beings and the prospects for society's redress of its ills, his contempt for "liberals," etc., that Kubrick expressed at the time are views he at least shared with fascists, as he did with the right more broadly. Yet the argument for fascism as a distinct tendency (rather than a synonym for "extreme right," a species of horseshoe theory-minded totalitarianism, a mere slur, etc.) is based on its mobilization of part of the public behind a right-wing agenda for the sake of preserving a bourgeois-capitalist order in the face of a radical challenge that can only be defeated through illiberal methods of government. Of course, in the aforementioned interview Kubrick did quip that the insecurity people felt because of crime, combined with "a little economic disappointment, and the increasingly trendy view that politics are a waste of time and problems have to be solved instantly," could translate to "very serious social unrest in the United States," and ultimately to "very authoritarian" government "of the Right," but his attitude toward this expectation was ambiguous. After all, to say that a thing is plausible, or even likely, is not to endorse it--even if one allows for some pathways being better than others. (In such a situation "you could only hope you would have a benevolent despot rather than an evil one. A Tito rather than a Stalin . . . of the right" he said.) The result is that there are grounds for rejecting the view of Kubrick as having himself been a fascist--though it also seems only fair to admit that much of what he said, as a filmmaker and in his interviews--has been grist to a fascist's mill, enough so that those who accused Kubrick of being one were far, far, from groundless in doing so. Indeed, even if Kubrick may not be a fascist, there seem few grounds for denying that A Clockwork Orange "works" as a piece of fascist propaganda.

Remembering Idiocracy and Silicon Valley Together

Some time ago I wrote about Mike Judge's film Idiocracy and HBO show Silicon Valley together, because while they had their differences the two seemed so complementary to one another. Where in Idiocracy Judge satirized the unintelligent, in Silicon Valley he satirized people who were supposed to be the extreme opposite. In ultra-conventional fashion--after all, were Judge not so we would likely never have heard of him--he identified unintelligence with the lower classes, and intelligence with the super-rich elite.

It also seemed to me safe to say that when, in the case of Idiocracy, he punched down, he did so very visibly, obviously and forcefully at the poor, while in Silicon Valley his punches up were limited to eccentric individuals, rather than to any group as such.

So does it generally go with comedy in America in our time, in which the right to punch down with impunity is hailed as the essence of the free speech, and never mind anything else.

Of "Kakistocracy": A Few Words

The reader of this blog may be familiar with the words "oligarchy," "plutocracy," "kleptocracy."

"Oligarchy" refers to government controlled by a small group.

"Plutocracy" refers to government by the rich.

"Kleptocracy" refers to government by thieves who use their positions of authority to rob the public.

"Kakistocracy," derived from the Indo-European root word "kaka," the meaning of which I imagine most readers can figure out for themselves, refers to government by society's worst.

A more obscure term, when a handful of commentators dared to use the term in public a few years ago it caused quite the sensation, but I am not sure that it has entered really common usage. According to Google's book-checking Ngram viewer usage of the word between 2016 and 2022 merely doubled from a very low level, so that as of the later date one is still about 280 times more likely to encounter usage of the word "oligarchy," forty times more likely to encounter "plutocracy," and about sixteen times more likely to come across even the relatively newfangled "kleptocracy." This is in spite of there being room to argue that even those three words are less frequently used than they ought to be in English, especially when we discount their use to fling abuse at other countries on officialdom's "Disapproved" list.

I might add that the word kakistocracy would seem to have a particular usefulness in a society in which conventional wisdom-guarding elites (in complete, ironic, obliviousness to the concept's flaws, pointed out by the very sociologist who coined the term!) ceaselessly refer to their society as a meritocracy. Those who disagree can point out to them that it is in fact the other, opposite thing with the rather pungent label, their supposed "meritocracy" in fact a "merdeocracy," and the singers of meritocracy as a contemporary actuality, if actually believing their own claptrap, apparently unable to tell Shinola from the other thing.

The Hired Killer in Fiction

Writing of David Fincher's film The Killer David Walsh remarked that "[h]ired killers like these . . . with their automaton-like precision and fanatical attention to detail," are fantasies, and about that Mr. Walsh is of course entirely right. Read up on the relevant subjects--crime, intelligence, covert operations--and you never find anything like these stock figures of so much thriller fiction. Ever.

So where did they come from?

I suppose one can see in these figures a combination of two "petty bourgeois" fascinations--the fascination with the criminal who refuses to be bound by society's rules (indeed, Walsh cites this again himself), and with the "professional." The petty bourgeois, after all, is a great admirer of the professionals whose competence and whose "standards" fiction endlessly, wildly, exaggerates. In the hired killer we get the merger of the two, making the figure irresistible to their imagination--which, after all, is substantially the imagination to which the pop culture industry plays.

The Petty Bourgeois' Romanticizing of the Outlaw

I have often seen writers refer to a fascination with crime and criminals as being distinctly "petty bourgeois," but I do not remember any of them clearly explaining why they think that is so in an explicit way. What I have gleaned from them is the view that, being petty bourgeois such people are not on top, and frustrated--their lot, if far from the worst society has to offer, still that of the "bound but unprotected" and they naturally not liking it much. At the same time being petty bourgeois they are essentially individualistic and conformist, so that they do not imagine, let alone desire, any other world than this one. They just want to change their condition in the one that exists. And the rule-breaking criminal, who is at the very least refusing to be bound, and if they get big enough, in some degree protected too in a society where corruption is not unknown (else what need for an Eliot Ness or a Batman?), has a fascination for them as someone doing what they would like to be doing, or would like to have done in the past (such that they would be enjoying the benefits of those actions now).

Certainly thinking of Robert Merton's "theory of anomic behavior," which I understand to have been the result of his examination of crime, this seems to track. As Merton wrote society sets goals for its members and sanctions particular means for realizing those goals--like individual economic advancement through education and getting a job (or, less often these days, be-an-entrepreneur-in-a-legal-line-of-activity). The conformist accepts goal and means--getting ahead, and getting the job supposed to lead to that. The rebel and the "retreatist" in their different ways and for different reasons refuse goal and means--disbelieving in getting ahead, and refusing to pretend the way taking the job requires them to do. The "ritualist" Merton describes as rejecting the goal but accepting the means--in the sense that they do not really believe in all that getting ahead stuff, but get a job anyway and go through the motions (because, frankly, it's very, very tough to live without a source of income). However, there is one other category--what Merton called "innovators"--who accept the goal but rely on a less than approved means, i.e. accepts "individual economic advancement" as a life's purpose but pursues the object through illegal business activity. They are not rebels, they accept the success-striving recommended to them, they just resort to disapproved means to go about it--while not advertising those means, or necessarily meaning to persist in them beyond their attainment of their goal.

I do not recall Merton saying anything about this, but I think that what those who picture crime as an object of fascination to those sincerely eager to get ahead, but disappointed in the sanctioned options and their results--perhaps especially in times of declining prospects for the "middle class." Few act on such nonsense--but all the same, the attraction on this foolishness on some level has its part in making criminals very popular protagonists in contemporary pop culture.

David Walsh Reviews David Fincher's The Killer

David Walsh has recently penned a review of David Fincher's Netflix film, The Killer, and taken the film as an occasion to consider Fincher's now three decade-old record of directing feature film, paying particular attention to such movies as Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and the more recent Mank. Walsh argues that while "each of [Fincher's] films has intriguing and even insightful moments," Fincher tends overwhelmingly toward superficiality, particularly evident in his "predilection for brutal, irrational behavior," and identification of "certain alienated moods," while never having much to say about "their origin or trajectory," and certainly not their "social sources." All in line with a "shortsighted, limited vision of humanity and society" apparently consisting of little but "general misanthropy," "pervasive darkness," and "the desire to make people uncomfortable" it is not, but only by the credulous confused with, "criticism of capitalism, corporations, contemporary civilization . . . modern marriage" that leaves us with the "chilly and banal" at that level, only underlined by the "style" over which Fincher fans gush so much.

I cannot say that I have tried to follow David Fincher's work, but I have seen a fair bit of it all the same, and going by that Walsh seems to me to do an exceptional job of summing up the (very limited) strengths and (considerable) weaknesses of a filmmaker who, in spite of the plaudits with which les claqueurs of the entertainment press lavish him, has a "body of work" with "many more minuses than pluses in" it, just as Walsh seems to me to have been one of the few to grasp the profound limitations of Quentin Tarantino's work (especially as his career went on).* Walsh seems to me equally correct in treating Fincher's outlook and its limitations as not merely his own, but characteristic of that cohort of filmmakers that emerged in the '90s, and has increasingly dominated the American cinematic scene ever since, of which Fincher is a star.

* The few others who did grasp Tarantino's limitations include Gary Groth, and James Wood. It seems significant that neither is by profession a film reviewer, and that neither seems to have been much heard from since regarding Mr. Tarantino.

The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen

Recently looking back on The Big Lebowski I encountered Graham Daesler's essay about that movie, which also takes up the matter of the Coen brothers' broader body of work. Over its course Daesler waxes poetic about his subject, which makes for an entertaining read--and if, as tends to be the case when writers wax poetic, he seems to me to give those of whom he writes more credit than is really due them, he is not without insight, or alertness to the limitations of, the movies and filmmakers he writes about, remarking in particular the Coen Brothers' misanthropy. The charge can seem easy given that misanthropy pretty much characterizes their whole generation of "indie" moviemakers, but it certainly seems not just warranted here, but fundamental to their choices of characters, and what they do with, or rather, to, them, with an evident sense of superiority and sense of self-satisfaction (presenting a parade of "dimwits, yokels, rubes, phonies . . . only to wreak havoc on their lives" in a manner Daesler compares to "kids collecting ants so they could incinerate them with a magnifying glass") in narratives in which meaning is pointedly elusive.

All that seems exemplified by the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. That movie, "built around a protagonist who learns nothing and gains nothing, replete with red herring clues and meaningless symbolism" on the way to an ending Daesler describes as enigmatic, is "[t]he closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a Dadaist movie." I might add that it is particularly hard to escape the politics implicit in the Coen brothers' postmodernism in that movie--those of the hard right, all too evident in their deeply unpleasant caricature of a left-wing intellectual in the eponymous "learns nothing and gains nothing" protagonist.

Naturally this was very appealing to the critical community--but less so to me, which, I suppose, is how Big Lebowski, incoherent as that movie also is and mean-spirited as it can also be, made a sufficient impression on me that I had something to say about it all these decades later.

Of Corporate Anthems and the Insanity of the '90s

Back in November 1999 there was a Ford Motor Company commercial which had Charlotte Church singing over a lavish two minute music video glorifying the global automotive colossus and its then-subsidiaries Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury and Volvo in a manner befitting the title "Global Anthem."

Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its mind.

The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, as people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance in the mainstream. How in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people gawked in awe at what a quarter of a century before than Norman Jewison showed us in that film where sports fans rose for the corporate anthem, Rollerball--the media elite (and the idiots who let them do their thinking for them) with teary eyes embracing what had such a short time ago been repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.

"You Must Be Doing it Wrong!"

In the society we live in everyone is supposed to be striving for "success," and in doing so driving for "the very top." (Every student should be aiming for Harvard, everyone should be aiming for a place in the three commas club, and so forth.)

Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."

Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.

You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.

The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.

"Ya Gotta Have Faith." But Faith in What, Exactly?

It is a commonplace that people need "faith," but the statement is as ambiguous as it is banal.

Today it seems that when most hear the word "faith" they associate it with religion. Religion is, of course, usually exclusive--famously, often to the point of extreme intolerance. Yet those saying "ya gotta have faith" do not often seem to be recommending belief in a particular religion, at times seeming to imply that even something as hazy as the idea that "the universe always has a plan" will suffice.

It is, in short, a commendation of if not religion then religiosity, in the view that the world is an ordered place in a way not necessarily perceivable with the senses or recognizable through the exercise of reasoning from that sensory data--which may well indicate the opposite of any such ordering--with the implication that this ordering is somehow benign ("Whatever is, is right") and a denial that reason is a sufficient basis for humans getting along in this world.

Putting it bluntly, to speak of "faith" in this way is to champion an irrational, anti-rational and highly conservative stance in a shorthand fashion that, I think, goes right over most people's heads, with this perhaps its attraction for many, the fact that the statement is so ambiguous and so banal that few give a highly debatable position any consideration whatsoever making them feel the freer in asserting it.

The Age of Austerity and the Assault on Britain's Libraries

Reading United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Professor Philip Alston's report on his visit to Britain and assessment of what the "age of austerity" the Tories and New Labour inflicted on the country (which, to its credit, outraged the British government and gutter press) I remember being struck by his references to the country's libraries. This was a matter not just of their making books and other reading material available to the public, but their affording particular amenities of special importance "to those living in poverty . . . including . . . a safe community space," and "access to a computer"--the latter of special relevance in a time in which the government was making access to much of the social safety net online-only through its replacement of a half dozen earlier programs with the "digital by default" system of "Universal Credit," even though those who need that system most are exactly the people least likely to have personal Internet access. The result was that, as Alston put it, Britain's "[p]ublic libraries are on the frontline of helping the digitally excluded and digitally illiterate who wish to claim their right to Universal Credit," and indeed the country's libraries had to deal with "claimants who arrive at the library, often in a panic, to get help claiming benefits online," with the City Library in Newcastle (a city of some three hundred thousand) alone obliged to assist almost two thousand such claimants in the August 2017-September 2018 period alone.

Of course, this was as the libraries saw their resourcing shrink. Apparently the whole process so far has seen the funding of Britain's libraries slashed by over half and a third of the libraries themselves shut down, with all that this especially means for access to their services outside the more urbanized areas--even as the uses to which libraries are being put grow. (Not only are they safe spaces--they are now "warm spaces" as well.)

The situation seems describable as collapse--all as I suspect that the pain Keir Starmer (who experienced as he in in discarding solemn pledges needed no time whatsoever before his promise that there would be no return to austerity turned into a promise of austerity that he seems almost certain to keep, with warmth in winter one of those things he has explicitly promised to take away from many) means to inflict on the British public's more vulnerable members will be felt in this area as in many others in the months and years ahead.

"Yesterday's Revolutionary, Today's Reactionary"

Considering my experience of Thackeray's Vanity Fair my thoughts turn to what Professor Ron Singer has to say of the classic novel, namely that yesterday's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's reactionary. Professor Singer had in mind the telling of the story--the later "aesthetic stricture requiring objectively, purely descriptive fiction" with which Thackeray's very "talkative" narration is out of line, but one may wonder if that is not the case politically given how, as Singer explains, the book was seen as socially subversive as well. Still, if allowing that a work of two centuries ago can seem more conservative today than it did at the time, it does seem to me that some of Thackeray's contemporaries still come across as having more "edge" that way than he did. If Dickens, getting his history from Thomas Carlyle and loaded with English prejudice against a country "less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident" could see in the French Revolution little but the guillotine that has so dominated conservative (and thus, mainstream) imagination of the event down to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, his empathy for the downtrodden and hatred for their oppressors and consequent disgust for the Old Regime comes through, as does a sense of history as tragedy, so much so that one should never forget that before the first guillotine blade fell France was the kind of country which sentences "a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards," while the conventional stress on Madame Defarge as the villain of the story (rather than the Marquis St. Evrémonde and those he represented) seems exceedingly simple-minded--all as Dickens' virtues rather than his failings have served to make him unfashionable with the makers and unmakers of respectable opinion these days. For now, at least, I do not think anything remotely like that can be claimed for Vanity Fair.

On the Conservatism of Journalists

In considering the politics of artists and how they are not necessarily what people expect them to be I have found myself also thinking of the politics of journalists--another group stereotyped as Establishment-bucking "liberals" who in fact produce a very conservative product. In his exposé The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed the extent to which journalists went about this work in a cynical and increasingly demoralized way amid the very real compulsions of their business. Still, that hardly seems the case with every journalist, especially in an era in which the field is so glamorized. Indeed, just as with artists I can picture a host of factors impelling would-be journalists toward conservative attitudes, especially at the more elite levels of the occupation, even apart from what they are required to do by a Fourth Estate that is, in practice, a Big Business pressed by innumerable political factors to stay on the right side of the powerful, which does not hire, does not keep employed, does not promote to positions of responsibility, those it does not trust to conform to its standards.

There is the "professionalization" of journalism, which gives their field a rather conservative ethos, just as it does all professional fields. (The evocation of a priesthood by the word "professional" is not unimportant.)

There is what partly followed from this, the general upper-classness of those who are likely to have access to the educational credentialing while being in a position to brave the low starting salaries in that career.

There is their occupational contact with an elite, which often dazzles them--not least in its "show business for ugly people" form, as they identify upward and imagine themselves up on society's commanding heights with the people they write about, and even becoming one of them (up until they learn the hard way that they are not really members of the club).

And there is the fact that journalists so often see themselves as "storytellers," offering narrative rather than analysis--a tendency to which I suppose they are the more susceptible in that so many of those who do become journalists have literary aspirations, as the attempts at "color" in the nonfiction books they write all too clearly show.

Alas, the articles-puffed-up-into-books they tend to produce rarely show much sign of promise in that field.

The Conservatism of Artists, and the Hollywood Strike

Considering what Upton Sinclair (among others) had to say about the tendency of artists to conservatism I found myself thinking of the recent Hollywood strike. After all, there seems to me no question that Hollywood's writers, if commonly characterized by mainstream and right-wing commentators as a pack of "liberals," have for the most part produced a thoroughly conservative product, glorifying the rich and powerful, championing traditional institutions like religion, etc., etc., as they obfuscate or elide social realities that do not fit in with orthodox views of the world. Yet amid the deteriorating working conditions Hollywood's personnel have faced this last decade and longer, and the labor battles of more recent times, the writers found themselves personally confronting a less rosy social reality than the one they present in their movies in the process of just trying to pay their bills for having found themselves at the sharp end of neoliberalism-come-to-Tinseltown.

Of course, these days artists in Hollywood as elsewhere are kept on a very short leash by businessmen even more deeply invested in a conservative outlook than they. Yet, for whatever it may be worth, I wonder if their worsening lot and their fights with management have not had an effect on how they see the world.

That Particular Stony-Faced Expression . . .

I have observed time and again that a certain sort of person--usually of very low intelligence--responds to any remarking of the ills of the world, and especially those of society, with a certain stony-faced expression, in which the lower jaw tends to jut out in a rather simian fashion. No one ever asked anything of this person--but they compulsively reacted as if someone had just come to them for a large handout which they were refusing, often as merely the beginning of a display of conspicuous callousness.

The very low intelligence of such persons cannot be emphasized enough. But that is far from being the whole of the issue. There is what that low intelligence led them toward--a narrowness as well as weakness of mind that leaves them uninterested in anything they cannot eat, a deeply neurotic intolerance for any reminder that all is not well with the world as some completely unacceptable attack on their own personal selfishness, and frequently an idiot desire to swagger combined with an alertness to any opportunity to do just that by showing how much they do not care.

Bad enough as this all is, it goes further still with some--an ingrained contempt for the disadvantaged as such, and equal contempt as such for those conscientious about such matters, and the combination of raging conformism and self-importance that makes them think it is their duty to police others' statements and punish anything that they register as the scent of dissent.

Of course, dealing with such is loathsome--and the Internet is crawling with them.

The Searing of the Heart and the Cruel Irony of the Artist's Path Through Life

It seems to me safe to say that many artists become artists because they are more sensitive than others, and what another century would have called "sensibility" and "fine feeling" mean so much to them--and pursuing a career as an artist seems to them a way to save that from what they fear will be the deadening of their sensibility by the kind of workaday existence those not born rich typically endure, with its drudgery and innumerable meanness. Living from their art, living well from their art, thus seem a salvation from something unbearable. Alas, the artist rarely finds the alternative for which they hope in that artistic career, the more in as so few ever really do get to live well from their art, while even of those who do find their way to that all but the most fortunate are apt to find, as Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions, that by the time they attain success their "heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," their faculty for that sensibility and that fine feeling by which they set store seared and calloused with it--and many apt to be reduced to pessimism and even nihilism. Indeed, the common fate is probably to find their heart "seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," without ever attaining success.

It is hard to see how it could be otherwise in a society where art is nothing but something from which business can make money, and the price of trying to be one of the few who can live this way is far, far higher than the propagandists of "aspiration" allow--the more is as so many pay the price, with nothing but what they lost to show for it.

What Gets Read Online?

Over the years I have argued that, contrary to the advice peddled on any number of sites, the real reason no one is reading your blog is because the ratio of blogs to potential blog readers is extremely high--far more people wanting to write for an audience than people wanting to be an audience for this sort of content (especially as online life becomes less and less verbal and more and more audiovisual, vloggers replacing bloggers, etc.). Indeed, where people of conventional and conformist mind will call that activity extremely "competitive" I would say that the sheer number of people jostling for attention (600 million blogs existing in the world according to one estimate), and the terms on which they do so (our reliance on search engines indexing very little of the Internet with search subordinate to ad dollars, the unwillingness of search engine users to venture far from the first "hit," etc., etc., ad nauseam), renders the idea of competition, in the sense of some functional market mechanism whereby consumers make judgments about the goods on offer and those who deliver the goods get ahead absolutely meaningless, any such sorting process completely collapsing under the pressure. This is made even worse by the fact that this is not a remotely level playing field--with those who can spend lots of money on site design and gaming the search engines and buying promotion plausibly having an edge, those who have connections with or can otherwise gain access to larger platforms and especially legacy media definitely having an edge, and so forth, all as search engines and other such means of discovery (apparently) "reward" those who have had clicks in the past with more visibility and more clicks, and vice-versa, so that those who start out obscure are likely to only become more so. The result is that many a writer seeking an audience online learns the hard way that no matter what they put out there no one will see it--while the sheerest drivel by someone with a claim, however dubious, to being a "somebody," will be lavished with attention and praises.

Still, even acknowledging that this is a game in which only an infinitesimal proportion of the players can win any prizes whatsoever, played on the most profoundly unfair terms from the outset with the odds getting much, much worse for those who fail to make a lot of headway early on, I will not deny that it seems to me that some kinds of content are indeed more likely to gain an audience than others; that, even if very, very few of the purveyors of that kind of material gain any audience at all, the point is that they are producing what people are taking, however little good it does them, while one is likely to find that those who do have an audience tend to offer their readers such fare.

I doubt I will surprise anyone if I say that people are more inclined to the entertaining as against the informative, the simple and quick as against the complex and involved, the emotive to the cerebral--and thus, of course, the narrative over the analytical, the personal to the impersonal. When they do go in for information the same principles apply--as they favor what promises to be immediately and readily useful in their own personal lives for solving a problem they care about (even if it is a false promise) rather than require any actual thought on their part, let alone any interest in the wider world.

Meanwhile, one gets further appealing to the audience that is actually there online than the population at large, of which the online audience may be less representative than most think. The talk of "digital divides" may seem passé in a world where even a decade ago more people had cell phones than toilets, and a significant majority of humanity is online, but it is one thing to have access to the Internet, another to spend lots and lots of time online using the Internet to do things besides access the most essential utilities or perform the most essential online tasks so that one has a chance of discovering things and taking an interest in them; of being active in comment threads, forums, social media; of registering their "likes" and sharing those things they find interesting with others. Consider, for example, the difference between the white collar worker who has a desktop at work--inside their own office--and is little supervised during the working day, and the service worker who has to hand their cell phone over to management when they clock in and only get it back when they clock out. Consider the difference between the web-connected individual with the full range of devices, with their handy keyboards if they want to do any prolonged typing in searching for information or engaging in dialogues, as against the person whose sole online access is through that cell phone they hand over when they come in to work--or maybe their local library. Between those extremes there lies a lot of difference in the quantity and quality of time spent online--and what appealing to those at one end of that spectrum will get you as against appealing to those at the other, online life still disproportionately dominated by the socioeconomically privileged, such that appealing to them pays off better than doing otherwise (a fact that has had important implications for our politics).

Will working in the way suggested here make you an online star? Very likely not. But to the very small extent that anyone can hope to reach an online audience their odds of succeeding with this course are probably a good deal better than the opposite.