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say something about the contrast between "Europe" and "America" tend to fall back on certain clichés, either badly outdated or baseless to begin with.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.
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. (That way it's no Star Wars, 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.
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. (That way it's no Star Wars, 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 $200 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $120 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 $450 million. Alternatively were one to take the $200 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 $500 million, some $50 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $50 million the other way as well we get $550 million.
A gross in the range of $450-$550 million (which is higher than David Gross is picturing it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie at least 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 a half billion. By contrast the sequel will 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.
Still, consider the situation as it stands.
Seventeen days into Gladiator II's international release the movie has collected $200 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $120 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 $450 million. Alternatively were one to take the $200 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 $500 million, some $50 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $50 million the other way as well we get $550 million.
A gross in the range of $450-$550 million (which is higher than David Gross is picturing it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie at least 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 a half billion. By contrast the sequel will 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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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