Cory Doctorow Writes About Tech

In the neoliberal era the conventional view has been to celebrate the "tech" sector as the absolute epitome of free-market "entrepreneurship," "innovation" and "meritocracy" are supposed to be the foundation and essence and glory of economic vitality generally and American capitalism particularly. Indeed, the country's politics, media, popular culture ceaselessly glorify it as the great legitimator of the prevailing economic and social ideology and model, with this attitude underlined by how even as he set about satirizing it Mike Judge's exceedingly conventional admiration of that hub of the "tech" sector ended up making the satire tepid stuff (the more obviously so when compared against Judge's Idiocracy, in which Judge did not hesitate in the slightest about being brutal as he "punched down").

By contrast the journalism of Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic offers a very different view of the tech world--as a scene of sociopath hucksters fighting tooth and nail against market forces, entrepreneurship, innovation, in defense of rent-generating monopolies built up through every anticompetitive practice in and out of the books that foist garbage on customers whose choices are to "take it, or take it," from their unsafe-at-any-speed software underpinning major national operations from pharmaceutical prescription to car dealing, to their Digital Rights Management device-packed and bricked-at-a-stroke gadgets, with this whole predatory process aided and abetted by a credulous and corrupt media propagandizing on behalf of and policymakers bowing and scraping before "Big Tech" as they do every other "Big" out there. A far less flattering picture of the sector than that to which we are subjected nonstop elsewhere, those weary of the propaganda of Silicon Valley's courtiers can find in Doctorow's writing much-needed honesty and insight--which, if seeming like a voice crying out in the wilderness in the face of the ceaseless propounding of the conventional view, is along with other such voices playing a part in challenging a "myth of Silicon Valley" that has only ever stood in the way of serious consideration and address of the challenges posed by new technologies, and the economics of our time.

The Myth of Silicon Valley--and the Very Different Reality

If you are even slightly attentive to economic reality then you will have likely noticed how much more attention the "tech" sector and its more prominent figures get than do their counterparts across the rest of the vast and highly diversified U.S. economy--exceedingly disproportionate attention. This has much to do with the development of an image of "Silicon Valley" that corresponds to how neoliberals want the public to picture capitalism generally and American capitalism particularly that associates it with

"entrepreneurship" of the founder-run "startup" form and "creative destruction," technological dynamism, worldwide American technological leadership and [the] recently self-made fortunes of inventor-entrepreneurs

all as against, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's "technostructure"-centered vision of a corporate planning system extremely remote from both the free market dynamics of orthodox economic theory, and the real-world experience of the rest of the public; a reality of technological stagnation that has made a joke of talk of an "information age" that can seem to have always been an attempt to deflect attention from an economy already traveled far down a path of not just relative decline but actual deindustrialization; and, contrary to the "market populist" line, not only the fact that a handful of people becoming "billionaires" say absolutely nothing of the real life chances of the many, but no reasonable person would imagine that New Money behaves any differently from Old Money in any way that counts in the lives of actual working people.

However, compounding the distortion is the fact that this image of tech is itself a matter of myth rather than reality--a fact so marginalized in contemporary discussion that one has to step outside the "entrepreneur"-singing, startup barking, tech-hyping courtiers to business of the media mainstream and look to, for example, the journalism of Cory Doctorow over at Pluralistic. The past month has seen Mr. Doctorow deliver a characteristically robust series of reports updating the interested on just how big is the gap between the hype and the reality which has ranged from the "scalesplaining" of social media companies, to the vileness that is "surveillance pricing," to the subject of dealer management software and its susceptibility to breaches whose disruptiveness has only grown over time (as Doctorow shows through the histories of such events at Equifax, Change Healthcare, and the crisis at CDK that recently disrupted car dealing in the United States)--each and every one of said pieces, per usual with Doctorow, worth not a skim but a proper word-for-word read from anyone even slightly interested in this subject (as anyone whose life is affected by this stuff, which is pretty much everyone who has not gone to such extremes to completely avoid anything and everything to do with the digital age that they are almost certainly not reading these words now).

Still, if you are new to this more critical perspective, or are not so new but have only time to look at just one item, I would particularly recommend Doctorow's piece about Microsoft's address of its products' security--precisely because here Doctorow presents of the story of the rise of Bill Gates and Microsoft in a way that is greatly and importantly different from the one with which Americans have been beaten over the head for as long as they can remember (Gates the inventor of genius, Gates the self-made man who rose from humble origins without any help whatsoever to be the richest man on Earth for most of a generation, Gates the embodiment of American meritocracy and the American Dream, Gates the humanitarian "philanthropist" leading the way on issues like climate change, Gates the model for all of the rest of us, etc., etc. ad nauseam).

Indeed, the facts would seem the extreme opposite of the endlessly promulgated "legend" in the way of so many Josiah Bounderbys past and present, so much so that even those who do not read journalists like Doctorow may well have encountered some of this in the past. Still, even if one has heard every bit before and remembers it still, the fact remains that given the endless reiteration of the "legend" intended to bury any other perception in avalanche-like fashion mere repetition of the truth has value, while there is what Doctorow does with it here--draw the bits and pieces normally presented in isolated fashion and easily ignored as the conventional picture endures to create a coherent, and more truthful, image that helps us understand the world better than before. As the critical sneers that have so often met the work of historians like Clive Ponting show, this important service is too little appreciated by even those who ought to know better.

Centrism and the Right: A Few Thoughts

Looking at political centrism as more than "middle of the roadness" but as a distinct ideological tendency these past few years my conclusion has been that this centrism is an adaptation of classical conservatism to the situation of the early Cold War. The resulting center has been fundamentally conservative and, if declaring itself equally opposed to extremisms of the right and left both, founded on anti-leftism rather than anti-extremism , and in fact usually partnering with a right in which it was always reluctant to see any extremism against a left it saw as inherently illegitimate.

That right-center combination pushed back against the left, minimized the concessions that the left's existence required (some readiness to provide which was usually what distinguished the center from the more plainly reactionary right), and ultimately marginalized the left. By the 1980s and even more so the 1990s this produced a situation where the left had simply ceased to exert any force at all. Meanwhile a center conservative to begin with, disinclined to put up much resistance to the still effectual right, accustomed to treating the right with respect in spite of the fact that the right showed the center no such respect, accommodated itself to the right's continued rightward pull over and over again.

All of this moved the center, the discourse, and even the right further rightwards--quite predictably given the dynamic discussed here, which would seem to, in the absence of a strong left, make the center's rightward shift, and even what some have called the "normalization" of the more extreme right, a default mode for a centrist-dominated politics. Moreover, this has been reinforced by the extent to which the center hastened upon the hugely unpopular course of abandoning its old function of securing social concessions in its rush to embrace neoliberalism, and an ascent of "status politics" inseparable from the weakening of the left, producing discontents which the right (even if itself even more staunchly neoliberal than the center) exploited through appeals against which a center with little emotional appeal to a broad public had few defenses, and little ability to compete. This disadvantaged a center that responded by accommodating itself to the right that much more--with this pattern exacerbated by the combination of crisis, anemic growth, repeated government combination of rescue of the financial sector with austerity for the public so much seen since 2007, and the absolute determination of centrists to stick by their more fundamental policies in spite of all the opprobrium that had come to be attached to them.

Considering all this as it has played out in American history over the twentieth and twenty-first century (as the Democratic Party of the New Deal gave way to the Democratic Party of the Neo-Liberals in the Clinton era, etc.) my first thought was that it was mainly relevant to a United States unique because of the extent to which American politics was defined by Cold War Anti-Communism, and the marginalization of the left, to a greater degree than in any other major Western country (such that what is called here "centrism" is what has passed for "liberalism" in America). However, I soon enough saw how some of these dynamics were operative in British politics. More recently reading political scientist Aurelien Mondon's discussion of the rightward trajectory of French politics it seems to me fairly clear that this same tendency of an ostensibly in the middle but actually deeply conservative center to come down hardest on the left and accommodate the right, pushing a country's politics in a rightward direction, has been operative there as well, with the consequences already seen, and now anticipated from the election for the country's National Assembly.

Boxoffice Pro Publishes its First Forecast for Deadpool & Wolverine: Thoughts

Two weeks ago there were reports that the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine was headed for a $200 million+ opening weekend. Extraordinary even by pre-pandemic standards those numbers caused a lot of excitement in the press.

Naturally I looked forward to the first estimate from Boxoffice Pro with more than the usual interest. Would those early estimates prove to have been exaggerated by the enthusiasm of devoted fans who distorted the earlier tracking, or indicative of very strong interest in the movie being so widespread as the tracking claimed?

As it happened Boxoffice Pro's estimate, if not quite as ebullient as the $200-$239 million so recently circulated, comes pretty close--their estimate some $175-$200 million, so that, yes, this will probably be the year's biggest opening up to at least that point. Meanwhile, going by a not unreasonable multiplier of 5-6 for the final global gross, the $1 billion mark definitely within reach, and the movie likely end up the franchise's biggest earner not just in current dollars but real terms as well.

I am sure many expected this all along--even if this could hardly have been extrapolated from the hard commercial data of the movie's predecessors, and the state of the market in 2023-2024. After all, the second Deadpool film made less than the first, all as the X-Men franchise is itself far along a path of diminishing returns with its second adaptation of the Dark Phoenix saga, all as superhero movies especially and franchise spectacles like these generally have been falling flat with audiences, etc., etc.--all of which led me just a few months ago to suggest the film's possibly failing to hit the half billion dollar mark (and even in April saw the "realistic" ceiling for the film as about $700 million).

Still, if in the past year or so my use of extrapolations from how prior films in a series and other similar films have done have tended to produce overestimates of the grosses of major films--as it did The Flash, and Indiana Jones 5, and Mission: Impossible 7, and Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2, this may be a case of the extrapolative approach producing a significant underestimation, and in a very welcome way from the standpoint not just of fans of Deadpool and Wolverine and the superhero genre, but Marvel, Disney and the American film industry as their claqueurs in the entertainment press will surely let us know should the box office bear out these expectations.

The Taboo Against Artists Admitting They Want to be Rich and Famous

In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair acknowledges the desire to "get rich and famous" as a deciding factor in the desire of many persons to become artists. This is not some unheard-of idea, of course, but it is less acknowledged than it ought to be--while when people do acknowledge it they tend to do so with a sneer, not only at the longshot nature of such a hope, but the desire itself, which is seen as somehow unworthy. What makes Sinclair's treatment of the theme different is that, even though it is possible that no one has written more, and more knowingly, about what the sacrifice of art to the pursuit of "success" means for artists and their art and the society they live in, he writes of such persons with sympathy. After all, there is the alternative, the life as a "nobody" that those who hope to become rich and famous as writers, or any other sort of artist, hope to escape.

Why is acknowledgment of something that "everybody knows" so rare? And this the case in a society where the essence of conformity to received values is striving for individual economic advancement--the "American Dream"--such that by that standard endeavoring to get rich as an artist ought to be as respectable a way of pursuing that dream as any other?

I suppose one reason is what Sinclair had what most commentators on the matter do not--appreciation of how cruel society is to nobodies, such that their attempting to become somebodies by a longshot is understandable, and esteem for art as a worthy vocation, both of which they lack. Indeed, it seems that the desire to advance oneself for this particular reason and in this particular way falls afoul of a great many prevailing cultural standards. The conventional preach aspirationalism all the time--but they do not respect those to whom they preach it, the respect for the rich going with a disrespectful and unsympathetic attitude toward the poor and their sufferings and their natural desire to escape them. (Thus does aspirationalist preaching always have the ring of "Perhaps this will have a humanising effect on the dog-stealers" about it.)

Here the attitude of the economic "Calvinist" toward wealth seems relevant--respectful of wealth, disrespectful of the actual enjoyment of wealth. Those aspiring to be somebodies this way--to become "celebrities"--are all too obviously after the perks and pleasures of such advancement, while the conventional overlook how those wearing the business suits may be no less motivated by those perks and pleasures, their desire to get rich quick from work of uncertain value rather than steady, patient, toil at "real" work, and the fantasies of self-indulgence driving it, getting a pass. (The business suit, the perceived tedium of the office, the respect for finance in an era in which old-fashioned producerist suspicion of the usurer and speculator has fallen by the wayside buys the "wolves of Wall Street" the benefit of the doubt as against "frivolous" art, such that only a Balzac or a Marx pays the seamier reality heed.)

By contrast the artist gets the full blast of their moralizing, which in its way gives away something more important--namely, what the aspirationalism is really about. That whole mentality has nothing to do with desiring that the lower orders make the most of their chance to "get ahead," and everything to do with their encouraging those lower orders to make themselves as useful as possible to those who are already ahead. A person discontented with their lot hoping to change it by drawing back from the job market and working on their art does business no good, certainly not as against those who uncomplainingly, diligently toil at an eight-to-six--what the missionaries of aspirationalism really want. Still less can they have those artists making any claims for society's support as they walk that other path. The result is that while, for all his criticism of the compromises of those who become "ruling-class artists" for the sake of living well, Sinclair appreciated that the artist needs support, the conventional wisdom, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it, holds that the "true" artist must resign themselves to being an "unworldly and monkish figure," cutting off that particular avenue of escape from the life of a deprived nobody in the process for anyone even pretending to be a genuine artist rather than just a good-for-nothing looking for "an easy life" in a culture that sees no one as having any right to even hope for that.

Review: Money Writes! by Upton Sinclair

In Mammonart (1925) Upton Sinclair threw down a comprehensive challenge to the received wisdom about the creation, content and valuation of art ("the six great lies"), and above all the extent to which artistic production and the standards of artistic criticism have been dominated by the requirements of ruling elites in "an economic interpretation" of the Western canon which in its early chapters presented a forceful essayistic argument for his position, then proceeded to a grand survey of that canon's writers and works from antiquity to the present day showing how this has been the case at every point. If the survey was uneven in places its selections of authors from differing periods and countries were nonetheless sufficiently balanced that Sinclair could say only so much about the literature of his own time and place, and one may add, the ways in which the age-old economic and social and political forces of which he wrote had shaped it. However, Sinclair did get to say his piece about both the writers of his time, and the conditions which produced them, in a book he published two years later Money Writes! (1927).

The last of the books in the Dead Hand sequence he published over the decade of 1917-1927, Money Writes! is also the shortest, and in contrast with the preceding Dead Hand books Sinclair produced on a foundation of journalistic and scholarly research with an eye to comprehensive coverage of their subject matter (as with, besides Mammonart, his studies of American education and the American press), the most personal--by which I mean that to a much greater degree than the others it derives from his personal experiences and personal observations as he takes up the questions "Just why do so many people want to be writers?" "What enables the aspirant to become 'successful,' as against what enables a writer to produce something of genuine artistic value?" and "What does it mean to walk one path against the other?"

As one who knows Sinclair at all might guess in this subsequent piece of "economic interpretation" his answer to these questions is bound up with the most fundamental aspects of the society in which he lived. For Sinclair the most fundamental fact of American life was economic inequality that was not only extreme but continually rubbed in the faces of those who have least in a way utterly without historical precedent via its mass media. Especially given the combination of how American society treats the "nobodies" who are its vast majority, never missing a chance to add insult to the already scarcely tolerable injury of the have-not; its relentless aspirationalist propagandizing--telling the "nobody" that "You can do it too!" and become a "somebody," and enjoy all the perks of being a somebody, and that they ought to think of that rather than a more just order of affairs; and the way in which careers in the arts are so often presented as a pathway from being a nobody to being a somebody; the plain and simple reality is that such motives have much to do with a many a person's decision to become a writer, or any other sort of artist.

They also have much to do with what writers produce, for in contemporary America as much as at any other point in the millennia Sinclair surveyed in Mammonart artists are expected to propagandize for the powerful as their way of earning their keep and punished if they do not--by those who would pay or not pay them for their work, by the critics who act as the guardians of "respectable" opinion. As Sinclair put it in a chapter allusively titled "Incense to Mammon," the artist can write about anything he likes across the whole of space and time and variety of life, but the sin qua non is that "they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view." Thus the artist must glorify riches, and those who have them, and never say anything that might call into question the status quo. Where all this was concerned the path seemed to him even narrower than it had been just a few years earlier, for the 1920s was not just a period of media consolidation and ultra-commercialism carrying further the trend he described in The Brass Check, but as the aftermath of World War I and the Red Scare in the wake of the Russian Revolution, an era of ferocious reaction.

Considering what this means for writers Sinclair reiterates the view he had expressed in Mammonart that artists, being sensitive, are susceptible to propaganda, propaganda for orthodoxy included. (Indeed, Sinclair phrases himself even more strongly here, declaring "[t]he average author" to be "fundamentally . . . a naive and trusting creature--half a child, or the make-believe impulse would not survive in him," with the result that "he believes what the grown-ups tell him, and is impressed by the princes of real life, just as by those in the fairy-tales.") Tending to make them conservative this means that "a great many" of them "do not have to be purchased, but serve privilege gladly and with spontaneous awe." Yet if many writers have no problem falling in line and doing what is expected of them this way, the disparities between the official line they are expected to promote and lived reality is such that what they produce can only be flimsy stuff, with those not so readily or completely falling into line finding themselves in a most awkward situation. Especially in the less free atmosphere prevailing after the war, Sinclair noted, many of these flew from the dilemma posed by knowledge of existing social realities and the obligations they impose on the artist into pessimism ("a symptom of . . . moral break-down," "decay," death, with the pessimism of capitalist art reflecting that "capitalism," since become "the negation of morality in social affairs," was itself dying), or psycho-babble (an age not of Freud, but of Freudians, as Sinclair says, followers of Freud "who pervert his doctrine in spite of all he can do"), or sheer muddle (indeed, "muddlement . . . the ideal of our intellectuals," precisely because no one who recognizes "economic inequality as a cause of social and individual degeneration is permitted to hold any responsible post in capitalist society"). The work resulting from this is likewise of little value, with the obscurity of style to which authors taking these tacks tend only underlining the lack of substance rather than concealing it. And it seems to Sinclair that all this has faced the artist with another dilemma, to, if given the chance to do so, "do well," with any artist of sincerity and intelligence knowing something of what the world really is but opting for the above approaches casting aside their real duty to humanity, squandering their potential, and destroying their souls and their bodies in the process--the cynicism of their course leading to dissolution, artistically and physically. Alternatively sticking to their principles as artists they, in trying to "do good," find themselves walking a path of hardships along which, if ever finding the chance to publish at all, they find themselves shut out of those "platforms" that can make a career, ignored or maligned by critics, and banned in censorious places like Boston, as they pay their bills by "selling insurance or digging the ground," or perhaps "teaching at a country school," which can be no less destructive. (The fate of the "talent that is lonely and without group support," Sinclair notes, tends to be tragic in a variety of ways.)

Along with laying out the big picture of American society and what it means for Art and the Artist in the very best of his vivid and forceful fashion Sinclair, once again, shows what this has meant for individual writers and their individual works as he speaks his piece about some he did discuss in Mammonart (as with Jack London), and many he did not. Of some of those he writes of he does not think very much--like Booth Tarkington, a "'diehard' Tory" who, after "for a generation . . . interpret[ing] the well-to-do classes of the middle west, and mak[ing] them gracious and charming," turned into what would today be considered a right-wing troll with his 1927 novel The Plutocrat.* In figures like Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill he saw extraordinary talents whose work was limited, even mutilated, in important, unfortunate, ways all too telling of the times. (The great "proletarian playwright" O'Neill, even at this early stage in his career, had grown pessimistic--indeed, the chapter on him the occasion for Sinclair's principal discourse on the subject. The "great-hearted," "clear-sighted," stubbornly "truth-telling" Dreiser also seemed to Sinclair to lack a grasp of the social forces that drove his characters, so much so that Sinclair could imagine one reading An American Tragedy and getting from it nothing more than a "Sunday sermon" teaching that "the wages of sin is death.") This is even more the case with those whose earlier work could seem an indictment of their later production, as in his comparison of the pre-war with the post-war Edith Wharton, or what he says of Sherwood Anderson (the chapter about whom is actually entitled "Muddle," for he seems to Sinclair to embody "muddle" more than anyone else). Those for whom he actually had the most sympathy, it seemed, were the ones of whom we were least likely to have heard of at all, like Gerald Lively, from whose poems in Songs of a Soil Slave Sinclair quotes some extraordinary verse.

It seemed to me that the judgments Sinclair made in this work he will not greatly surprise anyone who read Mammonart. Still, because of the structure and approach of the book Sinclair's personal quirks were more prominent--as with his Puritan streak. A supporter of Prohibition who had seen alcohol destroy many a talented author, he let us know it at such length that I became impatient with his singing about "Mister Booze." Even as one finding less and less value in the irrational and the backward-looking and the obscure, and sympathizing greatly with his critical stance toward such work, Sinclair's impatience with it could seem excessive. Even in his appraisals of particular authors he cited favorably he could appear to me wrong-headed. The example that most quickly leaps to mind I strongly disagree with his view of Dreiser as lacking a grasp of social forces, it seeming to me that just such a grasp was why, as David Walsh put it, his most famous book "presented more clearly" than any work before or since "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society."

Still, all these seem to me to be comparative quibbles. Sinclair's larger vision of the realities of the America of his time (which, for all his hopes, expectations and efforts is essentially the America of our own time) is indisputable, economic inequality then as it is now the defining fact of societal life, and manifest in the culture in the same ways, with the same implications and temptations and dangers for those who would embark on an artistic career, all as the 1920s can seem an era of artistic freedom for those of the views toward which he was sympathetic compared with the 2020s. (If Sinclair appreciated him less fully than he ought to have done, his era, after all, did produce a Dreiser--all as Sinclair plugged away. What figure of comparable stature today would you compare with either?) Certainly Sinclair's appraisal of the essential naiveté of artists, and the way those forced to "wise up" a bit fly from social realities into a pessimism, psycho-babble and muddle wrapped up in obscurity of style, seems to me a perfect characterization not just of the source and substance of the Modernism of his time, but the continued worship of that Modernism in the century since, reinforced by "cultural Cold War," by the eventual succession of Modernism by postmodernism. (Sinclair tells us that he "ridicule[d]" James Joyce, but at century's end the Modern Library ranked his Ulysses the best English-language novel of the twentieth century to no controversy whatsoever, this no more and no less than what "everyone" expected given that the standards Sinclair and others like him fought against endured.)

Indeed, Sinclair's individual judgments are also far more often right than wrong (as they seemed to be to as he ranged from the essential immaturity of mind of Rudyard Kipling, to the Tory-turned-Troll quality of Tarkington, to the essential meaninglessness of H.L. Mencken's smug cynicism, and much, much else), while Sinclair's ear for poetry particularly impressed me--reflected in how those whose advocacy he took up certainly merit rescuing from the obscurity in which they stand today. (How telling it is of the deranged character of the last century's critical standards that the piffle of a T.S. Eliot should be regarded as the supreme accomplishment of English poetry in his century while a talent such as Lively remains unrecognized!)

Amid it all what Sinclair had to say about not just the artist's works, but the artist's life, rings true again and again, from his telling of his own experience of the slush pile in his youth, to the sad ends to which so many of the writers he discusses came, while knowing why they came to such ends. (In his remarks about both the way the desire to be a "somebody" is the prime mover of many a literary career, and the tragic fate of the unsupported talent Sinclair only says what is obvious to any intelligent person but only very rarely acknowledged in a society preferring stupid clichés instead.) Indeed, when reading this book's earliest chapters I was sure that Money Writes! would rank with Balzac's Lost Illusions and Jack London's Martin Eden as one of those very, very few books which tells the truth about what it really is to be a writer in their time, and in our own time--and as I turned the last page on what is not only the briefest but briskest and most entertaining of Sinclair's Dead Hand books, I regarded myself as having only been confirmed in that judgment.

* As Sinclair put it "the girding of the 'reds'" drove Tarkington "into a sort of 'To hell with you' mood" that had him make a hero out of a virtual caricature of arrogant, trustified wealth acting "the ugly American" during a trip abroad in that book (all of which the press received very favorably indeed).

Inside Out 2's Second Weekend

Inside Out 2 opened well above Hollywood's already high expectations for the film. However, a still bigger surprise has been how the film held up over the following week, taking in another $100 million over the Monday to Thursday period, and another $100 million after that on the following weekend--the latter working out to a mere 34 percent drop from the first weekend to the second. Giving the movie $356 million after just ten days, and still rising fast, this meant the movie blowing far, far past my estimate of its floor ($240 million), and its more plausible ceiling ($330 million), on the way to all but certainly exceeding the highest end of the range I bothered to discuss ($440 million) some time this coming weekend. The film has also done similarly well overseas, more than matching its North American earnings, so that the same is probably going to prove the case with the international and global range (ten days in the movie taking in some $373 million internationally, for a global total north of $700 million+ and climbing fast).

Does this mean Pixar, Disney, the Hollywood blockbuster as we know them are back? Just as anyone paying attention ought to have expected the entertainment press is making the most of Inside Out 2's performance as evidence that they are. Perhaps they are right. But even if they prove to be so they seem to me to be "calling it" far too early. After the last four-and-a-half years, and the terrible last year-and-a-half especially, it will take more than one hit of that kind to show that, and those more interested in understanding the situation than claquing for a film industry absolutely determined to not abandon its lazy, crass, exhausted and recently seemingly failing standard operating procedures would do best to remember that it takes more than one hit to tell us how the market is really going, and show some circumspection about that for the time being.

Cordell Gascoigne Reviews Amazon's Fallout

The increasing fashionability of video game adaptations has been a factor not just on the big screen, where last year we got The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy's, but on the small screen as well, where HBO's The Last of Us followed in the footsteps of The Walking Dead by similarly winning the kind of unhinged critical praise for a prestige TV show that The Sopranos made so customary.

Now Amazon has Fallout, which has also been praised in a comparable fashion. Is it relevant to such a reception that Fallout, like The Last of Us, is a post-apocalyptic drama wallowing in a grimdark, misanthropic view of the world? I would imagine so, the more for having read a less conventional take on the material from Cordell Gascoigne that, the more persuasive in as Gascoigne is less impressed with those things that make critics lose their critical faculties. He presents Fallout as a cliché-packed yet inconsistent narrative in the end carried by "gratuitous violence and shock value"--failings that seem to him characteristic not only of this series, but the "romancing the nuclear post-apocalypse" genre Paul Brians was already criticizing decades ago, and which stands in stark counterpoint to what he thought a far more substantial treatment of the dangers of the nuclear age in Oppenheimer. Indeed, Gascoigne does not overlook the fact that Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan directed three episodes of the show--regarding which someone sympathetic to Gascoigne's outlook may say that where Christopher Nolan rose above the level of his past works with Oppenheimer, Jonathan proved all too conventional in telling his much more pop-oriented tale in Fallout.

Can Twisters be a Hit?

The movie Twisters is due out July 19.

I have to admit that, in spite of seeing it listed as one of those movies that Hollywood insiders are counting on to save the season, the year and Hollywood (like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine), I paid the movie little mind. After all, Twisters is a follow-up to a movie that was a hit way back in 1996, with nothing since come of it, giving me the impression of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel for past hits it could rework (like Gladiator 2, also coming out this year). This is all the more the case given that the market for sequels selling brand-name action-adventure spectacle is not what it was even a couple of years ago (don't let the entertainment press' rah-rah make you forget how disastrous 2023, and so far, 2024 as well, have been for movies of the type), while disaster movies have not done well in quite some time (partly, I think, because the scaling up of the action movie, and especially the superhero movie, made pretty much every action movie a disaster movie in some degree).

Not wholly disregarding the above in its weighing of the movie's "pros" and "cons" Boxoffice Pro informs us that the backers of the film are counting on nostalgia and star power to sell the film--which seem to me to be a weak basis for expectations of success. After all, '90s nostalgia has been no match for '80s nostalgia as a hit-maker--all as, I think, the original Twister has little cachet as a distinctly '90s moment. (People may remember the bit with the cow being carried across the road by the tornado's winds--but does this memory scream "'90s" to them the way other things might?) Meanwhile star power has been fickle in the best of times, and can seem all but nonexistent in the post-star twenty-first century, especially in the case of those younger actors who only became Names in this century. (The commentators may tell us that Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones are draws, but I am sure I was not the only one who had to look up who both those people were, while after checking out her IMDB page, I saw scant evidence for Ms. Edgar-Jones having a blockbuster-caliber draw in her credits to date.)

Indeed, rather than the movie playing like that other nostalgia-star power blend Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters seemed to me more comparable to that other belated sequel to a disaster movie hit of 1996, Independence Day: Resurgence, which fell flat at the box office (its gross scarcely a fifth of the original's in real terms)--the more in as Twisters lacks Top Gun 2's other advantages (namely the extreme weakness of the competition at the time of its release, for if 2024 is far from strong that way this movie has the misfortune of hitting theaters the week before Deadpool & Wolverine's possibly record-crushing debut; and the breathless cheer-leading of the media for the return of Tom Cruise to the skies in a Navy fighter).*

The result is that the magazine's prediction of a range of $65-$95 million was a surprise. If not particularly spectacular (compare it with the opening we have just seen for Inside Out 2, or what is projected for Deadpool & Wolverine), and leaves the movie a long way away from matching the original's gross in real, inflation-adjusted terms (even at the high end of the range it would have to quintuple its opening weekend gross to do that, a tall order indeed), it is still better than I expected--and in fact I remain skeptical, the more in as there are several weeks to go.* After all, last year we did see predictions for films crumble between the first projection and the opening weekend, and then the movie's actual opening weekend performance actually prove weaker than the bottom end of the last range indicated. (Thus did Boxoffice Pro's projection for The Flash fall from $115-$140 million to $60-$80 million over those few weeks, and the film actually take in just $55 million over the three-day period.) There is as yet no reason to think Twisters will suffer that, certainly in the absence of the idiocies that surrounded the promotion of those films that suffered that fate last year (as The Flash did), while some films do see their prospects rise greatly over the same time frame (as Oppenheimer and especially Barbie did, with their performance beating even the elevated expectations for both). Still, the point is that this prediction seems uncertain, enough so that I am not going to bother venturing any estimates--though I will be looking to the updates with interest.

* The original Independence Day made $306 million in 1996--equal to $468 million in 2016, when the sequel came out. Resurgence, however, made just $103 million domestically, which is why, contrary to the promise at the movie's conclusion, we have yet to see an Independence Day 3 (though don't rule that out yet given how desperate Hollywood is to crank out more sequels these days).
** Twister's domestic gross of just under $242 million back in 1996 is equal to $485 million in today's terms--a doubling corresponding to the rise in the budget. (Where the first Twister's production cost was an estimated $92 million, the figure for the new film is $200 million--before one gets into the non-production costs that have probably risen by an even greater margin.)

Authors Anonymous: A Few Thoughts

From the first I was all but certain that I would dislike Ellie Kanner's 2014 film Authors Anonymous, but watched anyway--mainly because I thought it would be a handy reference for something I was working on at the time about how film and television depict writers and writing. And indeed the film lived down to my lowest expectations, wallowing as it did in every horrid cliché of treatment of the theme, not least in its probably earning a world record for "number of book signing scenes crammed into a single movie." (Groan.)

Still, there was one bit that rang true, namely the idea the Jonathan Bennett character (William Bruce) had of "revision," which was, to put it mildly, irritatingly minimalist for the other members of his circle of aspiring writers meeting weekly to offer each other feedback on their manuscripts. In going over his work they ended up having to read through pages and pages and pages to find a single word altered to no effect whatsoever, week in, week out.

I have never been a member of such a circle--but teaching composition classes I found that Jonathan Bennett's attitude toward revision was pretty much the norm. There are, of course, reasons for that. Most students in a composition course do not care to write a paper in the first place, and care still less to revisit it after having written it, let alone really do the hard, grinding, work of making the paper better.

I get where they are coming from, believe me I get it.

But it does not make the job any easier--and is one more reason why the job gets dumped on those who cannot avoid it, rather than those best-equipped to do the job.

On the Latest Crisis of the French Fifth Republic

Last year, amid the protests against French President Emmanuel Macron's constitutionally dubious abuse of his emergency powers to force through a raising of the retirement age, the French magazine Marianne published a long interview with Emmanuel Todd, which I discussed at some length. As always, Todd had much to say of interest about the matter, displaying a good deal of insight into the character of neoliberalism (especially as it looks from the demographic angle), and the politics it had produced.

However, Todd struck me as less impressive in his discussion of what to do about the issue, calling as he did for an alliance between Marine Le Pen's far right National Rally (RN) and Jean-Luc Melenchon's center-left Unsubmissive France (Nupes) to save French democracy from Macron's dictatorial conduct. As I wrote at the time, "Being somewhere between 'faint' and 'facade' the two parties' supposed common opposition to neoliberalism is . . . no foundation for overcoming their perhaps irreconcilable differences," all as, far from their seeking to change the system in the manner Todd prescribed—pushing for the alteration of the voting system from the current "winner-take-all" version to proportional representation,

representation is the last thing that Le Pen and the RN want, precisely because of how, in 2002 and more significantly in 2017 and 2022, the lack of such representation lifted this party with a mere 15 percent of the seats in the National Assembly to that second round of voting in the presidential election—where in 2022 it got over 40 percent of the vote. Putting it bluntly, the RN's best hope for winning in 2027 may be that disgust with Macron, and the blocking of any alternatives to Macron but themselves, push them over the top and put Le Pen in the Élysée Palace.

Continuing I wrote,

Indeed, in making his call Todd can seem to be calling on Le Pen and the RN to link hands with their center-left rivals to help save France from . . . Le Pen and the RN.

As I had expected there was no such alliance, as, in the resulting circumstances, the electoral position of the RN has waxed, as seen in its advances in the recent European election.

The surprising bit is that Macron responded to the results of the European election by dissolving France's National Assembly (the lower, directly elected, house of its parliament), calling for a new election whose first round will be on June 30. Those insistent on seeing reason in Macron's conduct hold that this is a bold gamble intended to force a showdown with the far right that Macron hopes to win--but this course seems at least equally likely to stick Macron with a far-right-dominated National Assembly, and Prime Minister, via an RN enjoying a much larger share of the seats, in combination with smaller parties of the right and even parties of the center-right (Eric Ciotti, leader of the Gaullist LR, in a display of how in France as elsewhere the center has been moving rightward, calling for alliance with the National Rally).

I had taken it for granted that Macron's conduct would continue to provide opportunity for the far right to advance--but I had never imagined that he would give them so much opportunity so soon. But then again Macron is hardly the only head of a West European government calling for an election at a time profoundly inopportune for his party in conditions all too likely to see the far right make historic advances at his party's expense, in what seems a sign of the chaotic times.

Just How Big Will Deadpool & Wolverine Open?

Until just a couple of days ago I had no expectation of writing about Deadpool & Wolverine until after Boxoffice Pro came out with its projection later this month.

However the entertainment press has been buzzing with tracking-based anticipations of a $200-$239 million domestic opening for the film, and it seems worthwhile to say something of that.

Extrapolating from this using a 2.5 multiplier (reasonable for massively front-loaded blockbusters) one gets a North American gross in the $500-$600 million range. Assuming the film does relatively as well overseas as the first two Deadpool films did, one gets from this a global gross in the $1.1-$1.4 billion range. Should the film have the kind of international response some of the X-Men films enjoyed (Wolverine's inclusion is a big part of the interest, after all), one could see a doubling of the North American gross internationally, and a commensurately higher take.*

By pre-pandemic standards this would have been spectacular. By today's standards the figures are mind-boggling. (Even a month and a half ago I was still having a hard time picturing much more than $700 million for this one.) Even given how the media is these days setting the bar for commercial success very low it will have good grounds to make a fuss if Deadpool & Wolverine hit, let alone vault over, the billion-dollar mark--though it will not necessarily do so in an intelligent way. (Remember how the courtiers of the industry were insisting that Top Gun 2 "brought back" the star-driven film?) Especially coming on top of the success of Inside Out 2 (over which they are predictably crowing already) they will rush to tell us that not only is Hollywood back, but so is the precise kind of movie it has come to specialize in making, and which it badly wants to go on making, while also telling us that Disney, as the studio most committed to such films for a long time, is also back after its disastrous 2023, and what had up to the time of this writing been a mostly disastrous 2024.

Still, it takes more than two hits, however big, to rescue an industry, or even a studio. (Paramount had a box office-crushing success with Top Gun 2. Where is it now?) And so we will just have to wait and see how the rest of the year goes before daring to say too much about that.

* The R-rated Logan, notably, made 64 percent of its money outside North America. Other X-Men films making a comparable proportion of their money internationally include The Wolverine (68 percent), X-Men: Days of Future Past (69 percent) and X-Men: Apocalypse (71 percent). In fairness the numbers were boosted by relatively modest domestic earnings that made the international earnings the more impressive-looking, and in the cases of the latter two films, and Logan, $100 million+ grosses in China, which will not be factors with Deadpool 3 as discussed here.

On Inside Out 2's Surprisingly Strong Opening

Just in case you think it unreasonable to consider Inside Out 2's domestic opening to $62 million on Friday and "surprisingly strong" as I put it in this post's title, remember: in past weeks Boxoffice Pro's estimate of that weekend's likely range had fallen to the $70-$100 million range--at the low end, less than half of what the movie ended up making in its first three days.

That said, there is the matter not just of how the movie did in relation to the prediction and how the movie ended up doing it is worth noting how well the film did in relation to the first Inside Out. The 2015 original opened to a respectable $90 million--which even after adjustment for inflation comes to not much more than $120 million in today's terms. The result is that this is a sequel that outdid an original by a significant margin, and a performance that, while not record-crushing (check out what we used to take for granted), would have been very, very respectable indeed even by pre-pandemic standards, never mind the standard of 2023-2024.

Of course, Inside Out 2's stronger opening is suggestive of the kind of more front-loaded gross to which sequels tend--the movie making so much up front making it unlikely that it will quadruple its first three day take over its longer domestic run the way the first film did. Still, even with a mere 2.5 multiplier of the kind common for front-loaded blockbusters the movie will end up with a North American gross in the $350-$400 million range. Should the film do only as well overseas relative to that it would end up with a global gross in the $850 million to $1 billion range. And it is not entirely out of the question that it will do better. (If my projection was probably more restrained than others I have seen, the $1.1 billion that was the absolute upper end I discussed does not seem so unlikely now, or for that matter, even the absolute upper end of what it could eventually take in, with, for what it is worth, Deadline reporting that "this sequel is being projected by rival distribution bosses to easily exceed half billion" domestically "in the end.")

The result is that the movie seems very likely to end up on Deadline's list of the Most Valuable Blockbusters of this year come next spring--all as those inclined to think so will tell us that not only is Pixar "back" (indeed, the New York Times is already doing that) but so is Disney, and the big-budget brand franchise film, especially should Deadpool & Wolverine (the prospects of which are exploding right now in another hot story) live up to its incredible commercial buzz. Of course, whether this is really the case, or whether it is merely a matter of Hollywood's courtiers telling those who run the business what they want to hear, is something to be determined not by the performance of one or two movies, but by how the bigger slate of films does over the coming months. Should Moana 2, and the prequel to The Lion King rack up similar success then there might be grounds to think it is the late '10s all over again at that studio--all as it will take a lot more than that to create a broader image of recovery for Hollywood as a whole, with this ultimately a matter of how much moviegoers in North America and elsewhere as a whole actually spend at the box office between now and December 31.

Hollywood's Great Contraction, and the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Over the past few months Deadline has published a series of articles about "the Great Contraction" in Hollywood's television production, and the "depression"-like conditions this has meant for the industry. Depicting a hellscape of surprise cancellations of long-running series', shows to which platforms had already committed dropped before they even began, and a dearth of investment in new productions, while when a series does make it to order what follows has tended to be a story of smaller budgets, smaller casts (with regulars getting downgraded to "recurring" characters), and shorter seasons with fewer episodes.* (Those 22-episode network seasons now run more like 13-18 episodes, while network tight-fistedness is translating to fewer really long runs than before, few shows making it to season eight, or even seven.)

Oriented to what this has meant for the writers and actors looking to get along, the articles have struck me as being stronger on description than explanation, not that it is too hard for anyone to understand what has been going on. Previously TV has had its booms and busts, but these have tended to be in a part of the industry, with the decline of one thing usually a function of the ascent of another thing--as when growing original production for cable took a big bite out of the networks' market. After that streaming boomed at the expense of the networks and cable together--really, really boomed in an unsustainable way (companies churning out massive amounts of stuff without regard to profitability, just attracting subscribers, because the Federal Reserve was pretty much giving money away), so that when the streaming boom collapsed (because growth had its limits, because debt piled up, because interest rates went up, because investors were switching their focus from growth to profits) there was nothing else that could really make up for it. The disruptions of the pandemic, and then the recent strikes, made for an even shakier situation--with this reinforced by the broader economic uncertainty, as those doing the math in Hollywood, like their counterparts everywhere else, worried over the movements of the interest rate, the implications of trade war, and much, much else.

Of course, one would ordinarily expect a recovery eventually. Still, there is no plausible basis for a return to the reckless spending of the boom years--as indeed we see the streaming services going for content in other ways, as by buying the rights to old TV shows in the expectation that people will learn to love reruns again (quite plausibly, to go by the evidence), and I suspect in the wake of hits like Squid Game, become more open to bringing North American audiences the kinds of foreign production once virtually barred from the American market. Certainly I see no reason to think broadcast or cable TV are going to pick up the slack, their penuriousness a significant part of this picture. (As Nellie Andreeva informs us, where a decade ago there would have been a hundred broadcast pilots shooting during the relevant season, this year there were only three, and all of them at just one network, NBC, the others not bothering.) This is all the more the case in as, frankly, if there is no shortage of stories out there worth telling, those thinking in terms of content instead cannot possibly imagine the consumer to be very hungry for more at this point, the market overstocked by that standard (partly thanks to the boom, but also thanks to the tapping of those vast, vast reserves of older content and international content).

Moreover, it may be that even this is not the full story. Consider that critical object of contention in the aforementioned strikes of last year, the possible use of artificial intelligence to replace writers, actors and other industry workers. In considering this object of contention also consider the hype about the rate of progress in artificial intelligence, especially generative artificial intelligence, and particularly what technologies like Sora hint at its possibly permitting its users to do within a matter of months. Should this expectation be borne out even partially the industry is unlikely to ever be the same again--that Great Contraction not an exceptionally deep downturn but the end of an era and the beginning of another in which, as has happened so many times elsewhere, many an occupational category all but disappears.

The First Five Months of 2024 and the Prospects for the Year's Box Office

Between the start of the year and the end of May the U.S. box office took in about $2.6 billion.

By contrast 2023 had taken in almost $3.4 billion by that point--or more like $3.5 billion in current prices going by the Consumer Price Index.

Similarly adjusting for current prices the box office was even further behind the 2015-2019 average--which was more like $5.8 billion.

This year the month in which the box office picks up actually saw it slow down ($200 million less in the till than in March!), widening the gap between 2024 and prior years. Indeed, with 2024 already $800 million behind 2023 just five months in the expectations that 2024 would see the box office fall by a billion dollars from its 2023 level--from $9 billion in 2023 to $8 billion in 2024--actually seem optimistic now. (Were the performance of the past five months extended through the rest of the year 2024 would finish up with about $5.8 billion--about what 2015-2019 all took in in just their first five months, if you've been paying attention.)

Of course, considering how dark things look as of early June some will point out (as if this hasn't been stressed enough already!) that this May's release slate was exceptionally weak, and that things should pick up next week with Inside Out 2, may already be picking up with the Bad Boys sequel that came out this weekend. There may be something in these expectations. But it will take quite the improvement to get from here to $8 billion, more than may be plausible given the releases the rest of the year has to offer--the more in as those throwing these estimates around still seem to be in denial about the industry's structural crisis.

When people start taking that into account we might start seeing the estimates better approximate the reality.

Gabriel Kolko, Upton Sinclair and the Immigrant Experience at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Reading Gabriel Kolko's remarkable Main Currents in Modern American History (a book sadly out of print so far as I have been able to ascertain) one of its most remarkable chapters seemed to me its discussion of the much romanticized experience of the great wave of European immigrants that came to America in the heady years of expansion between the Civil War and the slamming of the door shut on newcomers in the 1920s.

As Kolko made clear, the immigrants were in the main refugees from economic hardship, and not necessarily intent on staying--many only thinking of working, saving up some money, going back to improve their lot. Typically rural in origin, they were unprepared for industrial and urban life, whose harshest side they commonly experienced, compounding the culture shock, and the broader trauma suffered by people who had already been in a fairly difficult, even desperate, situation uprooting themselves from home, family, community, native culture to deal with another world thousands of miles away from where they were born, often all on their own or nearly so. Often disillusioned, ambivalent, divided, it was commonly the case that even if they did not succeed in amassing that bit of money and going home they found that "You can't go home again," never readjusting to their new-old lot, all as those who stayed in America never quite came to feel themselves at home in their new country either.

Just as Kolko presents a striking picture of all this as a historian, Upton Sinclair does this as a novelist in his classic The Jungle (1906)--a book noted at the time and remembered since mainly for its depiction for what it showed about the actual contents of the food Americans ate, the novel was, as anyone who bothers to actually read it will tell you, was about much, much more than that. Hailed by the great Jack London as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery," it presented by way of the experience of Lithuanian immigrant Justus Rudkus the "jungle" of American life more broadly, from the horrific working conditions in which the meatpacking the book famously depicts went on, to the criminal justice system, to the machine politics of the big cities. Ground down until the honest, optimistic laborer and family man Rudkus was at the outset of the story is reduced to a common criminal by disaster after disaster of a kind all too common, he is saved only by the hope that the society and the world he lives in can become something better.

Of course, that is exactly what has drawn the scorn of Establishment literary opinion down upon this book, and Sinclair generally--such that where the Board of the Modern Library made a place for the slight and nearly forgotten Booth Tarkington on its list of the 20th century's best novels, it pointedly did not give The Jungle or anything else by Sinclair a place there. That is to their discredit, not Sinclair's, who, had he foreseen that society, and its literary Establishment as he described it in Mammonart, would be pretty much the same at the end of the century and after, would have expected exactly that much from them. By the same token the book remains compelling not just as a reminder of what it showed about its time with such great force, but all the ways in which Sinclair's time remains our time, and what Sinclair said still all too relevant to the way we live now.

The American Dream Endures. Sort of.

Louis Hartz, like Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, was one of the mid-century historians who played so large a part in forming that view of America's past that so informed the centrist's consensus-oriented vision of America's social structure and political culture. Significant in this was its muddled attitude toward class, which reflected and reinforced a particular conception of economic individualism, what has been called "the American Dream."

Of course, this Dream has not been viewed uncritically, even by those historians, with Carol Nackenoff, seeing room to speak of Hartz's characterization of America's "atomistic individualism, wedded to Horatio Alger" as a matter of the Federalist-Whig conservatives of the day "selling" America's small farmers and working class "a bill of goods" in false visions of "equality of opportunity" as they won an extremely unequal race, which subsequently became an "ideological straitjacket."

Over the years many have challenged that vision again and again. Indeed, looking back at the early twentieth century, before postmodernism utterly buried the inclination to deal with social reality underneath a great mass of epistemological nihilism, self-satisfied irony, idiot self-absorption and other such dross, one may say that challenge to the American Dream was actually the great theme of American literature. Thus may it be said to have gone with Mark Twain's portions of The Gilded Age.* Thus did it go with such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, the works of Jack London, among others.**

By and large these works have been marginalized. Respectable critical opinion prefers to hail the "road story" and "Go West, young man" stuff of Huckleberry Finn as "the Great American Novel," rather than the novel that actually gave the era its name (!). They remember Jack London as a writer of stories about animals, not people, his works about the latter rather less likely to be acknowledged than, say, The Call of the Wild. So far as those critics are concerned, Theodore Dreiser, as David Walsh put it, is "in the doghouse." And even when the books get attention, the relevant parts of them are ignored--Fitzgerald remembered for style rather than substance, the more easily given the obliqueness of his prose in Gatsby's tale (as against what he presents in This Side of Paradise).

Far from being aloof from them, the politics of literature reflect the politics of society at large, the early nineteenth century conservatism enduring as the conventional wisdom of American life into the early twenty-first century, to the dismay of the left, and the satisfaction of the right, though that satisfaction can seem more qualified these days. Estimates of the extent to which the left's ideas may be finding a new popularity differ immensely--but a Red Scare-ish alarm is definitely there, all as, whether or not they are consciously political, a great many of the young show plenty of evidences of disbelieving in the old premises and seeking other ways to live.

* The portions of The Gilded Age about the Hawkins family, and Beriah Sellers--the really satirical (and actually interesting) parts of the book—are generally attributed to Twain, rather than his cowriter Charles Dudley Warner.
** One can also count under this heading such figures as Upton Sinclair, who depicts a very different experience in The Jungle; or Nathaniel West in his reimagining of Voltaire's Candide in Depression-era America; or what becomes of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath; or Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman.

Remembering Six Days, Seven Nights

Looking back it can seem that Six Days, Seven Nights was very much a movie of the 1990s.

After all, it was a romantic comedy in a period when the form was doing well. When, in fact, at least one big romantic comedy was an expected part of the summer movie release slate.
When Ivan Reitman was still directing big comedies.

When Harrison Ford played off of an Indiana Jones image that was still a fairly fresh, fond, memory for many--certainly in comparison with what it was in 2023.

When Anne Heche was still being cast as a lead in major movies.

When the cast of Friends were still landing major film roles in those days when it looked as if they just might graduate from TV star to film star (Matt LeBlanc, in fact, making his bid for action hero stardom just a couple of months earlier in Lost in Space, another thoroughly '90s film).

Alas, if the film was very much of its time it was no great hit at that time, not quite living up to either the critical or the commercial expectations held for it, and I will not try to persuade you that it is some criminally underrated gem. Still, it has its good points--like appealing visuals, and a few memorable lines.

Of the latter one that has stuck in my memory was spoken when after Ford's plane crashed in a storm, stranding his and Heche's characters on a Pacific island, and Heche asked why he couldn't just fix the plane and get them back home again. After all, isn't he one of those "guy guys?" she asked. Who can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and . . . build you a shopping mall." Can't he do that?

No, he says, he can't do that--but he can do this, he tells her, sticks a finger in the corner of his mouth and snaps it to make a popping noise.

It was, for a Hollywood film, a rare (and amusing) acknowledgment of the idiotically exaggerated notions people have of others' competence. It is an important plot point that after happening on a lucky break Ford's character is handy enough to (with a little help from Anne's) get the plane in the air again--but no, no one can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and build a shopping mall," even as films and TV shows and stories written by and for the stupid ceaselessly make us think they can, partly out of the groveling elite worship to which the arts (and artists) have depressingly always tended, partly because of the ceaseless exhortations to and promulgation of fantasies of self-sufficient ultra-individualism summed up in the name "Robinson Crusoe," partly because of wildly outdated notions about how things get made and great things happen in the world--the last, of course, absolutely unhelped by that divide between the "two cultures" that so many would like to pretend does not exist.

Remembering Half Moon Street--and David Rothkopf's Superclass

The 1986 film Half Moon Street was a commercial and critical flop when it came out, and seems to have been pretty well forgotten since, never being "rediscovered," acquiring a cult following, or enjoying renewed attention on any other basis. And I know of no reason why it should be otherwise. Still, I can say that a particular bit of dinner-party dialogue in the film did get my attention and has stayed with me since. Specifically a character named Hugo Van Arkady (so IMDB informs me) remarked that the actual population of the world, which had then been approaching five billion, was actually just five thousand. As his dining companions wondered at his reasoning he filled in the picture by giving the "real" populations of different countries. Billion-person China had only two people in it, Britain forty-five, Germany sixty.

Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?

Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.

Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.

Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.

Of "Conspicuous Callousness"

So far as I can tell "conspicuous callousness" is not a usage--but it should be.

Of course, that claim raises the question--just what do I mean by "conspicuous callousness?"

Let us take it one word at a time.

The term "conspicuous" is an adjective indicating that something stands out so as to draw attention, with its use in the term "conspicuous consumption" telling. Such consumption--like someone's driving a flashy sports car when a much cheaper, lower-maintenance car would be a far more practical way of getting around--is typically on some level intended to draw such notice.

"Callousness" denotes, in the words of Oxford Languages, "insensitive or cruel disregard."

Conspicuous callousness is a display of callousness in a conspicuous, meant-to-be seen way.

Consider, for example, a person who sees a homeless person holding out a cup for spare change--and, even though they have change with which they can well afford to part, pretends not to see them. One may say that they are behaving callously. But in pretending they do not see the homeless person are attempting to not make their callousness evident.

By contrast, someone who yells at the homeless person "Get a job!" is manifesting their callousness in a way calling attention to it. This is all the more in as there is no practical advantage in their doing so (just as there is none in that flashy sports car), only whatever psychological satisfaction they get from being seen inflicting verbal abuse on someone vulnerable to it, by the victim and perhaps others.

Given that satisfaction's being the motive it seems to warrant a word. At the very least in acting this way the person displaying this callousness revels in a sense of their power in relation to that other person. Conspicuous callousness says "I don't have to care what you think, because you simply cannot do anything to me," such that they can rub in the other person's face a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and respect for them--and are doing it simply because they can.

Conspicuous callousness is, of course, vile--and ever-present. Indeed, the Internet is awash in it--so much so that it can seem mainly a vehicle for expressing that one exceedingly mean sentiment, the web access-enjoying scum of the Earth using that access to scream their callousness at the heart of the world. And we are all the worse off for it.

Of the Public Faux Pas

Even the most intelligent, educated and articulate will misspeak sometimes. If they are speaking constantly they will do so that much more often--and if their words are accorded continual publicity they will publicly embarrass themselves again and again (the more in as so many out there will simply have it in for such a figure, and so put the worst possible spin on anything they say or do).

Most of those in public life cannot be described as among "the most intelligent, educated and articulate." Most of them can be described as the extreme opposite. And they especially make sure that their every utterance is highly public--because, on top of their aforementioned failings, the demands of publicity seem to them to require it; because privilege and power and acclaim bring the idiot out in people; because show business, whether the real kind or the kind for "ugly people", is a horrifying hellscape of unhinged narcissists.

I am sure someone warned them at some point. But because of all of the above the warning simply did not matter, helping produce the cultural cesspool we inhabit today.

What Would Brecht's Worker Who Reads Make of the Received History of Science and Invention?

In Bertolt Brecht's famous poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" his worker wondered at what he read of the "great men" of the past and the way in which they seemed to be singlehandedly credited with enormous feats of military conquest and monumental construction. (Reading about Thebes of the seven gates, he wondered, "Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock" out of which it was built by themselves?) Suspecting others were involved he wondered at the completeness of their absence from the record, the way the most elementary things about them were simply unmentioned (like where the masons who actually built the Great Wall of China went after the job was done).

Of course, we all know that, however much elites are addicted to the theory that everything supposedly great and grand is due to the Great Men and these only--the Atlas who might one day decide to teach their ungrateful inferiors a lesson and shrug--the idea of the kings hauling up the lumps of rock themselves is of course an absurdity, that the feats the Worker reads of are the accomplishments of tens and hundreds of thousands, drawing on the resources of whole countries.

One might say something of the kind if one looks away from conquest and building to science and invention. The conventional thinking about such matters is, of course, exceedingly individualistic--but as a more nuanced view of the matter shows, as with Robert Merton's examination of the sociology of science, the reality is more complex. The scientific endeavor is cumulative, building on what came before, and cooperative, as even the scientist or inventor in their own lab is apt to have their helpers, enough of them to make one wonder just who contributed what, exactly. People can and do make individual contributions, of course, some minute, some not, but scientific and technological revolutions are far from being wholly attributable to single individual "geniuses" (even before one gets to the very hard detective work of actually apportioning credit).

A culture given over to an individualistic elitism, of course, tends to downplay this--but in the end it really is the case that much of the discussion of the history of science has traditionally been no less absurd in its explanations than a historian making it seem as if Caesar conquered Gaul without even having a cook with him.

The May 2024 North American Box Office

We all expected the box office during May to be lackluster--but I think it worth considering just how very, very badly it went for Hollywood.

Simply put, ticket sales during that month came to $550 million. Far from being, as usual, the month in which a sluggish box office really took off this was actually over a quarter down from the March box office this year (when Dune, along with Ghostbusters and Godzilla, helped sell $750 million worth of tickets).

In real, inflation-adjusted terms the May 2024 box office was about a third (31 percent) down from the disappointing box office we had in May as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened below expectations, and Fast and Furious 10 and the live-action version of The Little Mermaid both underperformed.

With the comparison with the May 2023 box office so poor it is predictable that it, again, represents a really great drop from the 2015-2019 average--of 57 percent. That is to say that in May the box office, after inflation, took in only two-fifths as much as it did in those pre-pandemic years (when, in April 2024 prices, $1.27 billion was the average).

Even by the standard of the past year as a whole, and of 2024 thus far (the first four months of which were down just 21 percent from the same period in the prior year), this is bad.

In fairness, one can point out that this May suffered from an unusually weak release slate --that a lot of big movies were indeed bumped to later dates, and that business should pick up as soon as next week with Inside Out 2, etc.. Still, a month with Planet of the Apes and Mad Max would ordinarily have been expected to do better than this, while The Fall Guy's being shifted to the first weekend of the month made no sense in the absence of some expectation of the movie benefiting from it, and that indeed their failure had much to do with this weakness. (Certainly The Fall Guy and Mad Max performed below the not-very-high expectations set for them, while Planet of the Apes did only a little better than the low expectations box office-watchers had for it, as, a near-month into release, it crawls toward the $150 million mark it will not surpass by very much to be a low point for the new iteration of the franchise.)

No, there is no good news here--and those hoping for even the limited turnaround that is the best anyone can reasonably hope for in the circumstances is well-advised to look ahead rather than backward.