The Rise and Decline of the Supermodel

The claim that the institution of the movie star has faded away has now been heard for rather a long time (at least, insofar as we mean an actor who is not simply well-known or well-liked or well-respected but a Personage so popular that their being the lead of a movie will serve to bring an appreciable number of people to the theater when it makes its debut). However, the claim does not go wholly unchallenged. Thus do we time and again hear that some newcomer nobody ever heard of, because (when one looks them up they see that) they haven't actually been in many movies let alone headlined a hit movie, has somehow "proven" that stardom still exists. Those who claim this may simply be engaged in so much claquing, but that they take this particular line in their claquing still says something of the readiness to believe that actors still do become movie stars.

By contrast I have not noticed anyone denying that the heyday of the supermodel is past--that we are a long way from that moment when the top models enjoyed the broad stardom of Christie and Cheryl, of Cindy and Claudia and Christy with a "ty" (especially if you are of a certain generation you likely knew instantly who I was talking about just from the mention of the first name), when it could seem as if the faces of those at the top of the modeling profession were "everywhere," when the Buti brothers founded the Fashion Cafe, and JFK Jr.'s political magazine George featured supermodels like Claudia and Christy in memorable tableaus on its covers. Indeed, a fairly commonplace narrative holds that with Hollywood becoming less glamorous than before in the "New Hollywood" era, fashion filled the gap--and held its place in pop culture until the supermodels seemed to be getting too pleased with themselves (a moment purveyors of the narrative identify with Linda Evangelista's offhand remark that "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"), after which backlash set in, and pop culture was never the same again (with recent revisitation of the remarks by the press, of course, giving the hacks of the press an excuse to go over it all again).

I can't say that I ever found that explanation satisfying. (For me these "One line blew it all" explanations never are.) Rather more was going on. Some of it seems fairly obvious--like that fragmentation of media culture that lets media hacks get away with pretending that somebody who has barely appeared in any movies is a movie star because no one person has any sort of handle on all that's going on anymore, which reflects how much less likely one is to feel that a particular face is "everywhere." There is also the reality that the celebration of physical beauty inextricable from the status of the supermodel has sat uneasily with those insistent on "inclusion," "body positivity" and the merciless thwarting and disciplining of the "male gaze" in media imagery getting so much influence in this cultural arena. (Indeed, if you had ever wondered what commercials for Revlon and Victoria's Secret would look like if the columnists at the Guardian had a say in their making, well, these past few years you didn't need to wonder any more.)

Still, it seems to me that rather more significant than the cultural warfare were the larger and more consequential developments in the world that exacerbated that warfare--not least globalization's wreck after the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, which seems to me the most important thing of all. The supermodel's natural habitat was a world of exuberant fantasy of luxurious, jet-setting glamour befitting an age of globalizing boom, or at least its appearance, which lost whatever credibility it may ever have had in these years. After all, the super-rich may be super-richer than ever before, but, despite the talking heads' fixation on this as if it were the measure of everything, the broad public is ever more alert to the fact that they are not super-rich, that indeed in many ways they are less rich than they were just a short while ago--all as the centibillionaires themselves seem uneasy, thinking less than before of the jet-setting good life and more the hope that, as Douglas Rushkoff had it, "as long [as] they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making" in the way the plebs cannot.

What Does the Decline of the Supermodel Have to do with Globalization?

In considering the decline of celebrity I have had something to say of the decline of the movie star, and the decline of the sports star.

However, one can also speak of the decline of the supermodel. One can see that decline as due to some of the same factors as the decline of celebrity generally--the broadly more fragmented and conflicted popular culture, for example. Still, just like the decline of the movie star and the sports star the decline of the supermodel has had its own, more distinct, features.

After all, consider those things with which we tend to associate supermodels. We think of prestigious brands of clothing and cosmetics, in lushly produced ads playing on your screen. We think of world capitals like New York, and Paris, and Milan, and the tropical getaways of the rich and famous that are the backdrops to so many swimsuit shoots, and other much-romanticized world capital/getaway locations like these, and jet-setting among them all.

Consider also the era in which the fascination with the supermodel emerged and really flourished--the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and after its arguable peak in the last decade of the century, the 2000s.

These decades together comprise the era of what it became fashionable to call "globalization" and what the more politically and economically literate recognize as "neoliberalism," with the peak of the supermodel phenomenon also the period in which globalization's champions' promises of opulence were most extravagant and widely heeded, not least in a "New Economy," dot-com bubble-era America singing global anthems to multinational corporations. These same decades also saw the digitalization of media we now take so much for granted, which saw the screens through which we took in the world beyond our immediate surroundings ever bigger and more ubiquitous, with, again, those same years in which the supermodel and globalization were at their peaks a watershed here with the Internet exploding into wide use at the very same time, all as an edgier, "extreme," aesthetic which had as one of its aspects a less restrained and sexier pop culture emerged, with advertising one level at which this was especially evident.

Within this context what the supermodel represented and what she helped sell was the fantasy of a free, cosmopolitan, gracious, graceful, aesthetic, sensual, luxurious life in the unprecedentedly exuberant, borderless world that unleashed markets and surging "innovation" were supposed to be making, coming at you through those screens bringing you the world as never before.

Indeed, looking back the then-novel and much-commented upon web-streaming of the 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show, the images of the show playing on that giant TV screen over that crossroads of the world in global fashion capital New York's Times Square, seem a perfect symbol of the moment.

Of course, however crisply rendered through those larger and higher-definition displays, the fantasy was always just that, a fantasy, and indeed a fantasy built on top of another fantasy--the fantasy of neoliberalism, in spite of all logic and the lessons to be drawn from all of economic history, actually working as promised by its claqueurs. However, that more foundational fantasy has withered in the years since the Great Recession. And I suspect that in the wake of that event whether people think so consciously or not the glamorous fantasy described here has just moved too far out of reach for a critical mass of them in an age that feels ever more limited and stifling as they struggle ever harder to make it through the day, and that the painful reality of being at the bottom of the heap or close to it counts for more with them than the practical impossibility of their ever experiencing life "at the top" as what they see through their ever-higher quality and more inescapable screens increasingly leaves them overwhelmed rather than exhilarated in a profoundly un-sexy time. Indeed, amid the "We're all in this together" claptrap that filled the media as the COVID-19 pandemic struck a world that was already coming apart, and began killing tens of millions of people, damaging the bodies and minds of hundreds of millions more and traumatizing and otherwise upending the lives of many more still as it cut a swath among the least fortunate and able to protect themselves, even the courtiers of the elite were prepared to acknowledge the measure of alienation among the many. If they did so in only a limited way, for a brief moment, what now in media years seems a whole lifetime ago, still they did it, providing a rare public recognition of the reality well worth remembering for how it has endured beyond that short-lived readiness to even make the admission that such a thing as the pandemic exists at all.

What Do the Hits and Flops of 2024 Say About the Box Office Today? And in 2025?

At the end of 2023, the first year with a slate of "big" releases thought really comparable to what we took for granted pre-COVID-19, it seemed that there were clear conclusions to be drawn about the North American box office. In particular it seemed that moviegoing had contracted structurally (per capita ticket sales in North America fallen from 3+ to 2 a year), and the big-budget franchise movies of the kind Hollywood favors have become less reliable earners, amid a business changing so that the pursuit of profitability favors lower-budgeted movies pitched at an enthusiastic built-in audience (Five Nights at Freddy's, The Eras Tour), and more novel fare generally (Barbie, Oppenheimer, in its way the animated Spider-Man movie).

By contrast as 2024 draws to a close the picture looks to me more ambiguous. Yes, as I said, Hollywood was eager to refute any such reading of the trend, and clung so hard to the thought that Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine would validate that hope, and then when they had their success took it as a green light to greenlight more, More, MORE! of the same old, same old (in the wake of Inside Out 2's success announcing new Shrek and Ice Age animated films, and as filmgoers flocked to Deadpool's latest, a relaunch of the Avengers).

Still, one may wonder at the meaning of the success of even those two particularly big successes, given the weakness of the recent competition, especially in this summer season--and in the case of Deadpool, the extreme idiosyncrasy of the offering. (The movie is, on certain admittedly not very ambitious terms, a subversion of the superhero film rather than a conventional movie of the type, which was so overflowing with crowd-pleasing gimmickry that in this case fans were more friendly than critics to its beating of audiences over the head with its postmodernism.)

So does it go with other movies, with, for example, Beetlejuice 2 and Wicked each as easily testifying to public responsiveness to something a little different from what they commonly get these days (a now rare high concept comedy with a quirky supernatural theme, a similarly rare big splashy musical) as they do "more franchise movies" of the conventional kinds. All of this seems to me the more the case given that, even with the slate thinner than in most years, the more mediocre performers afford some confirmation of the tendency. Thus did Deadpool win big--but response to the year's other superhero movies proved faint (with Madame Web flopping hard and Venom 3 disappointing). Meanwhile the new editions of Twister, Bad Boys, Planet of the Apes, Alien, Ghostbusters, etc. succeeded only by a more modest measure, far from proving that there is the kind of vast appetite for big franchise films that still seemed present in the years before the pandemic (all as Mad Max provided the summer a really big-budgeted flop, and Gladiator may do the same for fall). At the same time, providing positive affirmation of last year's lessons about pursuing narrow but deep appeal on a budget, It Ends with Us will probably come in way ahead of many of its more stereotyped and bigger-budgeted rivals when the folks at Deadline consider the "most valuable blockbusters" next spring.

This seems to me something to keep in mind as we look ahead to next year, which looks to be packed with the conventional kinds of would-be blockbusters in the same way that 2023 was, and most pre-pandemic years were as well. Just to name the most obvious contenders we have four really first-rank superhero movies, including three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films (Captain America 4, the new Fantastic Four, and reclaiming the first weekend in May for the MCU, The Thunderbolts), and James Gunn's Superman movie--as compared with the one such superhero movie we got this year. There will be more animation (Zootopia 2 from Disney, Elio from Disney's subsidiary Pixar) and live-action adaptations of animated classics (Disney releasing such versions of both Snow White and Lilo & Stitch, and Universal presenting a live-action version of its more recent success How to Train Your Dragon). There will be more of James Cameron's Avatar saga (Fire and Ash), more Jurassic World (Rebirth), and more spy-fi from the Mission: Impossible franchise (the second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning), while I think the second half of Wicked stands comparison with this crowd to go by how the first half has done with theatergoers.

My guess is that in spite of all that we will see the same level of moviegoing we have in the 2022-2024 period, and the big movies of this more crowded roster splitting up that shrunken take. Where more specific outcomes are concerned, I do have a few to offer:

* I have a hard time picturing all three Marvel Cinematic Universe films being the kind of solid hits we saw in Phase Three that is the only thing that will banish the less happy memories of the franchise's last five years (indeed, I expect leeriness of the revamped Captain America, hesitations about the obscure Thunderbolts, skepticism about a third try with the Fantastic Four). The result is that talk of "Marvel fatigue," and "superhero fatigue" will continue (especially if Superman also does poorly, a not unlikely prospect given DCEU's track record and the incompatibility between Gunn's sensibility with the Superman mythos).

* I expect that Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning will not improve on the performance of its predecessor, which was the lowest-grossing installment in the series to date. Indeed, the combination of the annoying decision to split one movie into two (Hollywood has to know people hate this, but must suppose it sells the second ticket often enough to more than make up for it), combined with the bumping of the initial release date to make for a two year gap between installments of the declining franchise, can easily see it do worse, making it the new lowest-grossing installment to date. The result is that, even if we don't talk about the very evident "spy-fi fatigue" Hollywood faces along with the superhero fatigue (in the declining grosses for James Bond, Fast and Furious, etc.), we will have more proof that spies, like superheroes, just aren't what they used to be here.

* Jurassic World: Rebirth, the second reboot of (and fourth installment in) the Jurassic Park franchise in less than a decade, may easily find audiences sated--the more in as a downward trend has been evident in the grosses of the prior films. (Adjusted for inflation Dominion's $376 million in North America in 2022 was less than half Jurassic World's $652 million in 2016.) The result is that I can see a lot of folks giving this one a pass as well, at least enough to confirm the decline in enthusiasm.

I will also add that I have little expectation that these three franchises, for which the international market has been so important, and for which China had been so important in the heyday of Hollywood in that market, will find no relief there. And the likelihood of undeniable underperformance, or outright flop, in some of these cases and in others (again, it is a pre-pandemic slate being released into a post-pandemic market, that larger number of would-be blockbusters chasing the same number of ticket-buyers) will make 2025 look more like 2023 than it will 2024--at least, to those willing to admit the fact, who may not be many. Indeed, even if 2025 proves to be as packed with box office disasters as the catastrophic year of 2023 I suspect that Hollywood's response will be to dismiss any trend ("I don't wanna hear about no superhero fatigue!") as its officers and their courtiers in the media speak only of errors in the making of individual films they will attribute to the Artists and not the Suits (as their verbiage evokes that stupid and supercilious phrase, "the adults in the room"), and look forward to the same strategy delivering better results in 2026, because they haven't heard about that definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. While in the wake of the shocks, reversals, disasters of the past decade making any guess about 2026 seems rather a bold thing, I suspect that it too will not go the way they hope it will--but that their memories will not extend back this far, and they will hope the same goes for everyone else.

Is Venom 3 a Flop?

How has Venom 3 (Venom: Last Dance) done at the box office?

Let us consider a suitable benchmark first, namely how the two preceding Venom films did. The first two movies' grosses broke the $200 million in North America--at a time of lower ticket prices, and, in the case of the sequel, when the pandemic still had moviegoing severely depressed. Put into today's terms the first Venom made $267 million in North America in 2018, the second $244 million in the strained conditions of 2021.

By contrast Venom 3 has made $139 million as of its seventh weekend, with almost no way to go past that --about half what its predecessors made when we count in inflation, and indeed just a little more than Boxoffice Pro estimated the movie might make in just its opening weekend a month before release (when the range of its forecast was $80-$120 million).

There is no way to call that a ringing success.

In fairness, the film held up a bit better internationally from the second film to the third, at least, the international gross for Venom 3 roughly matching that for Venom 2, after inflation (with some $334 million collected)--though that was admittedly a significant comedown from what the first film did ($643 million internationally in 2018, equal to over $800 million today, a fact which netted the backers a robust quarter of a billion dollar profit according to Deadline's calculations).

The result is that one could say that a franchise that opened with a bang, and which some thought would have done better on its second go in happier circumstances, with all that seemed to promise for the third and closing installment, is going out with a whimper. Still, my guess is that given the movie's low production cost (just $110-$120 million according to the estimates I have seen reported) the near half-billion theatrical gross with which it is finishing up may get it past break-even, with the post-theatrical income enabling it to do better still--such that if a disappointment the backers at least end up "in the black" on this one, which is more than can be said for a good many recent comic book-based movies.

Is Twisters a Flop?

Last summer I had something to say of Twisters' prospects and early performance.

As we are now in December we can safely discuss how it all went in the end.

As it happened the movie made some $371 million globally in its theatrical run.

It is not a spectacular figure by the standard of big summer movies--or for that matter, any movie that costs $150-$200 million for the production, before marketing costs come in.

. It is also not a spectacular figure relative to the original 1996 Twister--which made a little under a half billion globally three inflationary decades ago, and which if we adjusted its gross for inflation would be a billion dollar hit in today's terms (which is to say that it made almost three times what Twisters did).

Yet the entertainment press treated Twisters not as a colossal letdown (the way they rushed to do with the comparable Independence Day 2, another sequel to a hit from 1996 that actually made more money than Twisters did eight years later), but rather talked up what a big hit it supposedly was.

There are three reasons for that.

1. Twisters, if not a runaway success like the original, did relatively well in North America, where it took in some $268 million--72 percent of the total. Had, as is more typical with big summer blockbusters the domestic/foreign split been the other way around, with the movie making 72 percent of its money outside North America on top of that $268 million take we would have every reason to call it a good-sized hit in light of the near-billion dollar take. Indeed, had it merely matched its domestic gross internationally the way the original Twister did (and so finished north of $500 million+) the producers would have reason to feel it hadn't been a bad idea. But it didn't--and if this depressed the global take the fact got less attention than it might have given that most writing about these matters focuses on the home market.

2. In spite of the fact that the biggest movies make as much now as they could have been expected to before the pandemic (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun 2, Avatar 2, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Inside Out 2, etc.), in line with its members' duties as courtiers and claqueurs and the fact of smaller theatrical revenues on the whole, the entertainment press has (even while resisting drawing any broader conclusions from the situation) lowered its bar for judging movie performance generally, such that a gross of $268 million domestically now is talked up in a way that $268 million wouldn't have been five years ago, especially where there is room to take a "glass half full" view of the situation. (The fact that the original Twister came out so long ago and really big hits so few these years and that international failure is relatively easy to slight all made it easier in this case.)

3. Early on the media started pushing the narrative that Twisters was a case of Hollywood playing to the Red states it supposedly shunned most of the time, and profiting by it--an ideologically freighted narrative that those taking this line would not have marred by facts and numbers and such, such as we have seen in the past. (The reader may recall how back in 2015 the media pushed the idea that Mad Max: Fury Road was a feminist movie that had become a commercial triumph, when the movie was not really that big a ticket-seller by summer action movie standards, and indeed a money-loser--with, perhaps, the fact that this political narrative is turned about in this case telling of a broad rightward shift on the part of the "centrist" media in this way as in others.)

Still, even if the movie is absolutely not an unqualified hit, and indeed almost inarguably a commercial failure by several standards (comparison with the original's box office performance, expectations for $200 million summer spectacles generally, and the weakness of the international box office by just about any measure), it is not wholly out of the question that when everything is reckoned up we will see that home entertainment and the rest of the post-theatrical income stream carried the movie to and even beyond the break-even point given the way these things tend to go. (Of the rough $370 million gross the studio probably got somewhere around $180 million. Add in another 80 percent from those other revenue streams such as has been common in recent years, and you end up with $330 million+, which I think would probably do the job according to the usual, admittedly imperfect, accounting.)

Still, that the movie did not do better in a summer of what was on the whole limited competition, is a reminder of the fact that there was no real demand out there for a new edition of the old hit, and that Hollywood is really milking any old success of this kind it can find as it refuses to reckon with what seems a more limited appetite than before for this kind of spectacle.

It also seems to me telling of what I had to say about the hits of last year--that Hollywood's best road to profitability may be, instead of putting up tentpoles and hoping "everyone" comes, producing movies with a deep appeal to more limited audiences, while keeping the budget in check. I doubt there was any such strategy at work with Twisters (rather than a movie that would play well in the Red states its backers hoped for a movie that would play well everywhere when they put up that $200 million+, and just failed to achieve that), but another film that followed just three weeks later followed it perfectly. It Ends with Us grossed almost as much at the box office as Twisters ($351 million to Twisters' $371 million)--on a budget of a mere $25 million. The result makes It Ends with Us likely to be one of the most profitable movies of 2024, perhaps the most profitable in relative terms and in terms of absolute profit plausibly one of the top ten on Deadline's list next year--a distinction Twisters seems very unlikely to enjoy.

James Gunn, Edgelord

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I am no fan of '90s independent film, with its many unattractive traits including its smug, lazy, show-offy--dare I say it, EXTREME!--edginess (exemplified by that "filmmaker" whose critical adulation has lasted long enough for him to become the "Grand Old Man" of the movement, Quentin Tarantino).

Director and now DC Films boss James Gunn may be said to have come out of not only that period, but that ferment, with his work marked by it from Tromeo and Juliet forward. Thus writing the story and screenplay for 2002's live-action Scooby-Doo film he initially produced an R-rated script, which, in spite of the cuts and other changes, in its final PG-rated form still not only made Scrappy-Doo the villain (again, not just edgy, but lazy), but gave him an R-rated vocabulary (even if his usage of it is strategically cut off in the film we get) and had him literally piss all over Daphne while they are riding the Mystery Machine in a flashback scene (which, given that she was being played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in her Buffy the Vampire Slayer era, also meant his appearing to piss all over a feminist icon in her heyday).

All of this carried over to his superhero films, which actually began with the low-budget Super (which Gunn didn't have to keep PG, and didn't), but also the PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy films, where he wore a cheap nihilism on his sleeve throughout, from running his gag in which characters get cut off in the middle of a dramatic monologue into the ground, to having Yondu massacre his mutinous crewmen to the sounds of "Come a Little Bit Closer," before getting himself fired from the job of directing the third and last installment for some, again, edgelord, jokes on Twitter that came back to haunt him (before he was rehired and did his thing all over again).

If I generally find Gunn's sensibility wearisome, especially as this side of '90s culture grows ever more stale and trite, it at least seemed passable with the Guardians franchise (at least, to this viewer who never read any of the relevant comics)--but less so with the DC Extended Universe, and still more its most celebrated characters, such that barring his managing to show another side to himself as an artiste (something his cohort is not known for), it seems to me to bode poorly for their latest crack at satisfying their Marvel envy. Or, rather, their envy of what Marvel used to be in the Beforetime preceding the pandemic.

The Box Office Performance of Alien: Romulus

NOTE: This post is a derivative of a reply to a reader's comment back in October. The original post, and exchange, may be found here.

I previously declined to venture a comment about Alien: Romulus because when thinking about a film's likely or actual performance I tend to look for close points of comparison and extrapolate from that. This was until recently fairly easy with the Marvel movies, for example, because there were so many of them released so close together that it was possible to find very close precedents and search for trends among them. It was a lot harder with the Alien movies because they have been very widely separated over time, with a certain amount of variety among them, while I wasn't sure what kind of Alien movie Romulus would be (whether it would be more action- or horror-oriented, whether it would be more or less attentive to the "mythology" of the series). It seemed to me possible that the movie could add to the long list of underperforming franchise films of the last couple of years, but also possible it would do better, and in the end it has been a modest success. Even when we adjust for inflation Alien: Romulus seems to have done a little better domestically and internationally than 2017's Covenant (picking up $350 million worldwide, versus the $310 million or so Covenant made in today's dollars). That still leaves it a pretty long way away from the heights reached by the first two movies (the original Alien was almost an $800 million hit in today's terms), and the top rank of blockbusters today (the $1 billion+ grossers), but given that it more than quadrupled the reported production budget ($80 million) it is almost certainly turning a decent profit by today's standards ($100 million+ not out of the question when we take into account the post-theatrical income streams).

Especially given how Hollywood remains committed to the "franchise film," and how so many of the latest franchise films are doing a lot less well than Alien has just done, it is unsurprising that Fox has already decided to continue the franchise. So far as I know development of that next film is still in its early stages, but I would not be surprised if the backers decided to get a little more ambitious, aiming for something more than a relatively low-budgeted August release the next time around--maybe profitably, maybe not.

"It's Not the Economy, Stupid," They Still Tell Us

The media continues to insist that "It Wasn't the Economy, Stupid" to those trying to understand the meaning of the U.S. presidential election of 2024. Exemplary of this is Sarah Bernstein's piece in the New York Times attributing the outcome of the election to America's "dating culture." Again seizing on the "male rage" theme ever popular with the culture war addicts, Ms. Bernstein argues for the ultimate source of said rage being the expectation that males be the bread-winners in their households--that if it is now the norm for married women to work, the men bring home a significantly larger paycheck--has led to frustration among both men and women, especially in an era in which the "gender gap" in pay has narrowed, and a rising proportion of women enjoy superior educational and occupational outcomes to a rising proportion of the male population. (Men who cannot meet the resulting higher income standard find a growing proportion of women ruling them out as prospects.)

I will not go so far as to argue that there is nothing to this. It does seem to me that men and women do widely hold the expectation Ms. Bernstein talks about, and all the statistics I have seen testify to the substance of the shift in relative incomes that she describes. However, as an explanation of the election, or even the dating woes of the population, it is sadly lacking. After all, while the income gap between men and women has narrowed, this has largely been a matter of stagnation or erosion of incomes for the vast majority of males when income is taken in inflation-adjusted terms rather than of women's incomes catching up to those of prosperous male counterparts. (Indeed, median female income actually held steady as a proportion of per capita GDP from the 1950s to today.) As the situation also implies given that relative to many of the essentials of daily living (housing, auto ownership, higher education, health insurance premiums, etc.) the purchasing power of those male incomes has collapsed, with every sign indicating that collapse's continuing with no end in sight , all as economic insecurity generally is increasing.

The result is that even if women have caught men up this way what they have actually caught up to, contrary to the impression Ms. Bernstein gives of women doing so well that they can easily support not just themselves but a "househusband," means that few women interested in the financing of a household, a marriage, the rearing of children can really afford to give no thought to a partner contributing a second income, and indeed a fairly significant one. Accordingly the fact that women, even relatively high-income women, expect that a prospective partner make at least as much as they do, reflects hard economic reality--reality which would endure regardless of notions about gender. However, that observation would be unlikely to appear in an essay in the Times, or any other publication of its ilk, which much prefer to focus on the differences across the gender line than the differences which cut across it, while gaslighting the public with insistences that "You've never had it so good" as they struggle harder and harder to make ends meet in ways that those who write for the opinion pages of publications like these have rarely ever had to do.

It's Still the Economy, Stupid--But They're Trying Very Hard to Make You Forget It

After months of hearing that "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" from the media outlets covering the 2024 presidential election, which were eager for the election to be about anything else, it turned out to be about . . . the economy, stupid. Afterward the media outlets admitted as much, however reluctantly--saying stupid things like "It Wasn't the Economy, it Was Inflation" (as if inflation were somehow a thing apart from the economy)--and then hastened to bury the realization as they went on selling the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" narrative again in spite of the hard facts.

Consider the particularly popular "White male rage" variation on the argument--and how it compares with the data on how Americans actually voted. According to the data set published by U.S. News & World Report, 54 percent of the White women who voted, 44 percent of Hispanics (including 40 percent of Hispanic women), and 17 percent of African-Americans (including 11 percent of African-American women), voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump. Given those numbers it is safe to say that the majority of the votes for Trump came from persons classifiable as outside the "White male" category--all as, not incidentally, a far from negligible 39 percent of White males voted for Harris (a vote on the part of that group just 7 percent lower than the vote for Harris among White women). That does not rule out the "status politics" of the country, which the media do everything in their power to whip up at every turn in the shabbiest and most cynical way, has factored into the electoral outcome. However, the reduction of Trump's victory to "White male rage" simply does not find validation in the numbers, or anything else--though of course, those who wanted to pretend "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" have never let hard fact get in the way of their loathsome culture war-mongering.

The Last Great Moral Panic Over Violence on Network TV

As I have remarked again and again over the years, part of what gave the 1990s its distinctive flavor as a period was the sense of the country being aware of its having a nervous breakdown as it had that breakdown, one expression of which was the irony that seemed for many the only possible attitude toward many of the increasingly insane-seeming events of the day.

I place in the category of such events Law & Order actor Michael Moriarty's showdown with Attorney General Janet Reno over her threats to censor network TV if it did not significantly reduce the amount of violence that it put on the air.

Looking back it seems to me to be plausible, even probable, that Reno's kicking up a furor over TV violence was a cynical ploy by a Clinton administration implementing a thoroughly neoliberal economic program ("Reinventing Government," NAFTA, etc. as the modest social promises were kicked to the curb) that, generally unpopular with a public that had overwhelmingly voted against this path, outraged supporters who rightly felt betrayed, while winning no points from the right for its vigorous furtherance of the Reagan Revolution--and attempting to change the subject and score cheap points with an appeal to the Helen Lovejoys of the world at a time when this was still a fairly hot topic with them.

Hence the grandstanding about what was airing on TV as entertainment--and the specific decision to focus on violence on TV rather than sex on TV, sex usually the more controversial thing, and therefore more charged, not least because it was so much a concern of the culture warriors. By contrast concern for the violence on TV was a less charged matter, in part because of how concern about it could seem to cut across ideological lines, and be less suggestive of pandering to a right-wing Agenda in this way as in so many others.

Hence also the ease with which Reno backed away from her calls with nothing done about the matter--that people were less eager for something to be done about the violence on TV than the sex on TV making her and the administration less likely to catch criticism for the retreat (especially from that right that they were so anxious not to offend any more than they were already doing, little good that it ever did them).

Indeed, the only real consequence of the affair can seem to be the damage Mr. Moriarty did to his career by taking the cynically proffered bait. Thus did the fuss, which was undesired by Moriarty's producers and certainly to hear him tell it, see him stand alone, like Gary Cooper in High Noon (!)--but afterward parting ways with the show, and if he went on working afterward, never landing a really comparable gig again, no starring role in a comparably high-profile series appearing in his list of credits three decades on.

Of course, that did not mean that disputation over the perceived violence of the content on network television was wholly at an end. Still, in line with the broad politics that made Janet Reno's maneuver such a a safe one for her to undertake, and the fact that the successor administration was a Republican one with a blatant culture war commitment, sex figured in it much more highly than violence, such that when George W. Bush appointee to the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell--like the Clinton administration, easy to see as cynically stoking the culture war as cover and a source of cheap political points as it busily furthered the implementation of the neoliberal agenda--aggressively handing out fines during his tenure, hitting NYPD Blue with a million dollar penalty for nudity, not violence, while giving the "patriotic gore" in an uncensored broadcast of Saving Private Ryan a pass. It was also sex that was on the minds of those who denounced Desperate Housewives in its early days, and the display of Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl, with the same carrying over to the censoriousness of One Million Moms and #MeToo alike. However, that was far from all of it. The reality was that Big Media was changing, with before the end of the 1990s HBO dramas like The Sopranos making NYPD Blue look tame by comparison--all as the Internet exploded the scene. Simply put, the culture moved on--and so did the struggles over the censorship of that culture, which rage on to the same noxious ends as ever they did.

Reflections on the "Big Thinks" on "Europe and America"

Those who would say something about the contrast between "Europe" and "America" tend to fall back on certain clichés, either badly outdated or baseless to begin with. One of the worst is the comparison of "democratic" America and its popular culture with "aristocratic" Europe and its "high" culture, personified in the caricatured culture clash between the "crude" American and the "sophisticated" European.

This conception ignores how from the start America has had its aristocrats (however much their pretensions may have been taken less than seriously, or downplayed, by many in and beyond their country), while in Europe the aristocrats were, by definition, few. (After all, aristocrats can cultivate the graces of life because they live off of the toil of others rather than their own toil, while even among the aristocrats few get the whole "package," possessing titles and certain privileges going with them but wondering where their next meal will come from.)

There is what this also means, that America has long had its high culture, which has come a long way since the days when the Henry Jameses could snivel about America's lacking monuments and museums, while one should never forget the limits to the possession and enjoyment of high culture in Europe. In the case of the aristocrat it was apt to be a matter of superficial attainments for the purposes of showing off in that way to which the leisure class is addicted that Jane Austen satirized in her discussion of the "accomplished young lady," while contact with such culture falls off sharply just a little way down the socioeconomic ladder (Hans Fallada's portrayal of Berlin carpenter Otto Quangel showing disbelief at what a symphony conductor does sums it up), while Europe has its low culture as well, as trashy and stupid as anything that came out of America. (One would need only look at what Silvio Berlusconi put on the air in a country where, as one critic put it, "one struggles to take a step without encountering evidence of millennia of high culture.")

Bad enough in the day when Nabokov wrote Lolita, why do these stupidities persist so much later, when they seem so much less forgivable?

It would seem relevant here that we live in a deeply reactionary era which stresses cultural difference over similarity--strains for difference where it scarcely exists, plays up whatever it can; that so many have made so much of trans-Atlantic differences, and done so on the basis of the most outworn clichés, like the decadence of Old Europe contrasted with the vigor and innocence of "Young" America, for political and other purposes ("Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus"); that so many are so impressed with shallow aristocratic pretensions (utterly taken in and awed by and ready to glorify the "accomplishment" of the general public's supposed betters), and so utterly credulous toward the courtiers of the elite, both in the news media and the arts.

As if all that were not lousy reason enough, the centrist has also been a convenient marketing tool. Americans of conventional mind are prone to assume their country to be superior to the rest of the world in many things, like the development and exploitation of information technology. Yet they are ever ready to believe that others do some things better than them--with one of these fashion, cosmetics and those things generally serving the ends of "style" and beauty, where Europeanness counts for something with Americans, precisely because that is what one would expect of a more aristocratic, aesthetically refined culture. An example that springs readily to mind is the more than decade-long bombardment of the American public by commercials for Cindy Crawford's Meaningful Beauty skin care line. That the product was derived from melons grown in southern France by a French doctor who in his manner of speaking English and other ways can seem like an Anglosphere caricature of a Frenchman can seem part of the sales pitch. "It's European!" the commercial all but shouts. As European as a European men's carryall.

The Decline of the Reality Star

Despising the reality TV genre from the first (oh how hard the courtiers and claqueurs worked to get the public to love Survivor!), for many years after when the press referred to some entertainment celebrity as if the general public was expected to recognize their name and I had never heard of them my first thought was always "They're a reality star, aren't they?" and I was usually right.

Now, it would seem, this is less likely to be the case--because of that pop cultural fragmentation that means I might not know who they are for any number of reasons. Film stars, sports stars--they just aren't what they used to be, the media ecosystem that supported stardom in the past different from what we have now, while it may even be that when we consider the recording star we are made oblivious to decline here as well by the Taylor Swift phenomenon. (The real state of popular music in this regard is to be judged not by the status of those who are already megastars, but the chances of newer entrants into the field of becoming them, which show every sign of fast-shrinking.) Now, after we have (in the view of some, at least) seen reality TV play its part in making a President of the United States, the institution of the reality star would appear to be in decline along with all the rest.

Reality TV as Symbol of the Twenty-First Century

As was to so often be the case in the twenty-first century, what as late as the '90s was satire proved a slight thing next to the obscene reality of just a few years later when the reality TV boom brought the collective dementia of The Truman Show to life, and the courtiers and claqueurs of the entertainment press "normalized" it and its multiplicity of stupidities and vilenesses, which seemed likely to go on forever because of the addiction of the media-industrial complex to stupidity and vileness. But it may be that the readiness of the public to accept particular forms of stupidity and vileness have their limits, spelling the beginning of the end (rather than just the end of the beginning) of the reality TV format if we are to go by what the entertainment press tells us.

It would probably be too much to read into that the beginning of a saner new era--but I welcome the development nonetheless.

The Reality TV Bubble Bursts?

The press is telling us that the reality TV bubble has burst.

It seems to me too early to tell if this is really the case.

If so, while I have sympathy for the workers in television production who will experience this as another blow to the job market in which they work, the genre is a vile thing. The showbiz "wannabes" passed off as "ordinary people" crammed into a house to scream at each other and degrade themselves in stupid games and contests. The rich idiots making a global media spectacle of their raging stupidity, vulgarity and narcissism. The business-themed competition shows where millionaires put billionaires whose luck they pass of as genius on pedestals so that they may sit in judgment of supposed hopefuls of similar success in a pageant of conformism and aspirationalism at its most cruel and stupid. On and on it goes, all of it not just lowest common denominator in thinking and deeply retrograde in its attitudes, but thoroughly unpleasant to look at or contemplate for any but the most warped mentality in a way that puts me in mind of the quote attributed (very likely, incorrectly) to the philosopher George Santayana: "Americans love junk. It's not the junk that bothers me, it's the love."

Ordinarily I am not bothered by people loving what some would consider junk, and indeed even defend their right to unapologetically love what may be indisputably junk without qualification (hence my distaste for such terms as "guilty pleasure"). However, the world would be a better place if this particular type of junk never existed.

Of "Guilty Pleasures"

I have never liked the term "guilty pleasure," or at least its usage in reference to the enjoyment of cultural works not conventionally held in great esteem. There is about the term a sense of groveling before Authority that I find deeply distasteful--the more in as in the world of culture and the arts Authority has made its prescriptions and exercised its influence in such a self-serving, treacherous way from the start, and with particularly disastrous consequence in our time.

So far as I am concerned people should like what they like, without guilt--and deal with the value judgments after that, with people thinking for themselves rather than mindlessly following the dictates of a priesthood that it seems to is rather less necessary and more avoidable in this sphere than in so many others.

Alan Moore on Fandom: A Few Thoughts

Alan Moore recently published a piece in the Guardian titled "Fandom Has Toxified the World."

The content of the actual piece is rather less categorical in its criticism of fandom than that, and so the title an example of the characteristically cynical media practice of catching the eye with something more shocking or provocative than the material it offers really warrants. After all, Moore declares that he "believe[s] that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture" (emphasis added) and indeed that in the absence of fandom a culture--such as, I suppose, that of comics--"ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies." However, he is "also sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight" (emphasis added), which "poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement," with, as the title of the item indicates (it is representative of Moore's position to that extent, at least), this is one of those "sometimes."

In saying that Moore discusses his experience of fandom--which is not insignificant, but also limited, comparing the fan world he knew when he was young, at a time when the comic book was much more marginal to cultural life than it is now, with what, after aloofness from it for the decades during which he became a superstar in the field, fandom in its contemporary form. This is the occasion of the negative commentary, none of which will surprise anyone at all exposed to, for example, the Comicsgate episode.

While Moore's piece stuck to familiar ground here--arguably because it did so--it did get me thinking again about how so many treat fandom as an easy target. Consider, after all, the title of the piece: "Fandom has Toxified the World." Reading up on these matters I have had the opposite suspicion--that, to the extent that we find fandom "toxic," the toxicity of the world has simply been reflected in fandom, and that focusing on fandom is easier and safer than criticizing bigger and broader cultural developments, in part because fans are such an easy target for kulturkampfers from all sides. After all, fan-ness is equated with nerdiness by the conventional, and we live in a culture where gleeful nerd-bashing is not just given a pass, but a significant cultural industry in its own right (certainly to go by such successes as The Big Bang Theory and its spin-offs). At the same time Big Media has a significant financial stake in beating up on some elements of the fan community--Big Media, after all, intent on having things both ways, desirous of exploiting fan affection for the franchises they own, but at the same time desirous of the freest possible hand in exploiting the materials of its franchises as it chases consumers' ever-shrinking disposable income. Meanwhile those who embrace identity politics are prone to equate fandom with what they would see as its worst elements. (Looking at the dialogue about Joker 2 online I am struck by how many have rushed to see the film as giving fans what they think is a well-deserved middle finger, with the politics of identity and its enmities factoring heavily into this as they use words like "entitlement" to beat down any social criticism they see as irrelevant to their own concerns.) At the same time the identity politics-bashing right, if pleased to see the umbrage at certain aspects of pop culture turn the relevant part of the public off of "wokeness," has little sympathy for them. The right is the purview of the swaggering jock, not the nerd, and anyway sees grown men who like comics and such as refusing to put away "childish things" and get jobs and devote themselves to raising the country's fertility rate, 'cause reasons.

Indeed, all that being the case makes it seem even less likely that fandom is "toxifying" the world, than the opposite, that the world is toxifying fandom. After all, to go by the extreme disrespect with which pretty much everyone treats fandom, fans are nowhere near so powerful as they would have to be in order to have such an impact on the culture, while they are by no means immune to the world's toxicity, such that it manifests here--all as some, for whatever reason more attentive to the signs of poisoning here than elsewhere, readily confuse cause with effect.

AI Movie Trailers Today, Full-Length AI Movies Tomorrow?

If you spend enough time online to have come across this humble blog, it has probably already come to your attention that the Interweb is now awash in trailers for movies that have not been made, and which are therefore not coming to a theater (or anything else) anywhere near you--in cases, oodles and oodles of trailers for a single concept, the long-stuck-in-development-hell Gal Gadot-starring Cleopatra movie (which, if it does get made as we are again being told is the case, will probably look nothing like any of the trailers).

Given how fast the development of "generative Artificial Intelligence" seems to be moving (the extreme opposite of the slowness to put AI to any sort of practical, real-world use, like satisfactorily drive a vehicle through a city street, or even tidy your home), I wonder how long it will be before those playing around with the programs in these ways graduate from trailers to short movies and even full-length movies. (Indeed, some enterprising individuals may already be working on figuring out how to string together lots and lots of short AI-generated movies to form one coherent full-length movie.)

I wonder, too, how long it will be before Hollywood starts to regard this as a real competitor--and the studios which have made the creatives they so despise knuckle under to their participation in the training of such software find that the development of that software has put not just the writers and actors and set designers out of business, but the studios themselves as they find themselves superfluous in a media world awash in digitally conjured cinema.

Is "Glicked" Confusing Perceptions of Gladiator 2's Box Office?

I remember how back in the summer of 2023 the media telling us that the "Barbenheimer" meme juxtaposed the two big feature film releases of July 21 of that year (Barbie and Oppenheimer) went "viral" online, Internet users reveling in the ironies of the contrast between a movie about plastic toys and a movie about (however much the media prefer to tell us it is about something, anything, else) THE DANGER OF NUCLEAR WAR THAT HANGS OVER ALL OF US EVER MORE THREATENINGLY AS OPPENHEIMER DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN HIMSELF SPELLED OUT TO THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS LEST ANYONE MISS THE POINT.

I don't know that I believe that the Barbenheimer stupidity really did go "viral" the way the media claimed it did--precisely because everything I have seen about how the Internet works has left me only more and more convinced that things really don't go viral that way, that indeed the media just tells us they did, because it helps them push a particular narrative.

Still, whether or not Barbenheimer really did go viral or not the phenomenon did have one important feature in common with the great majority of those things we are told went viral--namely that it is extremely stupid, and each and every unfortunate contact with it like nails on a chalkboard.

Naturally the media, which can never resist repeating its stupidities, seized on the chance to reuse the marketing concept by talking up "Glicked"--the release of a screen adaptation of the revisionist Broadway musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked, the same weekend as the bloody Roman pseudo-epic Gladiator II. (They slapped together the "Gl" from Gladiator and "icked" from Wicked. Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.)

The expectation was that just as Barbie and Oppenheimer both performed way above expectations at the box office, saving the until then really dismal summer season of 2023, so would Wicked and Gladiator. As it happened, neither movie quite lived up to the expectations observers held for it on their mutual opening weekend, each coming in under the range that Boxoffice Pro projected the Wednesday of their week of release.* Still, Wicked did just well enough then and after to be considered a very palpable hit (with $262 million banked after ten days in release, and decent prospects through the season), while Gladiator has . . . done less well. Apparently on track to end up with half what the original did after inflation, it may be that even with post-theatrical income counted in the movie will be reckoned a money-loser, though few seem willing to admit that. This is, I think, primarily because the entertainment press is pushing the narrative that Hollywood's model of blockbuster filmmaking is as salable as ever, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary--but it may be that the "Glicked" foolishness intended to help sell both movies is playing its part, predisposing observers to think of Gladiator II as a success, and even letting it benefit from association with the much more successful Wicked in the minds of the easily befuddled.

* Wicked, supposed to open with $120-$140 million, picked up only $114 million.

Gladiator 2's Failure: Some Thoughts

Recently appraising Gladiator 2's box office performance I have inclined to the view that the movie is proving a commercial disappointment at the box office--not a total, The Marvels/Flash-style catastrophe, but far from what it would take to really justify a $300 million movie, and that the outcome was far from unforeseeable.

Consider the first Gladiator film that came out when many of those who voted in the recent presidential election were not yet even born. The movie was basically a blend of "You killed my favorite second cousin!" action movie with Attitude Era WWE in period costume. The approach had enough novelty, narratively, visually and in other ways to make for one of the more original and entertaining summertime spectacles of those years--but the film's cachet owed to its being taken for something more, the period setting evoking the epics of the last days of Old Hollywood, enough so to fool the more superficial critics into mistaking its puffed-up kayfabe (the ultimate wrestling feud!) for Historical Drama, and awarding it a slew of Oscars that action movies usually do not get, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (in a way, epitomizing Ridley Scott's career as a prolific maker of historical "epics" who apparently has no interest in or understanding of history whatsoever).

Alas, I suspect that the movie's just looking like an epic rather than actually being one limited its impression on viewers, with all that meant for any appetite for a return to Scott's Rome (the more in as the movie left even less room for a sequel than most, with hero and villain both dead, and history taking a wildly implausible turn in his story that would not stand up to any serious follow-up). And I dare say that the historical epics of old that Gladiator was able to exploit the existence of some nostalgia for in 2000 are that much more distant from the memory of today's moviegoing audience on the whole--all as, much as people enjoyed it, the original Gladiator doesn't generate much nostalgic pull of its own. (It's no Star Wars that way, no Top Gun, no 2002 Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man even.)

The result was that the very belated follow-up was just a transparent cash grab with a blend of sequel and remake as hazy as it is unimaginative, selling much more on spectacle than the predecessor did in an age in which audiences have had so much spectacle that it is ever harder to really make them feel that here is something they have never seen before--while American audiences, certainly, have long been harder to sell on this particular kind of spectacle, even if the movie has the benefit of being less shopworn than, for instance, the superheroic adventures of which they have seen so many. The resulting, tepid, appeal translated to a tepid response from ticket-buyers.

Is Gladiator 2 a Flop?

Admittedly the entertainment press doesn't think so.

Still, consider the situation as it stands.

Seventeen days into Gladiator II's international release the movie has collected $209 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $111 million in that market. Assuming not unreasonably that the movie has already made 80 percent of its international total by this point, and 60 percent of its North American total, one would expect the movie's final take to come to around $445 million. Alternatively were one to take the $185 million figure for the final domestic take implied by the calculations presented above and expect this to amount to 40 percent of the final worldwide gross the way the domestic take did for the original, one gets a figure of $460 million, some $15 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $15 million the other way as well we get $475 million.

A gross in the range of $445-$475 million (which may be more than some see it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie matching what the original made ($465 million), ignoring the dollar's losing almost half (46 percent) of its purchasing power since 2000 according to the Consumer Price Index. The result is that merely matching the original's gross in current dollars means the movie's making about half what the original did in real terms.

We get an even worse picture when we think in terms of the cost of the film. The original Gladiator was made for a little over $100 million, which permitted a very healthy profit indeed on a gross of (roughly) a half billion. By contrast the sequel would be making a half billion dollars--after an outlay of $250-$310 million on the production, an expenditure of two to three times as much.

We do not ordinarily think of a sequel that made half as much as the original as a success.

We also do not (given the economics of film production and distribution) think of a movie, or anything else, that costs three times as much as its predecessor for the same return a success, with this certainly carrying over to a movie that costs $250 million+ to make (and $120 million more to distribute and market) grossing a half billion dollars. And indeed, as I argued back in April, the bar for profitability may be higher for this one than the range discussed here--a loss still quite plausible even after the post-theatrical income from streaming, TV rights, physical media, etc. is taken into account.

Still, with rare exceptions the press has been fairly upbeat about how Gladiator 2 is doing.

A plausible explanation for the gap between rhetoric and reality is that the entertainment press is on the whole claquing for this one--at least in part because it fits in with the narrative that Hollywood so badly wants to believe, namely that, contrary to the evidence of 2023, and what must be regarded as the ambiguous evidence of the public response to the thinned-out release slate of a 2024 mere weeks short of its end, franchise-addicted Hollywood's formula for generating blockbusters remains viable. And it is not going to let a little thing like movies actually losing their backers money get in the way of that.

NOTE: The item was subject to some minor corrections on December 8, 2024.

Why Are They Making a Black Panther 3?

In the end Black Panther 2 made about half what the original film did at the box office in real terms, and less than that in profit. (According to Deadline's calculations Black Panther pulled in a $476 million profit in 2018, the sequel just $259 million four inflationary years later.) Even accounting for the fact that the sequel simply could not be the "event" the original was, and the not insignificant blow dealt the franchise by the loss of the original's star, it was a big drop (the worst seen for the Marvel Phase Four/Five films until the debacle that was The Marvels), with the bottom line reflecting this. The result was that I imagined Disney/Marvel would, facing such a path of diminishing returns reflecting the tougher market for movies generally and its movies particularly, be hesitant to greenlight a third film.

Still, as we have seen franchise-addicted Hollywood is determined to press on with business as usual, so much so that in spite of the numerous financial disasters it has suffered in recent years as a result of persisting in its strategy it is brushing off the failures putting nine-figure holes in its books and seizing on any excuse for acting on the premise that the public is hungry for more, More, MORE! of the same old crapola it keeps shoveling its way (all as it not incidentally lowers the bar again and again for what may be worth giving one more try). Thus it ignores everything but what may be the highly idiosyncratic success of Deadpool vs. Wolverine, and hastens to envision a brand new Age of Marvel Movies, while displaying its propensity for magical thinking in bringing Robert Downey Jr. back (as villain rather than hero), while deciding to give Black Panther one more try at the big screen, rounding out a trilogy after which they can always reboot and start all over again just a few years down the road!

A Remembrance of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! After the Tyson-Paul Bout

As I remarked not long ago, in past decades, and certainly the late '80s, sports games loomed a lot larger within the world of video gaming, just as the world of sports, and its stars, loomed larger within pop culture generally. This all went for boxing, with the most famous boxing game of all time Nintendo's Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, like a lot of sports games of the day trading on the cachet of a then-reigning superstar of the sport to sell a game that really didn't have all that much to do with the celebrity in question, or even sport. (As others have observed many a time, the game was less a simulation of boxing--not so easy to provide in any meaningful sense to a player using a controller with a mere four buttons and crosspad--than a puzzle game/rhythm game in which winning the bouts was a matter of figuring out, or more likely being told or reading in a strategy guide, some trick to defeating your opponents, like taking their opening their mouth as a signal to punch them in the gut, then mastering the particular combination of button pushes needed to do the trick.)

Over the course of that game the player fought a succession of matches with a string of entirely imaginary figures on the way up to their bout with "Iron Mike," up at the absolute pinnacle of the boxing world--with the notorious difficulty of the game, and that final match, reflecting and with many reinforcing Tyson's image as a giant of the sport.

Of course, Tyson's star was not long in falling after his achieving his "undisputed heavyweight champion" of the world status, and the game's release. His defeat by knockout by James "Buster" Douglas, his conviction and prison sentence, his effort to regain his standing in the boxing world that is mainly remembered for his biting off a piece of then-heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield's ear in the ring, and, just like so many post-fifteen-minutes superstars before him, acquiescing in a career of self-parody to pay his bills (exemplified by his voicing himself in seventy episodes of Adult Swim's The Mike Tyson Mysteries), are all notorious. Still, in the wake of Tyson's ridiculous and revolting "bout" with the similarly ridiculous and revolting Jake Paul (eight two-minute rounds of "elder abuse" by an ex-Disney Channel sitcom star pretending to be a big brute barbarian), Tyson has never seemed further than he is now from the days when Nintendo so flattered him in that edition of one of its most classic games--while I find myself reminded yet again that just as in the '90s Tyson was already a scandal and a disaster, the country seemed to be going through a nervous breakdown, one which has just gone on from decade to decade, bringing us to the point where few even possess the ability to see any significances in this all too symptomatic episode anymore.

The Online Media Bias Check Web Sites

As we have found ourselves deluged by information and opinion online from an unprecedented number and diversity of sources it has been appropriate that we have also seen a number of web sites emerge which have as their purpose helping web users evaluate the information with which others are presenting them. Thus do sites like Snopes provide a fact-checking service. And thus do sites like Media Bias/Fact Check also rate sites according to their usually undeclared political tendencies.

Again, I think this an essentially positive development--but it seems to me that the sites are less useful than they might be because of the narrow and muddled way in which we speak of "right" and "left," "conservative" and "liberal," and so on, which neglects political philosophy and "social vision," and such issues as the economy or foreign policy, to place the stress on one's positions in the culture war, and inclination toward one rather than the other of the two major parties. (Pro-life and Republican-leaning=conservative/right, pro-choice and Democratic Party-leaning=liberal/left, they say, as if there were no more to political life than that!)

I imagine that the editors of many of these sites do not question the received usages, but even those who do find themselves facing a dilemma. Do they go by the standards commonly used in the media and in political discourse generally, and which the public generally has in mind when they bother to evaluate what they are being told? Or do they challenge that usage with a more grounded and rigorous way of making judgments about web site biases even at the risk of leaving the conventional and hasty users of their sites confused and frustrated and perhaps inclined to look elsewhere for clarification?

As it happens every one of these sites of which I know goes with the first choice, accepting the conventional political labels and their uses. This seems to me understandable but also unfortunate, as they could have been more genuinely helpful by promoting other ways to understand the political scene--with, I think, the problem getting worse rather than better with time, and the sites in question becoming less useful as a result, even by their narrowed standards. Consider, for example, the New York Times, as analyzed in the Columbia Journalism Review. One study discussed in that publication showed that the Times' greatly favored the concerns of the right in its selection of stories, even as judged in the flawed, conventional ways--considerably more than did the Washington Post, for example. Yet Media Bias/Fact Check, on the basis of "wording and story selection" (emphasis added) judged the paper to be "moderately favor[ing] the left," warranting its classification as "Left-Center biased." Meanwhile, as Media Bias/Fact Check admits that the op-eds in the paper have failed fact checks, it treats this as not interfering with the "High" credibility they accord the paper. This, of course, ignores the extent to which not only are opinion pieces subject to editorial approval, and many a reader likely to not distinguish too carefully between supposed reportage and declared opinion pieces, but the way in which, in the words of Amber A'Lee Frost, the Times has treated those opinion pieces as a kind of "clickbait" producing "a vast pool of pseudopolitical content, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" to a degree not only "bloating" the paper, but "positioned very prominently, at the very top of the website." (By contrast, she notes, the Financial Times "sticks them at the bottom.") One may add to this the extent to which those opinion pieces have both been increasingly right-wing, and increasingly suspect in their never close to perfect respect for fact (why bother with those when made-up conversations with nonexistent cab drivers will do?), exemplified by the Times' controversial hiring of climate denialist Bret Stephens.

The result is that abiding by the old standards gives us less and less potential for clarity on what really matters here--and it seems to me that those really serious about judging sources are going to need to do a little more work than just quickly checking the handier evaluations. (Like reading a whole article every now and then in a periodical--if not the CJR, then something at least.)

Has the Red State-Blue State Narrative Changed Over the Years?

The simple-minded, obfuscating, indeed obscurantist discourse treating American politics as a contest between the irreconcilable national cultures of "Red" and "Blue" states has just gone on and on, but rereading Thomas Frank's old "American Psyche" essay I find myself reminded that the narrative has not been perfectly constant.

One aspect of it that has changed is the way that talk of the division once played into the hype about a "New," information age economy that was still very strong about the turn of the century. Those more favorably disposed toward the "Blue" states of the Northeast, Great Lakes and West coast saw them as at the forefront of that new economy, with their cultures playing an important part in that. Their disproportionate share of the more prestigious institutions of higher learning, the more open and cosmopolitan and accepting culture of their cities and their workplaces, were supposed to be key to attracting the superlative "knowledge" workers and technological and entrepreneurial talent that made such an economy possible--all as they criticized the Red states as looking backward nostalgically to an idealized industrial age past and taking comfort in bigotry rather than accommodating themselves to the rules of the hard but rewarding new game.

The narrative was, of course, nonsense. While there certainly are high-technology industries the broader vision of a profoundly transformative information economy, however interesting it may have been as a theory, was in the form that most came to know it and discuss it ultimately cover for neoliberals deflecting attention from deindustrialization and other problems the country had so that they could press ahead with their policies, as we are reminded when we consider just how much we still live in that insanely unsustainable fossil fuel-guzzling world dominated by "the brute force of things" that figures like George Gilder talked as if we had transcended thirty years ago, and ignore the rules of that still very physical, industrial age world at our cost.

It is a sign of just how much less salable the nonsense became that we now hear so much less of it than we did before.

However, if that has changed much else in the narrative abides with the commentariat--and not to our benefit.

The "Moral" Teaching That "Those Who Have None of the Power Have All of the Responsibility."

It is, of course, an ancient moral truism that with power comes responsibility--and that, as Ben Parker had it, with great power comes great responsibility.

However, many of those who would pass themselves off as moralists, in practice, tend to apply the extreme opposite principle in making their judgments. In their view it is the powerless who are at fault for everything in their own lives and with society as well.

It is a profoundly illogical position. But it is very convenient for a sniveling conformist coward ever-groveling before power--being which is pretty much a job requirement for the makers of respectable opinion.

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.