Those who have actually read the work of theoreticians of the information age like Alvin Toffler may remember its view that the centralized, sovereign, nation-state was an entity befitting the supposedly passing industrial age, which would prove itself exceedingly ineffective and irrelevant in the information age, a lumbering dinosaur (with the dinosaur the more lumbering the bigger it is), as other actors took a larger part in political, economic, social life--international organizations, and non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations to name the more obvious. Indeed, those who trafficked in such visions commonly expected that many of the states of the time, including such developed, affluent, stable Western states like Canada, Britain, Spain and Italy would be torn into smaller pieces by secessionist movements, and the stripped-down city-state would make something of a comeback as thriving urban centers relieved themselves of burdensome ties to their hinterlands, giving us a very different-looking map of the world, with the list of nation-states it presents drastically increased, perhaps risen to four hundred, perhaps much more than that.
Of course, this is not what happened--and in spite of an era of endless crisis managed with extreme incompetence by those who hold power. Rather what has been at issue has been a profound overestimation of the information age's "dynamism," and the associated fantasy that location, natural resources, territorial control, scale, were ceasing to matter in a world where the small but agile, and the flexibly networked, were fitter to survive than old-fashioned government, a belief that was partly a matter of technological hype, but also, given the trend of that theorizing, the libertarian contempt for government.
After all, consider what has been, rather than what the proponents of the information age imagined would be. As far as international organizations go perhaps none has been more powerful than the European Union--and its limitations have only grown more evident all the time. While on paper it represented an economic space of comparable affluence to the United States, and had infringed on the sovereignty of its member states in ways that have made it deeply popular, actually faced with financial crisis in 2007 that entity, absolutely unequipped to rescue its portion of the trans-Atlantic banking system, had no choice but to turn to America's Federal Reserve for $10 trillion in short-term loans. Meanwhile those who imagined that the organizations of "civil society" could replace the welfare state or the regulatory state have learned otherwise in an era of mounting social and ecological stress, such that those who are serious about redressing such problems, contrary to the foolishness of Third Way-peddling pseudo-social democrats and corporate claqueurs such as Thomas Friedman, still look to the public sector for solution precisely because it has means, and because it can command. And multinational corporations show themselves at every turn hopelessly dependent on not just the public goods but the outright subsidies supplied by those states out of other people's taxes, which they could not afford themselves--as that aforementioned financial crisis reminded everyone--while the mania for privatization has proven to have distinct limits. (Given the choice between paying a private military company to fight the next oil war, or having the tax-paying working people living under friendly governments foot the bill, which do you think the occupants of the executive suites prefer? Meanwhile it's no coincidence that much as it may have outsourced America still has its Defense Department, rather than "Admiral Bob's Global Defense.")
Indeed, consider those predictions of Canadian, British, Spanish, Italian breakup. All four of those countries remain entirely intact, the splitting away of Quebec and Scotland and Catalonia and Padania seeming no closer now than it did a half century ago--with the same going for the rest of the world, with the anomaly of Eastern Europe notably connected with the nomenklatura of its governments having decided to dismantle their own countries for the sake of stealing whatever they could from their publics (very successfully), with the process pretty much running its course in a not quite two year period extending over 1991-1992. Contrary to what many a Western analyst predicted over the following decades, no Russian break-up followed the Soviet one--all as the list of genuine city-states has not grown at all. Back then we had Singapore and Monaco and Vatican City, and now we still have . . . Singapore and Monaco and Vatican City.
The result is that with only a very few marginal exceptions (East Timor, the last act of the Yugoslav break-up in the independence of Montenegro, the formation of South Sudan) the map of the world in 2025 looks pretty much like the one of 1995, with this, again, less different from that of 1975 than the hawkers of information age had many anticipating, which throws into sharp relief just how much its champions got wrong. Meanwhile, if the world order appears anything but stable it is not because of signs of late realization of what such theorists predicted, but because of the old industrial age rules, and what they mean for the largest and most powerful states especially. Motivated by the same old concerns of elites for their narrow economic interests, and the power of the states on which they rely, pursuing their "national interests" in a world where location, resources, control, scale still matter, they are not above fighting to redivide the world in ways which would change the lines on the maps--and as the horrors in Ukraine show, doing it through the same old industrial warfare that fashionable military theoreticians not so long ago told us had become passé.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Kevin Phillips on Financialization and Decline
I suppose that few these days encounter theorizing the "rise and fall of great economic powers" outside a university program or contact with the associated scholarship but it was more common to do so once upon a time. Thus did Paul Kennedy become a bestseller with a book about that subject in the late '80s, while in the earlier part of the century Republican strategist Kevin Phillips brought such arguments to that part of the popular audience that reads really serious books on public affairs (rather than just elite gossip and the rants of their preferred flavor of Talking Head), arguing for a particular variation on the theory (tying the great power cycle to particular energy regimes that had seen the Netherlands and Britain rise and fall in the past, as an oil-addicted America was at risk of doing) in 2006's American Theocracy. Two years later he related what he had written to the then just emerging crisis spawned by the combination of deregulation, loose monetary policy and financial "innovation" within an increasingly internationalized financial system in an ever-more financialized economy in Bad Money.
In an interview promoting the book Phillips said that Bad Money was his last about the political and financial affairs of the present, and that in his revulsion at the present state of things he was relieved to turn back from that to (I quote from memory, but here it goes) "People who deserve to be in the history of books," in contrast with the present-day elite that "deserve to be nothing." Hearing that I thought Phillips was sincere but probably wrong--that he would go back to writing about the present again soon enough. However, it turned out that this was exactly what he did. If the gravity of the crisis proved such that Bad Money got an update his next book was 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, while so far as I can tell he did not produce another book directly addressing contemporary affairs in the decade between that book's release and his passing in 2023. Still, it is all too easy to imagine what Phillips would have had to say about the post-crisis, Great Recession-mired, America in which the development of everything he had denounced so forcefully for so long continued unabated.
In an interview promoting the book Phillips said that Bad Money was his last about the political and financial affairs of the present, and that in his revulsion at the present state of things he was relieved to turn back from that to (I quote from memory, but here it goes) "People who deserve to be in the history of books," in contrast with the present-day elite that "deserve to be nothing." Hearing that I thought Phillips was sincere but probably wrong--that he would go back to writing about the present again soon enough. However, it turned out that this was exactly what he did. If the gravity of the crisis proved such that Bad Money got an update his next book was 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, while so far as I can tell he did not produce another book directly addressing contemporary affairs in the decade between that book's release and his passing in 2023. Still, it is all too easy to imagine what Phillips would have had to say about the post-crisis, Great Recession-mired, America in which the development of everything he had denounced so forcefully for so long continued unabated.
Of Finance and Decadence
I remember decades ago first encountering the cyclical theories of the rise and fall of great economic powers--the patterns those theories' proponents held to be evident across the history of such different polities as the city-state and thalassocracy of Venice, the Netherlands in its Golden Age, the United Kingdom in more recent times.
One development oft-noted as part of the cycle was how these powers' once-flourishing industrial capitalism became increasingly "financialized."
Those discussing the matter were stronger on registering the tendency than explaining it, but one thought I have had has been that industrial success provided both the capital and the need for a sophisticated financial system. Afterward the reality that real-world value creation with all its physical and temporal limitations cannot compete with "making money from money" from the standpoint of ease, speed, scale of gains (at least, until those gains turn out to be just so much paper); and the fact that the way of life of an aristocratic rentier is so much more alluring than the life of a bourgeois industrialist or merchant; meant that financial activity had a way of coming to prevail over industry in business, in policymaking, in the economy as a whole. It also seems plausible that the process was helped along by how, as conditions change, and the likely very specific advantages that made a country a great industrial success vanish, industrial success gives way to stagnation—for even if one is not prepared to go so far as to acknowledge the tendency of profit rates to fall that goes back at least to Adam Smith in the classical economics tradition, the fact remains that industrial success inspires imitation and even counter-measures, as technology and other circumstances change, so that old titans inevitably, and usually much sooner than they expect, find themselves at a disadvantage. (Thus did the Dutch United Provinces create the world's first modern economy, but then a bigger United Kingdom unburdened by the need to defend a land border against a hostile military superpower, with better access to the world's oceans, and massive surface deposits of bituminous coal--and as a result of its already exploiting them, the most developed transport infrastructure to be seen in the region--in an era in which the steam engine was becoming really useful increasingly have the advantage.)
On the social and cultural side the process also has its implications. Particularly obvious is that you get a bigger gap between poor and rich in a financialized economy--because where industry means high-productivity jobs for the many, finance means vast paper profits (and whatever it is that paper wealth's holders can cash them in for) for a few, the more in as this usually means not producing but taking what others have produced. Meanwhile those who have wealth become less inclined to any "enlightened" conception of their self-interest, showing themselves less far-seeing, as they become more indulgent of themselves and less ready to make any concessions toward the have-nots as in their ever greater sense of entitlement they contrive to lay their hands on ever more by any means necessary, and then show off what they have--making the "Puritan" virtues of "hard work," delayed gratification, restraint all look ever more like sanctimonious claptrap in circumstances where the winners are playing by very different rules, and life that much harder for those who would refuse those different rules. Indeed, there is a sense of degeneracy in the air that, in the Victorian version of all this, had "race theorists" claiming to detect an atavistic resurgence of the facial features of cave-men in slum-dwellers, and the habits of the worst of slum-dwellers in the lifeways of mansion-dwellers. (To put what one noted observer of the time into more contemporary reference, in its way of getting ahold of money and its pleasures alike the financial elite is nothing but a pack of Jerry Springer guests up on society's commanding heights, as another observer notably sensitive to the contrast between industrial and financial capitalism was moved to write of the survivals of barbarism in "the leisure class.") Reflecting this, while the great realist Balzac made his enduring mark on world literature portraying such a cultural moment (the highly financialized world of the Orleanist monarchy), it seems more characteristic of its mood that it throws up figures like a Baudelaire. Naturally at such times there is a widespread sense that "This can't go on"--but go on is what it often does for a long time, until it can't, by which time everyone caught up in this is really, really in trouble.
One development oft-noted as part of the cycle was how these powers' once-flourishing industrial capitalism became increasingly "financialized."
Those discussing the matter were stronger on registering the tendency than explaining it, but one thought I have had has been that industrial success provided both the capital and the need for a sophisticated financial system. Afterward the reality that real-world value creation with all its physical and temporal limitations cannot compete with "making money from money" from the standpoint of ease, speed, scale of gains (at least, until those gains turn out to be just so much paper); and the fact that the way of life of an aristocratic rentier is so much more alluring than the life of a bourgeois industrialist or merchant; meant that financial activity had a way of coming to prevail over industry in business, in policymaking, in the economy as a whole. It also seems plausible that the process was helped along by how, as conditions change, and the likely very specific advantages that made a country a great industrial success vanish, industrial success gives way to stagnation—for even if one is not prepared to go so far as to acknowledge the tendency of profit rates to fall that goes back at least to Adam Smith in the classical economics tradition, the fact remains that industrial success inspires imitation and even counter-measures, as technology and other circumstances change, so that old titans inevitably, and usually much sooner than they expect, find themselves at a disadvantage. (Thus did the Dutch United Provinces create the world's first modern economy, but then a bigger United Kingdom unburdened by the need to defend a land border against a hostile military superpower, with better access to the world's oceans, and massive surface deposits of bituminous coal--and as a result of its already exploiting them, the most developed transport infrastructure to be seen in the region--in an era in which the steam engine was becoming really useful increasingly have the advantage.)
On the social and cultural side the process also has its implications. Particularly obvious is that you get a bigger gap between poor and rich in a financialized economy--because where industry means high-productivity jobs for the many, finance means vast paper profits (and whatever it is that paper wealth's holders can cash them in for) for a few, the more in as this usually means not producing but taking what others have produced. Meanwhile those who have wealth become less inclined to any "enlightened" conception of their self-interest, showing themselves less far-seeing, as they become more indulgent of themselves and less ready to make any concessions toward the have-nots as in their ever greater sense of entitlement they contrive to lay their hands on ever more by any means necessary, and then show off what they have--making the "Puritan" virtues of "hard work," delayed gratification, restraint all look ever more like sanctimonious claptrap in circumstances where the winners are playing by very different rules, and life that much harder for those who would refuse those different rules. Indeed, there is a sense of degeneracy in the air that, in the Victorian version of all this, had "race theorists" claiming to detect an atavistic resurgence of the facial features of cave-men in slum-dwellers, and the habits of the worst of slum-dwellers in the lifeways of mansion-dwellers. (To put what one noted observer of the time into more contemporary reference, in its way of getting ahold of money and its pleasures alike the financial elite is nothing but a pack of Jerry Springer guests up on society's commanding heights, as another observer notably sensitive to the contrast between industrial and financial capitalism was moved to write of the survivals of barbarism in "the leisure class.") Reflecting this, while the great realist Balzac made his enduring mark on world literature portraying such a cultural moment (the highly financialized world of the Orleanist monarchy), it seems more characteristic of its mood that it throws up figures like a Baudelaire. Naturally at such times there is a widespread sense that "This can't go on"--but go on is what it often does for a long time, until it can't, by which time everyone caught up in this is really, really in trouble.
What the CPI Doesn't Tell Us
The sorts of economic commentators who are given the kind of media platform from which one can reach an appreciable audience are famously averse to any sort of long-term thinking about how the public is doing. They think in terms of quarters, not of decades--with the result that they tend to ignore long-term trends that are highly inconvenient from the standpoint of those who prefer to paint rosy pictures of how the economy has been doing.
Consider, for example, what we find when we use that most common inflationary measure, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). We see that if, when adjusted using the CPI, the median male income has had its ups and downs over the last half century or so, it has not risen appreciably--every rise followed by an economic downturn that knocks it back down so that any further "rises" are just a matter of years-long recovery, with wages likely to be barely back up to what they had been before the next "recession" knocks that income back down again, again and again.
Of course, this truth being inconvenient many a champion of the status quo dismisses the use of the CPI as producing an overly "negative" picture, "exaggerating" inflation, and so obscuring real gains, all while they suggest that many a gain may simply not register in the numbers. "What about your cell phone?" they say. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? You didn't have that before so clearly you're better off and should shut up now, pleb."
Alas, there is a stronger case that, far from exaggerating working people's problems, the CPI itself produces an overly rosy picture of the situation. Perhaps the full value yielded by our electronics is not registered in the economic statistics (though I think such claims at best exaggerated), but there is also a vast range of other goods about which the same cannot be said. What does it actually cost to buy a home and keep it (paying the tax and maintenance and insurance), for example, or alternatively, rent a home--especially one in which parents can raise children decently, within tolerable commuting distance of a job that can pay for such a home? What does it cost to own and operate the vehicle they will use to make that commute (especially in the absence of a viable alternative in the form of public transport), or pay for health care, or cover the cost of supporting themselves without a collapse in their standard of living when they are too old to work at anything like their current job with its demands, or pay for a college education for their children? When we actually dig into these matters what we find is that, far from holding steady, the purchasing power of the median income has halved or worse with respect to every one of these essentials over the past half century--the public has got significantly poorer when its situation is measured by the only yardstick that counts in the end, its ability to buy the goods it needs to live, in a way the CPI grossly underrates.
Consider, for example, what we find when we use that most common inflationary measure, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). We see that if, when adjusted using the CPI, the median male income has had its ups and downs over the last half century or so, it has not risen appreciably--every rise followed by an economic downturn that knocks it back down so that any further "rises" are just a matter of years-long recovery, with wages likely to be barely back up to what they had been before the next "recession" knocks that income back down again, again and again.
Of course, this truth being inconvenient many a champion of the status quo dismisses the use of the CPI as producing an overly "negative" picture, "exaggerating" inflation, and so obscuring real gains, all while they suggest that many a gain may simply not register in the numbers. "What about your cell phone?" they say. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? You didn't have that before so clearly you're better off and should shut up now, pleb."
Alas, there is a stronger case that, far from exaggerating working people's problems, the CPI itself produces an overly rosy picture of the situation. Perhaps the full value yielded by our electronics is not registered in the economic statistics (though I think such claims at best exaggerated), but there is also a vast range of other goods about which the same cannot be said. What does it actually cost to buy a home and keep it (paying the tax and maintenance and insurance), for example, or alternatively, rent a home--especially one in which parents can raise children decently, within tolerable commuting distance of a job that can pay for such a home? What does it cost to own and operate the vehicle they will use to make that commute (especially in the absence of a viable alternative in the form of public transport), or pay for health care, or cover the cost of supporting themselves without a collapse in their standard of living when they are too old to work at anything like their current job with its demands, or pay for a college education for their children? When we actually dig into these matters what we find is that, far from holding steady, the purchasing power of the median income has halved or worse with respect to every one of these essentials over the past half century--the public has got significantly poorer when its situation is measured by the only yardstick that counts in the end, its ability to buy the goods it needs to live, in a way the CPI grossly underrates.
What the Complaints About How Hard it is to be Famous are Really About
It is a commonplace that the famous complain (ceaselessly) about the downsides to being famous. How complete strangers may be inappropriately familiar with them because they deludedly think they know them, even though they don't. How googling themselves they will find people saying nasty things. And so on and so forth.
The complainants often being unintelligent, inarticulate, unreflective, they tend not to explain themselves very well. The complainant isn't complaining about fame, really. What discomfits them is fame on very particular terms. What they really complain about is being famous enough for others to know them, but not having enough power to not have to care what those others think, so that they suffer a measure of exposure for a measure of privilege, but do not feel really and truly secure and protected and comfortable.
To cite an easy Hollywood example, studio heads are famous--in cases, famous enough to have their doings well-reported in the press, their faces known (and even get badmouthed a great deal online as they outrage fandom again and again and again and again and again and again as they crassly, grubbily, exploit franchises of which they know and understand absolutely nothing). But one doesn't often see them complain about "being famous." It's the actors who complain--because they are more visible, and less protected, than the Suits in the executive suites, a lot less sufficing to destroy their careers than the Chief Executive Officers whose principal "skill set" is losing their companies' money, then claiming nine figure compensation packages for having done their shareholders the favor.
The complainants often being unintelligent, inarticulate, unreflective, they tend not to explain themselves very well. The complainant isn't complaining about fame, really. What discomfits them is fame on very particular terms. What they really complain about is being famous enough for others to know them, but not having enough power to not have to care what those others think, so that they suffer a measure of exposure for a measure of privilege, but do not feel really and truly secure and protected and comfortable.
To cite an easy Hollywood example, studio heads are famous--in cases, famous enough to have their doings well-reported in the press, their faces known (and even get badmouthed a great deal online as they outrage fandom again and again and again and again and again and again as they crassly, grubbily, exploit franchises of which they know and understand absolutely nothing). But one doesn't often see them complain about "being famous." It's the actors who complain--because they are more visible, and less protected, than the Suits in the executive suites, a lot less sufficing to destroy their careers than the Chief Executive Officers whose principal "skill set" is losing their companies' money, then claiming nine figure compensation packages for having done their shareholders the favor.
Why People Can't Stand Hearing Celebrities Whine About "How Hard it is to be Famous"
It is a commonplace that celebrities often complain about the less attractive aspects of being famous (or rather, fame on the very particular terms on which they enjoy it).
It is also a commonplace that many have little patience for the complaints.
Some of the reasons for this impatience are the same as the impatience that many display with complaint generally, in all their ignobility--the idiot bully's instinctive pouncing on any utterance of anything that smells of dissent to beat it down, the sneering of those who know not morality from moralizing, the perverse thrill some derive from displaying callousness toward others.
Such human refuse are not rare. Indeed, they seem to comprise most of the pool of people you'll meet online. However, there seem to me to be reasons for the intolerance more specific to this situation. There is the reality that the complainants often are clueless narcissists oblivious to how many in the world have it far worse than they do; how the complainant is so often self-important rather than really important; how easily they could just walk away from being famous if they find it so unbearable, in a way that people generally cannot walk away from the vast majority of things that are making the miserable miserable.
There is also the fact that in whining about being famous they are apt to crap all over the desperate dreams of nobodies who believe their sole hope of a life worth living is to become famous themselves--without which, what is left to them?
And there is, of course, the fact that the complaints are apt to be doing all this in the course of cashing in on the very fame they complain so much about; whining about how hard it is to be famous in a ghostwritten book they are selling on the basis of their fame, from which they hope to realize more money than their readers are likely ever to see in their lifetime (not least, should they actually write a book themselves).
It is also a commonplace that many have little patience for the complaints.
Some of the reasons for this impatience are the same as the impatience that many display with complaint generally, in all their ignobility--the idiot bully's instinctive pouncing on any utterance of anything that smells of dissent to beat it down, the sneering of those who know not morality from moralizing, the perverse thrill some derive from displaying callousness toward others.
Such human refuse are not rare. Indeed, they seem to comprise most of the pool of people you'll meet online. However, there seem to me to be reasons for the intolerance more specific to this situation. There is the reality that the complainants often are clueless narcissists oblivious to how many in the world have it far worse than they do; how the complainant is so often self-important rather than really important; how easily they could just walk away from being famous if they find it so unbearable, in a way that people generally cannot walk away from the vast majority of things that are making the miserable miserable.
There is also the fact that in whining about being famous they are apt to crap all over the desperate dreams of nobodies who believe their sole hope of a life worth living is to become famous themselves--without which, what is left to them?
And there is, of course, the fact that the complaints are apt to be doing all this in the course of cashing in on the very fame they complain so much about; whining about how hard it is to be famous in a ghostwritten book they are selling on the basis of their fame, from which they hope to realize more money than their readers are likely ever to see in their lifetime (not least, should they actually write a book themselves).
Remember Paul Flart?
Back in 2018 an individual working as a security guard in a hospital recorded videos of his flatulations and, using the name "Paul Flart," posted the videos online for six months. At that point Monsieur Flart "went viral" (or so we are told). However, rather than achieving his declared aspiration of "making a living off of farting," he seems to have, besides losing his job as a result of his notoriety, to have subsequently slipped back into obscurity going by how little information has been made publicly available about him since.
Still, if he did not quite achieve his "dream," it seems to me that Paul Flart is nonetheless highly symbolic of the culture we have been living in for at least these past hundred years--this his particular form of the grab after celebrity that, as Upton Sinclair observed a century ago, seems to many of those enduring a working class existence the sole chance for something better (however small that chance).
It especially seems to me symbolic of the Internet--literal flatulence summing up well most of what one finds online, and what the vast majority of web users gravitate toward, helping to make it the intellectual wasteland that it is, as all those who have dared to offer (or seek) anything else in expectation of an audience have learned to their cost and, I do not doubt, frequent embitterment.
Still, if he did not quite achieve his "dream," it seems to me that Paul Flart is nonetheless highly symbolic of the culture we have been living in for at least these past hundred years--this his particular form of the grab after celebrity that, as Upton Sinclair observed a century ago, seems to many of those enduring a working class existence the sole chance for something better (however small that chance).
It especially seems to me symbolic of the Internet--literal flatulence summing up well most of what one finds online, and what the vast majority of web users gravitate toward, helping to make it the intellectual wasteland that it is, as all those who have dared to offer (or seek) anything else in expectation of an audience have learned to their cost and, I do not doubt, frequent embitterment.
Is There a War on Independent Bloggers?
Far from being a situation where those who "work hard" may reasonably hope to make steady progress, those who have been "independent" bloggers for very long are likely to have experienced repeated setbacks as, due to reasons of which they have been told nothing, the traffic they laboriously built up collapsed to nearly nothing--and had to be laboriously built back up again. Thus they never get ahead, while the reason for their not getting ahead seems to them to be their being in the Kafkaesque situation of having been judged guilty of crimes they have not been told under laws of which they know nothing except that they are changing all the time, as indeed those who have so judged them insist that it is right they be told nothing. If we explained how the algorithms work, the Search Engine Overlords say, people would actually know what they would get punished for and so abide by the rules in order to avoid punishment--and we can't have that, can we? It would be totally at odds "with giving users the best possible experience!"
Going by what they actually see online it would seem to them that to the Search Engine Overlords "best possible experience" means the constant infliction on the web user of the sites of parasitical scum trying to shake them down for their money, clickbait trash, and even keyword-filled slop of exactly the kind that their highly touted algorithms are supposed to keep from offending the Internet user's sight. Indeed, those told that the search engines punish "low quality content" and self-promotion they found that there is a double-standard at work--in which the search engines are catering to the well-funded and "brand-named" as against the rest, whom the executives of the Search Engine Overlords themselves openly compare with the contents of a cesspool, with this extending to indulging the low-quality content and self-promotion of the Big Sites, not least in their outright selling visibility (advertising, after all, the revenue stream for the search engine owner). This is complimented and reinforced by the pseudo-good citizenship of the responsible executives who insist that they seek to promote "authoritative" sources and guard against the much-derided "fake news"--with, of course, "authority" equated with the well-funded and brand-named, and "fake news" equated not with the lies that a media machine effectively the propaganda arm of the powerful has spewed ceaselessly through its disgraceful history, but those outside that lie-spewing machinery, all as the standard by which they judge the "fakeness" of the news deriving from that source is not that of "realfact," but of "goodfact," as determined by masters whose brazenness in exercising their power makes a mockery of Progressive-era fantasies that "professionalism" would set everything wrong with the media aright.
Still, if it has been established over and over again for many years that the web's dynamics, and those of the media machine, have both left the independent bloggers hopelessly outmatched in the competition for eyeballs that we call the "attention economy"--and to the extent that they have managed to get noticed at all been so to the advantage of the Established (in spite of the right's complaints it is the left that suffered worst from how the web and the media work, from the Big Techs censorship-that-does-not-speak-its-name)--the fact remains that even if they have greatly favored them, those in power can never be comfortable with the fact of a mass of people presenting their opinions to the world at large without their communiques or their persons having been vetted by their Ministry of Truth because it is simply too large and unruly a thing to ever be a safely integrated, controlled and reliable part of the Media Ecosystem as they would like it to be, and so an uncertainty and an annoyance they need no longer tolerate, to go by their actions as they set about making the web approximate their ideal for that ecosystem (pretty much the online equivalent of '90s animation classic Phantom 2040's Maximum Era).
In the circumstances it does not strike me as being at all an exaggeration to speak of the mainstream media, Big Tech and that Establishment opinion which views the public's speaking up and finding any sort of audience with extreme distaste generally as waging a war against independent bloggers, and indeed having done so for many, many years now--and which should also be regarded as a war on free speech, the real war on free speech, and a war on democracy, long-escalating and increasingly making headway such that, going by what many say of recent "Helpful Content" updates, there now seem to be grounds to wonder if those fighting the war on bloggers are not now approaching their clearly yearned-for Victory-Bloggers Day.
Back when the vaporware hustlers, sci-fi power fantasy addicts and aspiring Führers of Silicon Valley were clumsily concealing their true natures behind their crudely made and ill-fitting countercultural masks, and the news and entertainment media performing their role of obediently repeating the goodfacts of the powerful to a public for whose intelligence it has never shown anything but the most acid contempt, the promise of a free and open and democratic Internet made for not just a marketing tool, but good public relations (as seen in those ridiculous commercials where Big Telecom slapped contemporary-sounding covers of '60s hits by bands like The Rascals onto "power-to-the-people"-themed commercials pushing their crappy services onto the consumer).
Nowhere near so many bought this garbage as some would have us believe, of course. Certainly any leftist worthy of the label, all too aware of the hard realities of "inequalities in resources, infrastructure, class power" between groups, was unlikely to be taken in, while even so "safe" a figure as Thomas Frank had his first popular success with a book tearing apart the stupidities of "market populism." Still, the mainstream being what it is the propaganda for those stupidities was everywhere, as the media that reached a broad audience on the whole treated them with great deference for many, many years.
All of that has since palled, and the fact that those who championed that fatuous cyber-utopianism when it was useful have long since seen it as being in their interest to turn against it in the way described here, making sure that the really effective Means of Communication are in what those in power would consider to be safe hands as the public listens and obeys rather than talks back. And so just as elites talk up democracy when convenient (as a club with which to beat regimes they disapprove for other reasons) they spend their time and energy trying to defeat democracy in actuality, as seen in how where they cannot wholly deny the public the franchise they contrive ways to nullify it, so that just as you have your vote but also find that "nothing ever changes," you will still have your little blog--but no one will ever see it, as in the process whatever measure of democracy we had online fast vanishes.
Going by what they actually see online it would seem to them that to the Search Engine Overlords "best possible experience" means the constant infliction on the web user of the sites of parasitical scum trying to shake them down for their money, clickbait trash, and even keyword-filled slop of exactly the kind that their highly touted algorithms are supposed to keep from offending the Internet user's sight. Indeed, those told that the search engines punish "low quality content" and self-promotion they found that there is a double-standard at work--in which the search engines are catering to the well-funded and "brand-named" as against the rest, whom the executives of the Search Engine Overlords themselves openly compare with the contents of a cesspool, with this extending to indulging the low-quality content and self-promotion of the Big Sites, not least in their outright selling visibility (advertising, after all, the revenue stream for the search engine owner). This is complimented and reinforced by the pseudo-good citizenship of the responsible executives who insist that they seek to promote "authoritative" sources and guard against the much-derided "fake news"--with, of course, "authority" equated with the well-funded and brand-named, and "fake news" equated not with the lies that a media machine effectively the propaganda arm of the powerful has spewed ceaselessly through its disgraceful history, but those outside that lie-spewing machinery, all as the standard by which they judge the "fakeness" of the news deriving from that source is not that of "realfact," but of "goodfact," as determined by masters whose brazenness in exercising their power makes a mockery of Progressive-era fantasies that "professionalism" would set everything wrong with the media aright.
Still, if it has been established over and over again for many years that the web's dynamics, and those of the media machine, have both left the independent bloggers hopelessly outmatched in the competition for eyeballs that we call the "attention economy"--and to the extent that they have managed to get noticed at all been so to the advantage of the Established (in spite of the right's complaints it is the left that suffered worst from how the web and the media work, from the Big Techs censorship-that-does-not-speak-its-name)--the fact remains that even if they have greatly favored them, those in power can never be comfortable with the fact of a mass of people presenting their opinions to the world at large without their communiques or their persons having been vetted by their Ministry of Truth because it is simply too large and unruly a thing to ever be a safely integrated, controlled and reliable part of the Media Ecosystem as they would like it to be, and so an uncertainty and an annoyance they need no longer tolerate, to go by their actions as they set about making the web approximate their ideal for that ecosystem (pretty much the online equivalent of '90s animation classic Phantom 2040's Maximum Era).
In the circumstances it does not strike me as being at all an exaggeration to speak of the mainstream media, Big Tech and that Establishment opinion which views the public's speaking up and finding any sort of audience with extreme distaste generally as waging a war against independent bloggers, and indeed having done so for many, many years now--and which should also be regarded as a war on free speech, the real war on free speech, and a war on democracy, long-escalating and increasingly making headway such that, going by what many say of recent "Helpful Content" updates, there now seem to be grounds to wonder if those fighting the war on bloggers are not now approaching their clearly yearned-for Victory-Bloggers Day.
Back when the vaporware hustlers, sci-fi power fantasy addicts and aspiring Führers of Silicon Valley were clumsily concealing their true natures behind their crudely made and ill-fitting countercultural masks, and the news and entertainment media performing their role of obediently repeating the goodfacts of the powerful to a public for whose intelligence it has never shown anything but the most acid contempt, the promise of a free and open and democratic Internet made for not just a marketing tool, but good public relations (as seen in those ridiculous commercials where Big Telecom slapped contemporary-sounding covers of '60s hits by bands like The Rascals onto "power-to-the-people"-themed commercials pushing their crappy services onto the consumer).
Nowhere near so many bought this garbage as some would have us believe, of course. Certainly any leftist worthy of the label, all too aware of the hard realities of "inequalities in resources, infrastructure, class power" between groups, was unlikely to be taken in, while even so "safe" a figure as Thomas Frank had his first popular success with a book tearing apart the stupidities of "market populism." Still, the mainstream being what it is the propaganda for those stupidities was everywhere, as the media that reached a broad audience on the whole treated them with great deference for many, many years.
All of that has since palled, and the fact that those who championed that fatuous cyber-utopianism when it was useful have long since seen it as being in their interest to turn against it in the way described here, making sure that the really effective Means of Communication are in what those in power would consider to be safe hands as the public listens and obeys rather than talks back. And so just as elites talk up democracy when convenient (as a club with which to beat regimes they disapprove for other reasons) they spend their time and energy trying to defeat democracy in actuality, as seen in how where they cannot wholly deny the public the franchise they contrive ways to nullify it, so that just as you have your vote but also find that "nothing ever changes," you will still have your little blog--but no one will ever see it, as in the process whatever measure of democracy we had online fast vanishes.
If the Information Age Never Happened, Where Does That Leave Us?
While few remember this today--at least in part, I suspect, because many prefer that it not be remembered--the "information age" was supposed to entail a transformation at the civilizational level comparable with the transition from an agrarian world to an industrialized world. This was supposed to be because of a radical substitution of "INFORMATION!" for every other economic input that was to make said information ever more the foundation of productivity, wealth, power and devalue tangible assets like land, minerals and (unskilled) human labor by comparison--"dematerializing" the economy in a manner that drove Newt Gingrich's "guru" Alvin Toffler and Reagan administration house intellectual George Gilder to, with their coauthors, declare grandiosely in the opening words of their would-be "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" in 1994 that "[t]he central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter" as "[t]he powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things," and make very clear that they have in mind exactly what Toffler predicted ). Exemplary of what this meant in more concrete terms was Toffler's prediction in a book he published just a few years before putting his name to that document (1990's Powershift) that by 2025 the information age civilization would have replaced the industrial--one feature of which would be its having shifted away from industrial-style fossil fuel-burning to running on renewables.
Obviously, this did not happen. If many heeded Toffler, Gilder and company's pontification about the overthrow of matter one would have done better to heed instead what Madonna said about how we were "living in a material world," as we still do now, a fact underlined by how in 2025, far from an energy transition having been completed, it is not even clear that is properly beginning, the makeup of our ever-burgeoning "energy portfolio" having scarcely budged from what it was when Toffler was making his predictions, with this only the most obvious way in which our economy has been very far from "dematerializing" in that way Toffler predicted, and which would have been the case if "matter" and "the brute force of things" had been overthrown. However, it was not so easy for the champions of an imminent information age to back away off of the idea of an information age, hoven, however it originated, given how they had pressed into the service of a particular propaganda responsible for wide public awareness of the concept (thus could Jerry Seinfeld's neighbor Newman threaten him with the fact of his control of "INFORMATION!")--whose propaganda is made all too clear by the mention of such names as Gingrich, Gilder, Reagan. They simply had too much invested in it to let it go even as it lost credibility, with one result their lowering the bar for the "information age" from civilizational transformation to people simply having gadgets that access the Interweb, with, ironically, the economics of those gadgets endlessly reminding us how material their existence is. Thus, in contrast with the Tofflerian vision that had the "INNOVATION!" of the INFORMATION! Age using our ever-growing "knowledge" to find in the abundant and cheap raw material satisfactory or even superior replacements for the rare and costly, we hear ceaselessly of the need of those gadgets for copper and other still more exotic elements, not least those that actually get lumped together in discussion as rare earth minerals. Thus do we hear ceaselessly not of the radical economies we are achieving in the power consumption of these devices, but of the immense "carbon footprint" of what we do with our computers, with some worried that the reliance of artificial intelligence research on copious amounts of electricity dependent on our fossil fuel-guzzling energy base will by itself be enough to derail our extremely belated, glacially slow (and by those interests that have power, ferociously resisted), progress toward a "net zero" world.
Of course, all that being the case raises the question--if the Information Age, the proper Information Age that was the cause of all the fuss, never happened, then where does that leave us? The obvious answer is that when it comes to what really matters we remain squarely in the Industrial Age, with all that Age's ways of operating and thinking, with its constraints and rules and contradictions and problems that we not only failed to transcend because, again, the Information Age never came about, but which have actually worsened since that time when Toffler argued for the Information Age as our way out of them. One may argue why this has been the case--whether there was nothing to the information age but delusion, hucksterism and cynical political gamesmanship from the start, or whether the policies governments followed in the name of the information age were exactly the thing to prevent such an age from ever being properly born by making the envisaged and required radical technological progress less likely. However, whichever explanation we favor, that the Information Age did not happen is indisputable, and acceptance of the fact indispensable to our understanding our present discontents--and considering what options we may have for dealing with the unhappy situation with which they face us.
Obviously, this did not happen. If many heeded Toffler, Gilder and company's pontification about the overthrow of matter one would have done better to heed instead what Madonna said about how we were "living in a material world," as we still do now, a fact underlined by how in 2025, far from an energy transition having been completed, it is not even clear that is properly beginning, the makeup of our ever-burgeoning "energy portfolio" having scarcely budged from what it was when Toffler was making his predictions, with this only the most obvious way in which our economy has been very far from "dematerializing" in that way Toffler predicted, and which would have been the case if "matter" and "the brute force of things" had been overthrown. However, it was not so easy for the champions of an imminent information age to back away off of the idea of an information age, hoven, however it originated, given how they had pressed into the service of a particular propaganda responsible for wide public awareness of the concept (thus could Jerry Seinfeld's neighbor Newman threaten him with the fact of his control of "INFORMATION!")--whose propaganda is made all too clear by the mention of such names as Gingrich, Gilder, Reagan. They simply had too much invested in it to let it go even as it lost credibility, with one result their lowering the bar for the "information age" from civilizational transformation to people simply having gadgets that access the Interweb, with, ironically, the economics of those gadgets endlessly reminding us how material their existence is. Thus, in contrast with the Tofflerian vision that had the "INNOVATION!" of the INFORMATION! Age using our ever-growing "knowledge" to find in the abundant and cheap raw material satisfactory or even superior replacements for the rare and costly, we hear ceaselessly of the need of those gadgets for copper and other still more exotic elements, not least those that actually get lumped together in discussion as rare earth minerals. Thus do we hear ceaselessly not of the radical economies we are achieving in the power consumption of these devices, but of the immense "carbon footprint" of what we do with our computers, with some worried that the reliance of artificial intelligence research on copious amounts of electricity dependent on our fossil fuel-guzzling energy base will by itself be enough to derail our extremely belated, glacially slow (and by those interests that have power, ferociously resisted), progress toward a "net zero" world.
Of course, all that being the case raises the question--if the Information Age, the proper Information Age that was the cause of all the fuss, never happened, then where does that leave us? The obvious answer is that when it comes to what really matters we remain squarely in the Industrial Age, with all that Age's ways of operating and thinking, with its constraints and rules and contradictions and problems that we not only failed to transcend because, again, the Information Age never came about, but which have actually worsened since that time when Toffler argued for the Information Age as our way out of them. One may argue why this has been the case--whether there was nothing to the information age but delusion, hucksterism and cynical political gamesmanship from the start, or whether the policies governments followed in the name of the information age were exactly the thing to prevent such an age from ever being properly born by making the envisaged and required radical technological progress less likely. However, whichever explanation we favor, that the Information Age did not happen is indisputable, and acceptance of the fact indispensable to our understanding our present discontents--and considering what options we may have for dealing with the unhappy situation with which they face us.
Of the Politician's Rhetoric of "Sacrifice"
Political hacks of a certain kind love to speak of "sacrifice"--to tell the public that it must "sacrifice" for this or that end. For balancing the government's books. For the sake of "growth." For the sake of a war.
In doing so they remind us of their essential illiteracy and dishonesty. After all, what does the word sacrifice mean? It means one's giving up something they have that is of value to them--as when people who live by animal husbandry sacrifice the livestock that is the basis and measure of their wealth to propitiate a deity. This means that for us to speak of sacrifice the sacrificer must offer up the thing themselves, acquiescing in the demand; the thing being sacrificed must be theirs to be sacrificed; and the thing of theirs that they sacrifice must be something they regard as valuable.
When governments tell their public that they must "sacrifice" by having their health benefits or their pensions cut, or by paying more taxes, they eliminate the element of choice for the public--because, after all, the public does not make that choice, their government does. "But isn't their government run by their elected representatives?" those who have civics textbook ideas about democracy actually existing in those states whose political Establishments love to call them such will retort, and of course, those who insist upon claiming evidence of a public "consensus" behind everything that office-holders do.
As a practical matter what the public is apt to have is a government that, elected within conditions highly controlled by the elite, was voted for by only a minority of the public in even "landslide" circumstances (looking at Britain today, remember, only one in five eligible voters cast their ballot for Keir Starmer's Labour), and proceeded to behave in a manner that broke every promise it made to its public scarcely a month earlier in a Manifesto that was itself a rejection of virtually every pledge Starmer campaigned for the party leadership on a betrayal and line of policy that public is apt to highly disapprove, with this so much a constant of recent years that the electoral process enjoys ever less legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Indeed, from France to South Korea it seems to be becoming routine for the heads of government in so-called democracies to in the course of transacting what ought to be ordinary government business illegally invoke emergency powers for the sake of imposing programs entailing "sacrifice" because the opposition to them is such that they cannot implement them in any way at all consistent with even the slight and debased democratic norms that have been allowed to prevail until recently.
Looking at such a situation it seems safe to say that while one can imagine a context in which a government which is really representative of the public one can speak of that public's collectively choosing to sacrifice--but in any situation actually evident in such countries today it would seem that, no, the public at large isn't choosing. Rather others are choosing for it, in contradiction of and even in defiance of its preferences as they show themselves "generous with other people's things"--as it happens, the things of those who have least (such governments rarely call for "sacrifice" on the part of the rich, and even more rarely exact it). One can and should add to this that as the functionaries of those governments speak of "sacrifice," in "sacrificing" the well-being, and even the freedoms, of their country's citizens they themselves do not feel themselves to be giving up a thing of value--having no regard for those citizens' well-being and freedoms, and not even trying very hard to pretend that they do for as long as anyone can remember (indeed, these politicians, who have been constantly been attacking these things in the most open and sanctimonious fashion for many decades now, often seem grateful for the excuses to step up the attack that prompt their calls for "sacrifice")--yet again making their speaking in terms of sacrifice an absurdity.
The result is that even if their "leaders" are too obtuse to understand their misuse and abuse of simple words in their own language (such is what one now gets from the so-called "highly educated" that idiots of elitist mind love to talk about), the public should be under no illusions that in anything like such circumstances "sacrifice" is merely one of those words which are used to dress up the exploitation of the many by and for the few, and commensurately wary of any utterance from their "leaders" containing that term. This is all the more in as they are hearing it so much now, and will hear it so much more later, not least in the nations of Europe, where, as national Establishments clamor for "rearmament" and even a "war economy" from every orifice in a manner that can give the impression of a bidding war ("We think 2.5 percent of GDP is not enough! We're going for at least one percent more than that!" "Oh yeah? Well we're going for 5!"), those in "showbusiness for ugly people" are auditioning for their dream role as wartime leader. Hoping to be Churchill or De Gaulle as these have been mythologized by their cultists, they bear a stronger resemblance to other persons from England and France, and Italy and Germany, and many other countries we remember just as well from that conflict, and with whose (real life and not at all mythological) records their politics and personas and even the histories of their political parties in many a case would seem the far better fit.
In doing so they remind us of their essential illiteracy and dishonesty. After all, what does the word sacrifice mean? It means one's giving up something they have that is of value to them--as when people who live by animal husbandry sacrifice the livestock that is the basis and measure of their wealth to propitiate a deity. This means that for us to speak of sacrifice the sacrificer must offer up the thing themselves, acquiescing in the demand; the thing being sacrificed must be theirs to be sacrificed; and the thing of theirs that they sacrifice must be something they regard as valuable.
When governments tell their public that they must "sacrifice" by having their health benefits or their pensions cut, or by paying more taxes, they eliminate the element of choice for the public--because, after all, the public does not make that choice, their government does. "But isn't their government run by their elected representatives?" those who have civics textbook ideas about democracy actually existing in those states whose political Establishments love to call them such will retort, and of course, those who insist upon claiming evidence of a public "consensus" behind everything that office-holders do.
As a practical matter what the public is apt to have is a government that, elected within conditions highly controlled by the elite, was voted for by only a minority of the public in even "landslide" circumstances (looking at Britain today, remember, only one in five eligible voters cast their ballot for Keir Starmer's Labour), and proceeded to behave in a manner that broke every promise it made to its public scarcely a month earlier in a Manifesto that was itself a rejection of virtually every pledge Starmer campaigned for the party leadership on a betrayal and line of policy that public is apt to highly disapprove, with this so much a constant of recent years that the electoral process enjoys ever less legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Indeed, from France to South Korea it seems to be becoming routine for the heads of government in so-called democracies to in the course of transacting what ought to be ordinary government business illegally invoke emergency powers for the sake of imposing programs entailing "sacrifice" because the opposition to them is such that they cannot implement them in any way at all consistent with even the slight and debased democratic norms that have been allowed to prevail until recently.
Looking at such a situation it seems safe to say that while one can imagine a context in which a government which is really representative of the public one can speak of that public's collectively choosing to sacrifice--but in any situation actually evident in such countries today it would seem that, no, the public at large isn't choosing. Rather others are choosing for it, in contradiction of and even in defiance of its preferences as they show themselves "generous with other people's things"--as it happens, the things of those who have least (such governments rarely call for "sacrifice" on the part of the rich, and even more rarely exact it). One can and should add to this that as the functionaries of those governments speak of "sacrifice," in "sacrificing" the well-being, and even the freedoms, of their country's citizens they themselves do not feel themselves to be giving up a thing of value--having no regard for those citizens' well-being and freedoms, and not even trying very hard to pretend that they do for as long as anyone can remember (indeed, these politicians, who have been constantly been attacking these things in the most open and sanctimonious fashion for many decades now, often seem grateful for the excuses to step up the attack that prompt their calls for "sacrifice")--yet again making their speaking in terms of sacrifice an absurdity.
The result is that even if their "leaders" are too obtuse to understand their misuse and abuse of simple words in their own language (such is what one now gets from the so-called "highly educated" that idiots of elitist mind love to talk about), the public should be under no illusions that in anything like such circumstances "sacrifice" is merely one of those words which are used to dress up the exploitation of the many by and for the few, and commensurately wary of any utterance from their "leaders" containing that term. This is all the more in as they are hearing it so much now, and will hear it so much more later, not least in the nations of Europe, where, as national Establishments clamor for "rearmament" and even a "war economy" from every orifice in a manner that can give the impression of a bidding war ("We think 2.5 percent of GDP is not enough! We're going for at least one percent more than that!" "Oh yeah? Well we're going for 5!"), those in "showbusiness for ugly people" are auditioning for their dream role as wartime leader. Hoping to be Churchill or De Gaulle as these have been mythologized by their cultists, they bear a stronger resemblance to other persons from England and France, and Italy and Germany, and many other countries we remember just as well from that conflict, and with whose (real life and not at all mythological) records their politics and personas and even the histories of their political parties in many a case would seem the far better fit.
Show Business for Ugly People: Whining About the Rewards
People in show business whine--constantly--about the less glamorous realities of their business.
People in the Show Business for Ugly People that is politics likewise whine--constantly--about the less glamorous realities of their business. And as it happens, Politico recently passed on to its readers, without comment, the whines of 25 Senators and Representatives from Capitol Hill.
Just as any reasonable person would expect they did themselves no credit whatsoever as they complained that "It's not like The West Wing!" (Did they really have to be in Congress to understand that?) and "It's not like House of Cards!" (Did they seriously want it to be? Were they even watching the same repugnant spectacle the whole rest of the world was?) in a way that can be insulting to the listener's intelligence.
They seemed to me to be at their worst when they talked about what seemed to them the lack of what they see as adequate remuneration for their so-called "public service." "I get paid only $174,000 a year!" they whined--oblivious to the fact that this is equivalent to twelve times a full year's earnings at minimum wage that they have collectively refused to raise from its level of $7.25 an hour since 2009, almost five times that wage in a Washington D.C. admittedly very expensive to live in (not least because of what Congress allowed to be done to the government), and three times the median wage for a full-time worker in America (even when calculated in the rather generous fashion of assuming fifty-two weeks of the median weekly wages or salary). It also overlooks the fact that they get a good many benefits that make that salary go a longer way, to which the rest of the public has no access--such as, to cite only the most basic and important, cost-of-living reimbursements, and very favorable health and pension plans, widening the gap between their lot and that of the country at large yet again.
Moreover, as a practical matter those in Congress are unlikely to have just their salary and fringe benefits to live on the way others would. As of 2020 a member of Congress on average had assets in the range of $4.5 million (some $5.6 million in today's terms). Of course, extreme inequality prevailing on Capitol Hill as it does everywhere else in America means that the median in that body is closer to $1 million (or $1.25 million now). Still, regardless of which of those metrics we go by they were about five times as wealthy as the rest of the country at large--all as, of course, the survey overlooks the extent to which many of those who are not so affluent may, for example through marriage, be connected with a still wealthier person--with all that means for their household income and wealth as against their personal income and wealth. (Consider, for instance, the cases of those Senators John Kerry and Kamala Harris, and the financial situations of their spouses relative to their own far from unenviable situation.)
Meanwhile, as they and those who pay for their campaigns love to ceaselessly remind the public in their unending display of hostility to young people trying to make their way in the world, an unremunerative, or even costly, position, like finishing an expensive college education or taking an unpaid internship, is often a trial suffered to get to something better. ("Yes, the life of that law student is pretty shabby--but think of what they'll be making when they graduate and get that job with that blue-chip firm!") So does it go with those on Capitol Hill, who so commonly go on to very lucrative careers after political office--not least, sitting on the boards of corporations and taking jobs with lobbying firms grateful for their having so consistently sided with them against the public interest when in office, as they collect other rewards still in the form of speaking fees and paydays for the books ghostwritten for them and put on bestseller lists by mass purchases by their "supporters" and sympathetic or hired claqueurs (or aspire to graduate from the legislature to become Cabinet members, Vice-Presidents, Presidents, and get all the boodle that awaits those who depart from those offices).
One must take that, too, into account when appraising the situation of an overwhelmingly narcissistic group of people who are in this job not to do good but to do well (some might say, do well by doing evil).
The result is that, no, these people are simply not dealing with the same hardships as the rest of the public. Indeed, their personal financial situation, even in the absence of great personal or household wealth, must be considered a very privileged one relative to that public--with the fact of their whining about it bespeaking the fact that it is on the whole a very privileged group indeed that gets itself elected to Congress (as seen, again and again, in the proportion of lawyers, by and large lawyers who have done fairly well for themselves, who hold seats in this body, relative even to other Western democracies). And if politicians' votes, especially on the more material questions facing them, have little to do with what their constituents' think about the matter, it bespeaks, too, how little they know, or care, for them, as against how much they know and care for those who get them into office and whom they hope will lavish them with rewards. The result is that just about any complaint from their quarter about their financial situation is, with possible rare exception, to be treated as a display of--the word is warranted here--the self-pity of which the privileged (which they most certainly are) so love to accuse the exploited, cheated and oppressed whenever they dare to speak up for themselves, and which they (didn't I already say they are narcissistic?) are quick to display; and a pack of elitists sure that even as they get much, much more than the people they supposedly represent because they are so much better than those people (This. Means. You.) they deserve to have that much more still, with their entitlement the more blatant because, in contrast with how they would have, for example, schoolteachers, treated, it is clear they think the idea that pay should be linked to performance ought not to apply to them. By allowing the reader to imagine otherwise Politico, like the Congresspersons it interviewed, did itself no credit--but then when has it ever done so?
People in the Show Business for Ugly People that is politics likewise whine--constantly--about the less glamorous realities of their business. And as it happens, Politico recently passed on to its readers, without comment, the whines of 25 Senators and Representatives from Capitol Hill.
Just as any reasonable person would expect they did themselves no credit whatsoever as they complained that "It's not like The West Wing!" (Did they really have to be in Congress to understand that?) and "It's not like House of Cards!" (Did they seriously want it to be? Were they even watching the same repugnant spectacle the whole rest of the world was?) in a way that can be insulting to the listener's intelligence.
They seemed to me to be at their worst when they talked about what seemed to them the lack of what they see as adequate remuneration for their so-called "public service." "I get paid only $174,000 a year!" they whined--oblivious to the fact that this is equivalent to twelve times a full year's earnings at minimum wage that they have collectively refused to raise from its level of $7.25 an hour since 2009, almost five times that wage in a Washington D.C. admittedly very expensive to live in (not least because of what Congress allowed to be done to the government), and three times the median wage for a full-time worker in America (even when calculated in the rather generous fashion of assuming fifty-two weeks of the median weekly wages or salary). It also overlooks the fact that they get a good many benefits that make that salary go a longer way, to which the rest of the public has no access--such as, to cite only the most basic and important, cost-of-living reimbursements, and very favorable health and pension plans, widening the gap between their lot and that of the country at large yet again.
Moreover, as a practical matter those in Congress are unlikely to have just their salary and fringe benefits to live on the way others would. As of 2020 a member of Congress on average had assets in the range of $4.5 million (some $5.6 million in today's terms). Of course, extreme inequality prevailing on Capitol Hill as it does everywhere else in America means that the median in that body is closer to $1 million (or $1.25 million now). Still, regardless of which of those metrics we go by they were about five times as wealthy as the rest of the country at large--all as, of course, the survey overlooks the extent to which many of those who are not so affluent may, for example through marriage, be connected with a still wealthier person--with all that means for their household income and wealth as against their personal income and wealth. (Consider, for instance, the cases of those Senators John Kerry and Kamala Harris, and the financial situations of their spouses relative to their own far from unenviable situation.)
Meanwhile, as they and those who pay for their campaigns love to ceaselessly remind the public in their unending display of hostility to young people trying to make their way in the world, an unremunerative, or even costly, position, like finishing an expensive college education or taking an unpaid internship, is often a trial suffered to get to something better. ("Yes, the life of that law student is pretty shabby--but think of what they'll be making when they graduate and get that job with that blue-chip firm!") So does it go with those on Capitol Hill, who so commonly go on to very lucrative careers after political office--not least, sitting on the boards of corporations and taking jobs with lobbying firms grateful for their having so consistently sided with them against the public interest when in office, as they collect other rewards still in the form of speaking fees and paydays for the books ghostwritten for them and put on bestseller lists by mass purchases by their "supporters" and sympathetic or hired claqueurs (or aspire to graduate from the legislature to become Cabinet members, Vice-Presidents, Presidents, and get all the boodle that awaits those who depart from those offices).
One must take that, too, into account when appraising the situation of an overwhelmingly narcissistic group of people who are in this job not to do good but to do well (some might say, do well by doing evil).
The result is that, no, these people are simply not dealing with the same hardships as the rest of the public. Indeed, their personal financial situation, even in the absence of great personal or household wealth, must be considered a very privileged one relative to that public--with the fact of their whining about it bespeaking the fact that it is on the whole a very privileged group indeed that gets itself elected to Congress (as seen, again and again, in the proportion of lawyers, by and large lawyers who have done fairly well for themselves, who hold seats in this body, relative even to other Western democracies). And if politicians' votes, especially on the more material questions facing them, have little to do with what their constituents' think about the matter, it bespeaks, too, how little they know, or care, for them, as against how much they know and care for those who get them into office and whom they hope will lavish them with rewards. The result is that just about any complaint from their quarter about their financial situation is, with possible rare exception, to be treated as a display of--the word is warranted here--the self-pity of which the privileged (which they most certainly are) so love to accuse the exploited, cheated and oppressed whenever they dare to speak up for themselves, and which they (didn't I already say they are narcissistic?) are quick to display; and a pack of elitists sure that even as they get much, much more than the people they supposedly represent because they are so much better than those people (This. Means. You.) they deserve to have that much more still, with their entitlement the more blatant because, in contrast with how they would have, for example, schoolteachers, treated, it is clear they think the idea that pay should be linked to performance ought not to apply to them. By allowing the reader to imagine otherwise Politico, like the Congresspersons it interviewed, did itself no credit--but then when has it ever done so?
Review: The Bourne Ultimatum, by Robert Ludlum
In publishing a third Jason Bourne novel a mere four years after the preceding book Robert Ludlum could seem to simply be milking a past success, but one could also argue for a finale to the saga somehow seeming right at that point--perhaps more so than Ludlum could have known given how fast events were moving in those days. After all, the sequel he published to The Bourne Identity did not resolve the issue still unsettled at the first book's close, namely the fact that the assassin Carlos the Jackal was still on the loose, with no less incentive than before to settle the score with his "rival" Jason Bourne--or, for him the same thing, the academic who had years ago played the part of Bourne as part of American intelligence's campaign to bring him down. That the world to which Carlos and Bourne both belonged was, circa 1990, was fast passing--the Cold War drawing to a close, the wave of international terrorism of which Carlos has been for a period the face waning with it, and the ghosts of Vietnam that haunted Jason Bourne were, in America at least, fading away--lent all this an additional edge. So did the fact that those who had fought all those battles were getting on in years, and the time in which they could plausibly go on playing games in the field--could personally settle old scores against each other--was fast running out. (Indeed, Jason, who contrary to those who may picture Matt Damon when they think of Bourne, was already closer to forty than thirty in the first adventure, here looking ahead to his fifty-first birthday, while Carlos is a good many years older than that--and if still possessed of not just his organization but apparently all his old capacities, has also been diagnosed with a terminal illness that makes him not long for this world.)
Still, if this was a logical time to give us that last Duel of the Master Assassins, such a duel was comparatively thin stuff for an '80s-era Ludlum "super-thriller." The result was that Ludlum spun a bigger narrative around it. To his credit he utilized the elements of that passing world of which Jason and Carlos were so representative for the purpose. Thus is it the case that after the trap at a Baltimore amusement park announces that Jason Bourne's old enemy Carlos the Jackal is back and gunning for him--and his family--Jason's investigation quickly leads to a characteristically Ludlumesque conspiracy rooted in Bourne's past, namely the corrupt, pocket-lining clique over at Command Saigon who had controlled the Medusa battalion in which Webb/Bourne fought back in the Vietnam War. Not only got on in years but come up in the world since, they had also moved on to corruption on a far grander scale, the men who had run Medusa now chairs of the Federal Trade Commission and Supreme Commanders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as they fully exploit their connections and positions to extend their wealth and power through a shadowy international business empire. Attempting to use Medusa to entrap the Jackal, the resulting intrigue involves actors from La Cosa Nostra to Moscow, all of whom have their own, sometimes multiple, agendas.
However, if appropriate thematically, it meant a different book from its predecessors structurally. Rather than Bourne and Carlos racing into battle, the plot, a merger of the intricate conspiracy-in-high-places stuff of the earlier Ludlum with the shoot 'em up stuff the Bourne novels in particular emphasize, sprawls even by the standards of Ludlum's later books, the prior The Bourne Supremacy included--with the result that the Duel takes a while to properly get going. Indeed, in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel Jason Bourne disappears entirely from the reader's view for long stretches as Ludlum lays the groundwork for later events, we are a third of the way in before Jason and Carlos make contact, and we are more than halfway through the story before the battle is really and properly joined and the fights, shootouts, explosions begin in earnest. Ideally all of the build-up would have given the showdown when it came the more impact, but the book ends up overstuffed and overcomplicated rather than impressively intricate, with much of what it is overstuffed with and overcomplicated by doing nothing to forward the progress of the story (with Webb's wife Marie's attempt to find Bourne in France in particular coming off as an attempt to give her a bigger part in the story even more awkward than what we saw in Supremacy), and others treated at excessive length relative to their ultimate importance (as with the Mafia's involvement). It does not help that Ludlum reuses a good many elements from past books to less effect here than he achieved the first time. (The Medusa network may be very appropriate thematically given the connection with Bourne's past and the end-of-an-era aspect the book has, but Medusa is also a much less fully imagined, and much less insidious and high-stakes-seeming entity than the Matarese, or Geneon.)
Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that "This time, it's personal" the Jason Bourne we get here is less compelling than the Jason Bourne of prior books. Again, the secret agent who has lost his memory was not an unprecedented idea in 1980, but Bourne confused about who he is and what he has done, hunted by his employers as well as his enemies in that first book and capable of the back-to-the-wall feral ruthlessness that saw him kidnap Marie way back when; and, too, the Bourne the Washington bureaucrats acting on raison d'etat cruelly manipulated into doing their dirty work in The Bourne Supremacy, and driven over the edge in the process; had a rather sharper edge than the "Bourne" we see here. Even if he every now and then says something that seems murderously callous, it is mostly David Webb we see on the page. Indeed, we often see Webb desperately holding on to what remains of the Bourne persona to get through the crisis he is facing rather than making us feel his settled, civilian, self is ever really in danger of being overwhelmed by it. In this it matters that Bourne is never so isolated and pressed as before, in this battle against Carlos having a host of powerful allies on his side from the start of the story--and that if there is friction between him and the government functionaries they are less that of a man going over the edge after its misuse of him than a case of a "loose cannon cop" pleading for a little more time from his desk-pounding captain in which to bring down the bag guys.
Of course, that leaves the matter of the mechanics of the duel between hero and villain. To his credit Ludlum has his successes here, especially as the story gets more focused. If Paris may be overfamiliar ground for Ludlum and Bourne alike, the maneuvering surrounding the Le Coeur du Soldat bar was particularly robust, and the involvement of the Soviets that contributes to the final showdown taking place behind the Iron Curtain, on ground with a special significance for the KGB-trained Carlos, was a good idea. I'm not sure that finale amounted to all that it could have dramatically, given both how little we see of Carlos directly (the character remains a near-cipher down to the end, with all that means for any realization of the dramatic potentials of this super-villain's meltdown as he approaches the end of his story), and an element of surrealism, even science fiction, in the depiction of the final battle that can feel a bit jarring given the tone of the story prior to that point (and what we generally expect of Ludlum). Still, it is undeniably a big finish, the kind that gives us as much assurance as any ending can that there won't be a next time, with the saga capped off by a suitable final chapter assuring us that with that secret war over the living will be getting on with their lives.
Again, though, it is some hundreds of pages before all that is really underway, while taking the book as a whole I find it easy to understand why first picking it up way back when I got pretty impatient with the earlier part of the tale, all as this time around I often found that rather than the overall thrust of the tale it was some minor subplot or character or detail holding my interest. Little as they did for the advancement of the larger story, they brought a lot more humor to the story than I expected. Granted, the results are far from consistently successful, but Ludlum definitely had his successes here. (The intersection of the paths of Gates, Prefontaine and Fontaine, if falling a bit flat when it comes together, and then falling by the wayside for hundreds of pages, provided by some very entertaining misunderstandings, and even satire, for a stretch.) Indeed, Ludlum here may be open to the charge of getting too joke-y. (Amid the carnage and havoc of the big finale Ludlum finds occasion for Jason Bourne to say the word "plastics" to a callow young Californian named Benjamin. Seriously.)
That Ludlum so often played the events of the story for a laugh seems reflective of the reality not only that he had long had an inclination to the comedic--as seen not only in his early The Road to Gandolfo but his "straight" thrillers as well. Like the increasing tendency to sequels, it also reflects the fact that he had been at the thriller game for two decades, his name on the cover still selling books in "top ten of this year's Publisher's Weekly list" numbers, but, in spite of every now and then experimenting with new elements, mainly working off of older ideas to diminishing returns, and, I suspect, bored with the effort and making a joke of things as so many writers do at such a stage in their careers. In fact it would be my guess that this was the reason why the next Ludlum novel was a direct sequel to The Road to Gandolfo, The Road to Omaha--a novel I regard as being the last "true" Ludlum novel, just as The Bourne Ultimatum is for me the last "true" Ludlum thriller before those efforts like The Scorpio Illusion and The Apocalypse Watch that had me wondering whether Ludlum really wrote them at all.
For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Still, if this was a logical time to give us that last Duel of the Master Assassins, such a duel was comparatively thin stuff for an '80s-era Ludlum "super-thriller." The result was that Ludlum spun a bigger narrative around it. To his credit he utilized the elements of that passing world of which Jason and Carlos were so representative for the purpose. Thus is it the case that after the trap at a Baltimore amusement park announces that Jason Bourne's old enemy Carlos the Jackal is back and gunning for him--and his family--Jason's investigation quickly leads to a characteristically Ludlumesque conspiracy rooted in Bourne's past, namely the corrupt, pocket-lining clique over at Command Saigon who had controlled the Medusa battalion in which Webb/Bourne fought back in the Vietnam War. Not only got on in years but come up in the world since, they had also moved on to corruption on a far grander scale, the men who had run Medusa now chairs of the Federal Trade Commission and Supreme Commanders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as they fully exploit their connections and positions to extend their wealth and power through a shadowy international business empire. Attempting to use Medusa to entrap the Jackal, the resulting intrigue involves actors from La Cosa Nostra to Moscow, all of whom have their own, sometimes multiple, agendas.
However, if appropriate thematically, it meant a different book from its predecessors structurally. Rather than Bourne and Carlos racing into battle, the plot, a merger of the intricate conspiracy-in-high-places stuff of the earlier Ludlum with the shoot 'em up stuff the Bourne novels in particular emphasize, sprawls even by the standards of Ludlum's later books, the prior The Bourne Supremacy included--with the result that the Duel takes a while to properly get going. Indeed, in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel Jason Bourne disappears entirely from the reader's view for long stretches as Ludlum lays the groundwork for later events, we are a third of the way in before Jason and Carlos make contact, and we are more than halfway through the story before the battle is really and properly joined and the fights, shootouts, explosions begin in earnest. Ideally all of the build-up would have given the showdown when it came the more impact, but the book ends up overstuffed and overcomplicated rather than impressively intricate, with much of what it is overstuffed with and overcomplicated by doing nothing to forward the progress of the story (with Webb's wife Marie's attempt to find Bourne in France in particular coming off as an attempt to give her a bigger part in the story even more awkward than what we saw in Supremacy), and others treated at excessive length relative to their ultimate importance (as with the Mafia's involvement). It does not help that Ludlum reuses a good many elements from past books to less effect here than he achieved the first time. (The Medusa network may be very appropriate thematically given the connection with Bourne's past and the end-of-an-era aspect the book has, but Medusa is also a much less fully imagined, and much less insidious and high-stakes-seeming entity than the Matarese, or Geneon.)
Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that "This time, it's personal" the Jason Bourne we get here is less compelling than the Jason Bourne of prior books. Again, the secret agent who has lost his memory was not an unprecedented idea in 1980, but Bourne confused about who he is and what he has done, hunted by his employers as well as his enemies in that first book and capable of the back-to-the-wall feral ruthlessness that saw him kidnap Marie way back when; and, too, the Bourne the Washington bureaucrats acting on raison d'etat cruelly manipulated into doing their dirty work in The Bourne Supremacy, and driven over the edge in the process; had a rather sharper edge than the "Bourne" we see here. Even if he every now and then says something that seems murderously callous, it is mostly David Webb we see on the page. Indeed, we often see Webb desperately holding on to what remains of the Bourne persona to get through the crisis he is facing rather than making us feel his settled, civilian, self is ever really in danger of being overwhelmed by it. In this it matters that Bourne is never so isolated and pressed as before, in this battle against Carlos having a host of powerful allies on his side from the start of the story--and that if there is friction between him and the government functionaries they are less that of a man going over the edge after its misuse of him than a case of a "loose cannon cop" pleading for a little more time from his desk-pounding captain in which to bring down the bag guys.
Of course, that leaves the matter of the mechanics of the duel between hero and villain. To his credit Ludlum has his successes here, especially as the story gets more focused. If Paris may be overfamiliar ground for Ludlum and Bourne alike, the maneuvering surrounding the Le Coeur du Soldat bar was particularly robust, and the involvement of the Soviets that contributes to the final showdown taking place behind the Iron Curtain, on ground with a special significance for the KGB-trained Carlos, was a good idea. I'm not sure that finale amounted to all that it could have dramatically, given both how little we see of Carlos directly (the character remains a near-cipher down to the end, with all that means for any realization of the dramatic potentials of this super-villain's meltdown as he approaches the end of his story), and an element of surrealism, even science fiction, in the depiction of the final battle that can feel a bit jarring given the tone of the story prior to that point (and what we generally expect of Ludlum). Still, it is undeniably a big finish, the kind that gives us as much assurance as any ending can that there won't be a next time, with the saga capped off by a suitable final chapter assuring us that with that secret war over the living will be getting on with their lives.
Again, though, it is some hundreds of pages before all that is really underway, while taking the book as a whole I find it easy to understand why first picking it up way back when I got pretty impatient with the earlier part of the tale, all as this time around I often found that rather than the overall thrust of the tale it was some minor subplot or character or detail holding my interest. Little as they did for the advancement of the larger story, they brought a lot more humor to the story than I expected. Granted, the results are far from consistently successful, but Ludlum definitely had his successes here. (The intersection of the paths of Gates, Prefontaine and Fontaine, if falling a bit flat when it comes together, and then falling by the wayside for hundreds of pages, provided by some very entertaining misunderstandings, and even satire, for a stretch.) Indeed, Ludlum here may be open to the charge of getting too joke-y. (Amid the carnage and havoc of the big finale Ludlum finds occasion for Jason Bourne to say the word "plastics" to a callow young Californian named Benjamin. Seriously.)
That Ludlum so often played the events of the story for a laugh seems reflective of the reality not only that he had long had an inclination to the comedic--as seen not only in his early The Road to Gandolfo but his "straight" thrillers as well. Like the increasing tendency to sequels, it also reflects the fact that he had been at the thriller game for two decades, his name on the cover still selling books in "top ten of this year's Publisher's Weekly list" numbers, but, in spite of every now and then experimenting with new elements, mainly working off of older ideas to diminishing returns, and, I suspect, bored with the effort and making a joke of things as so many writers do at such a stage in their careers. In fact it would be my guess that this was the reason why the next Ludlum novel was a direct sequel to The Road to Gandolfo, The Road to Omaha--a novel I regard as being the last "true" Ludlum novel, just as The Bourne Ultimatum is for me the last "true" Ludlum thriller before those efforts like The Scorpio Illusion and The Apocalypse Watch that had me wondering whether Ludlum really wrote them at all.
For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Review: The Bourne Supremacy, by Robert Ludlum
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
The premise of Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (which differs significantly from the premise of the well-known 2002 film adaptation) is that American intelligence, determined to catch the super assassin-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, creates the legend of another super assassin-for-hire, Jason Bourne, who takes credit for Carlos' kills in the expectation of driving Carlos to come after him and put an end to this rival invading his turf and threatening his business, enabling the authorities to once and for all bring down the Jackal. But alas the agent playing the part of Bourne, as a result of amnesia suffered in an incident in the course of his assignment in which he was shot and nearly drowned, beginning a series of acts on his part that cause his controllers to think he has betrayed them, as a result of which the man who was Bourne, while trying to figure out who he was and what he was doing, not only had Carlos and his men out to put him down, but also his own employers . . .
I was very impressed with it when I first read it, way back when. I was less impressed by it later. Even if one gets beyond the way in which Ludlum expected readers to identify the villain with the real-life Carlos the Jackal but really gave us a totally made-up figure under that name far more serviceable to the plot (age, appearance, activity all altered out of recognition), that super-assassins-for-hire like Carlos and Bourne in general are pretty much pure fantasy, and that the rather convoluted scheme for using Bourne to draw out Carlos was a layering of an even sillier fantasy over the other fantasy, making for the kind of "I'm the only one who can catch him, because I know how he thinks!" and "This time, it's personal!" action movie logic-driven Duel of the Master Operatives that has also come to seem awfully cliché after all these years (even with the whole memory loss thing, which wasn't nearly so original as some seem to think it was)--and indeed redolent of decline in Ludlum's moving away from the kind of intricate political thriller that made Ludlum's earlier books (a Matlock Paper, a Trevayne, a Chancellor Manuscript) so much more intriguing to me these days in favor of "safer," more readily salable, conventional good guys vs. bad guys action movies-on-paper.)(The fact that Hollywood was willing to make an action movie out of the paper version again and again, as it ignored Ludlum's other books, seemed to me confirmation of that reading of the situation.)
Indeed, in his two subsequent efforts Ludlum appears to have tried to strike a balance between an action movie on paper and something more like his '70s-era novels, at times with impressive results. (On recent revisitation I found the first forty percent or so of The Aquitaine Progression very, very impressive--but felt that afterward the novel, in spite of some good later bits, became something much flatter and more generic, and the less satisfying for being stretched out to such length.) However, after that Ludlum was, like so many writers who have had a major success, especially as they become more prone to repeat themselves, tended much more toward sequels, with the first straight sequel the follow-up to The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy--I suppose, not just because The Bourne Identity ended with the flesh-and-blood human being who had been acting the part of Bourne, David Webb, just beginning his recovery and Carlos the Jackal still on the loose, but because the relatively easy premise made a continuation easier to write (certainly by contrast with a novel that wrapped things up the way Gemini Contenders or Chancellor Manuscript did, or the way things stood at the end of a Trevayne, or even the more conventionally action thriller-structured The Holcroft Covenant, given the big twist at the end).
To Ludlum's credit if the basic premise of Bourne Identity is silly, Bourne Supremacy puts a clever twist on the silliness. This time instead of Jason Bourne taking credit for Carlos' kills, another killer is posing as Jason Bourne, exploiting his legend. Of course, Jason Bourne was just a fraud intended to draw out Carlos, and Bourne, especially as he is increasingly being buried by Webb, is not about to go after the Bourne impostor to protect his bad name the way Carlos did. Indeed, at this point there are very, very few things that could possibly make Bourne/Webb get back into the game in the old way. However, the same old D.C. functionaries who have played havoc with Webb's life in the past find that the impostor Bourne is now in the service of a mad Chinese politician whose ambitions may well ignite a world war, and so would dearly like for Bourne to come back, and take out the impostor as presumably only he can. To that end they follow up their less than half-baked scheme for trapping Carlos with another less than half-baked scheme, concocting a situation in which a vengeful Asian magnate kidnaps Webb/Bourne's wife Marie to force Bourne back into action (with Webb/Bourne supposed to be oblivious to the fact that in reality American intelligence has done the job).
How do things go from there? The first quarter of the novel is actually quite fluid and gripping, with the initial shock of Marie's kidnapping right out of their home, and then the way the functionaries on whom Webb/Bourne has relied for help transitioning "back in from the cold" gaslight him and give him the bureaucratic runaround has a very visceral quality. Webb's desperation, and his rage at those treating him this way, really come through--and as the man that Webb had been for so long, and has now tried so hard to suppress, resurges within him Ludlum really makes us feel that this other personality is back, and taking over, as Ludlum, keeping a tight focus through this section of the story, follows Bourne through the initial phases of his quest to take down the impostor Bourne, and get his wife back.
Still, as Ludlum had repeatedly demonstrated a chase like this isn't a sufficient foundation for a six hundred page doorstop like Bourne Supremacy--while we already know the nature of the trick the government is playing on Webb, and the identity, objects, motives of the villain of the piece from the first briefing, so that if we learn additional details later there is really no great mystery to hold our attention through the proceedings. At the same time, if Webb is far from having recovered the entirety of his memory, the whole problem of "Who am I?" so central to The Bourne Identity was clarified in the prior book (and indeed, we, and Webb, know all too well what the answer is). Likewise what interest Carlos derived from association with a real-life figure, or what Ludlum made him over into, a man who at times seems the shadow ruler of Paris from behind a confessional screen, does not have its counterpart here. This book does have the interest of a change from Ludlum's usual locations (the northeastern United States, and Western Europe, particularly that arc of territory extending from the English Channel to Rome, and the associated waters and isles) in its use of China as its principal setting, but that is a matter of backdrop rather than story, the more in as, if the geopolitics of the premise contain some intriguing elements (not least a villain with a motive such as we would not usually get in a thriller such as this), Ludlum develops them to only a limited degree.
Ultimately what Ludlum opts for is giving the story two axes rather than one. There is Jason Bourne's quest to get his wife back, with taking down the impostor and stopping the madman using him a means to that end--and there is what happens with Marie after the folks from Washington kidnapped her, given that, if no more than Jason knowing the nature of the game in which they are caught up, she manages to escape from the facility in which she is being held, so that she is herself the object of a hunt (because, after all, being unable to produce Marie when Bourne does the job and comes asking for her release could easily have very ugly consequences for the schemers who dragged him into this affair), which Ludlum accords almost equal time through most of the book's middle, alternating his chapters so that for the greater part of the text we get one (or two) about Bourne followed by one (or two) about Marie followed by one about Bourne again, etc., etc..
The result is that the Jason Bourne novel is instead a Jason and Marie Bourne novel, problematically I thought given that it seemed that a Jason Bourne novel is what we were promised, and that Marie's side of the story quickly sprawls in its turn, with her friend from her Canadian government days Catherine Staples actually becoming a much more active figure within the goings-on than Marie herself for a long stretch. This side of the story, if ultimately important in the resolution of the main plot, still mostly gives us a lot of minor figures within the conspiracy to manipulate Bourne engaged in lament and blame games over how their essentially demented scheme has gone "off the wire," as other minor figures look on aghast at the foolishness, and sociopathy, involved, with even the more substantive-seeming other bits time and again proving inessential. (Late in the story we learn that the Big Bad has penetrated the operation, forcing Marie's kidnappers to not just try to find her as she continues a flight dragged out by misunderstandings and unnecessary occurrences as they try figuring out what Bourne himself is doing, but also root out the traitor in their midst--even though his existence could easily have been excised from the story without any damage to its fabric.) It is not much compensation for taking us away from what seems the proper line of the story, and the slowing of the pace of its progress.
Meanwhile the scene changes and the advancement of the narrative with them get increasingly choppy due to transitions that give the impression of a novelized film rather than a novel (with, at one point, Bourne and a comrade landing on China's southern coast, Bourne asking a contact they have just met to arrange their passage to Beijing, and then, bam, there they are at Beijing's international airport). This combined with how in Bourne's side of the story as in Marie's there are lengthy incidents which were, strictly speaking, unnecessary (so does it seem with the episode in Tiananmen Square) to make the narrative harder to follow. Indeed, as if Ludlum himself is getting weary of his own tale, after the midpoint we see his sense of humor at times inappropriately present (as in the goings-on surrounding Tianannmen Square, which comes to hinge on an act that, if we are speaking of Bourne characters, seems much more General Mackenzie Hawkins than Bourne). Meandering, and both harder and less satisfying to follow along, the tension predictably slackens, but it does pick up again when the True Bourne finally, properly, faces down the fake, and Bourne advances with his captive to a reckoning with his manipulators that I recalled vividly decades after first reading it, and which held up impressively against my old memory all these years later--helped by the fact that we go beyond Webb relying on Bourne to get through the adventure to Bourne himself seeming to be eclipsed by something else, even darker . . .
Writing out that confrontation Ludlum may be susceptible to accusations of writing himself into a corner and pulling his punch to get out of it when a murderously vengeful Webb/Bourne allows himself to be talked down from the ledge onto which he has gone out, so to speak, but even after that what came before still retains a good deal of its impact. Of course, coming with nearly a hundred pages of the story left to go this means that taking down the madman who was the whole reason for the D.C. bureaucrats drawing Webb/Bourne into the game reads almost like an epilogue to the drama giving the book its emotional core, but it is a fairly entertaining epilogue all the same that really does wrap up the very messy affair. Thinking again of the tendency to draw out stories excessively that increasingly characterized publishing in that era and since, of which the size of Ludlum's books could seem all too representative, it seemed to me that if Ludlum's development of an overcomplicated tale out of his unlikely premise made it less satisfying than it would otherwise have been, the taut action thriller Ludlum at its core is still very evident and effective in it, and made the reread well worth the while.
For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
The premise of Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (which differs significantly from the premise of the well-known 2002 film adaptation) is that American intelligence, determined to catch the super assassin-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, creates the legend of another super assassin-for-hire, Jason Bourne, who takes credit for Carlos' kills in the expectation of driving Carlos to come after him and put an end to this rival invading his turf and threatening his business, enabling the authorities to once and for all bring down the Jackal. But alas the agent playing the part of Bourne, as a result of amnesia suffered in an incident in the course of his assignment in which he was shot and nearly drowned, beginning a series of acts on his part that cause his controllers to think he has betrayed them, as a result of which the man who was Bourne, while trying to figure out who he was and what he was doing, not only had Carlos and his men out to put him down, but also his own employers . . .
I was very impressed with it when I first read it, way back when. I was less impressed by it later. Even if one gets beyond the way in which Ludlum expected readers to identify the villain with the real-life Carlos the Jackal but really gave us a totally made-up figure under that name far more serviceable to the plot (age, appearance, activity all altered out of recognition), that super-assassins-for-hire like Carlos and Bourne in general are pretty much pure fantasy, and that the rather convoluted scheme for using Bourne to draw out Carlos was a layering of an even sillier fantasy over the other fantasy, making for the kind of "I'm the only one who can catch him, because I know how he thinks!" and "This time, it's personal!" action movie logic-driven Duel of the Master Operatives that has also come to seem awfully cliché after all these years (even with the whole memory loss thing, which wasn't nearly so original as some seem to think it was)--and indeed redolent of decline in Ludlum's moving away from the kind of intricate political thriller that made Ludlum's earlier books (a Matlock Paper, a Trevayne, a Chancellor Manuscript) so much more intriguing to me these days in favor of "safer," more readily salable, conventional good guys vs. bad guys action movies-on-paper.)(The fact that Hollywood was willing to make an action movie out of the paper version again and again, as it ignored Ludlum's other books, seemed to me confirmation of that reading of the situation.)
Indeed, in his two subsequent efforts Ludlum appears to have tried to strike a balance between an action movie on paper and something more like his '70s-era novels, at times with impressive results. (On recent revisitation I found the first forty percent or so of The Aquitaine Progression very, very impressive--but felt that afterward the novel, in spite of some good later bits, became something much flatter and more generic, and the less satisfying for being stretched out to such length.) However, after that Ludlum was, like so many writers who have had a major success, especially as they become more prone to repeat themselves, tended much more toward sequels, with the first straight sequel the follow-up to The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy--I suppose, not just because The Bourne Identity ended with the flesh-and-blood human being who had been acting the part of Bourne, David Webb, just beginning his recovery and Carlos the Jackal still on the loose, but because the relatively easy premise made a continuation easier to write (certainly by contrast with a novel that wrapped things up the way Gemini Contenders or Chancellor Manuscript did, or the way things stood at the end of a Trevayne, or even the more conventionally action thriller-structured The Holcroft Covenant, given the big twist at the end).
To Ludlum's credit if the basic premise of Bourne Identity is silly, Bourne Supremacy puts a clever twist on the silliness. This time instead of Jason Bourne taking credit for Carlos' kills, another killer is posing as Jason Bourne, exploiting his legend. Of course, Jason Bourne was just a fraud intended to draw out Carlos, and Bourne, especially as he is increasingly being buried by Webb, is not about to go after the Bourne impostor to protect his bad name the way Carlos did. Indeed, at this point there are very, very few things that could possibly make Bourne/Webb get back into the game in the old way. However, the same old D.C. functionaries who have played havoc with Webb's life in the past find that the impostor Bourne is now in the service of a mad Chinese politician whose ambitions may well ignite a world war, and so would dearly like for Bourne to come back, and take out the impostor as presumably only he can. To that end they follow up their less than half-baked scheme for trapping Carlos with another less than half-baked scheme, concocting a situation in which a vengeful Asian magnate kidnaps Webb/Bourne's wife Marie to force Bourne back into action (with Webb/Bourne supposed to be oblivious to the fact that in reality American intelligence has done the job).
How do things go from there? The first quarter of the novel is actually quite fluid and gripping, with the initial shock of Marie's kidnapping right out of their home, and then the way the functionaries on whom Webb/Bourne has relied for help transitioning "back in from the cold" gaslight him and give him the bureaucratic runaround has a very visceral quality. Webb's desperation, and his rage at those treating him this way, really come through--and as the man that Webb had been for so long, and has now tried so hard to suppress, resurges within him Ludlum really makes us feel that this other personality is back, and taking over, as Ludlum, keeping a tight focus through this section of the story, follows Bourne through the initial phases of his quest to take down the impostor Bourne, and get his wife back.
Still, as Ludlum had repeatedly demonstrated a chase like this isn't a sufficient foundation for a six hundred page doorstop like Bourne Supremacy--while we already know the nature of the trick the government is playing on Webb, and the identity, objects, motives of the villain of the piece from the first briefing, so that if we learn additional details later there is really no great mystery to hold our attention through the proceedings. At the same time, if Webb is far from having recovered the entirety of his memory, the whole problem of "Who am I?" so central to The Bourne Identity was clarified in the prior book (and indeed, we, and Webb, know all too well what the answer is). Likewise what interest Carlos derived from association with a real-life figure, or what Ludlum made him over into, a man who at times seems the shadow ruler of Paris from behind a confessional screen, does not have its counterpart here. This book does have the interest of a change from Ludlum's usual locations (the northeastern United States, and Western Europe, particularly that arc of territory extending from the English Channel to Rome, and the associated waters and isles) in its use of China as its principal setting, but that is a matter of backdrop rather than story, the more in as, if the geopolitics of the premise contain some intriguing elements (not least a villain with a motive such as we would not usually get in a thriller such as this), Ludlum develops them to only a limited degree.
Ultimately what Ludlum opts for is giving the story two axes rather than one. There is Jason Bourne's quest to get his wife back, with taking down the impostor and stopping the madman using him a means to that end--and there is what happens with Marie after the folks from Washington kidnapped her, given that, if no more than Jason knowing the nature of the game in which they are caught up, she manages to escape from the facility in which she is being held, so that she is herself the object of a hunt (because, after all, being unable to produce Marie when Bourne does the job and comes asking for her release could easily have very ugly consequences for the schemers who dragged him into this affair), which Ludlum accords almost equal time through most of the book's middle, alternating his chapters so that for the greater part of the text we get one (or two) about Bourne followed by one (or two) about Marie followed by one about Bourne again, etc., etc..
The result is that the Jason Bourne novel is instead a Jason and Marie Bourne novel, problematically I thought given that it seemed that a Jason Bourne novel is what we were promised, and that Marie's side of the story quickly sprawls in its turn, with her friend from her Canadian government days Catherine Staples actually becoming a much more active figure within the goings-on than Marie herself for a long stretch. This side of the story, if ultimately important in the resolution of the main plot, still mostly gives us a lot of minor figures within the conspiracy to manipulate Bourne engaged in lament and blame games over how their essentially demented scheme has gone "off the wire," as other minor figures look on aghast at the foolishness, and sociopathy, involved, with even the more substantive-seeming other bits time and again proving inessential. (Late in the story we learn that the Big Bad has penetrated the operation, forcing Marie's kidnappers to not just try to find her as she continues a flight dragged out by misunderstandings and unnecessary occurrences as they try figuring out what Bourne himself is doing, but also root out the traitor in their midst--even though his existence could easily have been excised from the story without any damage to its fabric.) It is not much compensation for taking us away from what seems the proper line of the story, and the slowing of the pace of its progress.
Meanwhile the scene changes and the advancement of the narrative with them get increasingly choppy due to transitions that give the impression of a novelized film rather than a novel (with, at one point, Bourne and a comrade landing on China's southern coast, Bourne asking a contact they have just met to arrange their passage to Beijing, and then, bam, there they are at Beijing's international airport). This combined with how in Bourne's side of the story as in Marie's there are lengthy incidents which were, strictly speaking, unnecessary (so does it seem with the episode in Tiananmen Square) to make the narrative harder to follow. Indeed, as if Ludlum himself is getting weary of his own tale, after the midpoint we see his sense of humor at times inappropriately present (as in the goings-on surrounding Tianannmen Square, which comes to hinge on an act that, if we are speaking of Bourne characters, seems much more General Mackenzie Hawkins than Bourne). Meandering, and both harder and less satisfying to follow along, the tension predictably slackens, but it does pick up again when the True Bourne finally, properly, faces down the fake, and Bourne advances with his captive to a reckoning with his manipulators that I recalled vividly decades after first reading it, and which held up impressively against my old memory all these years later--helped by the fact that we go beyond Webb relying on Bourne to get through the adventure to Bourne himself seeming to be eclipsed by something else, even darker . . .
Writing out that confrontation Ludlum may be susceptible to accusations of writing himself into a corner and pulling his punch to get out of it when a murderously vengeful Webb/Bourne allows himself to be talked down from the ledge onto which he has gone out, so to speak, but even after that what came before still retains a good deal of its impact. Of course, coming with nearly a hundred pages of the story left to go this means that taking down the madman who was the whole reason for the D.C. bureaucrats drawing Webb/Bourne into the game reads almost like an epilogue to the drama giving the book its emotional core, but it is a fairly entertaining epilogue all the same that really does wrap up the very messy affair. Thinking again of the tendency to draw out stories excessively that increasingly characterized publishing in that era and since, of which the size of Ludlum's books could seem all too representative, it seemed to me that if Ludlum's development of an overcomplicated tale out of his unlikely premise made it less satisfying than it would otherwise have been, the taut action thriller Ludlum at its core is still very evident and effective in it, and made the reread well worth the while.
For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
The Novels of Robert Ludlum (A Listing)
Below is a listing of Robert Ludlum's novels intended to provide a convenient links page for my reviews and essays about them that I have posted on this blog. In drawing up that list I have elected to include the novels Ludlum originally published under the pseudonym Jonathan Ryder (the more in as he later republished those books under his own name), but exclude the "coauthored" works, the "continuation" novels, and even the novels published with Ludlum's last name posthumously as there are widespread doubts about the actual provenance of the book. (Indeed, my suspicion is that Ludlum, or at the very least the "Ludlum we knew," wrote less and less of the books from The Scorpio Illusion forward, such that even this list may overstate Ludlum's actual output, but I have elected to allow him what others generally do.)
The Scarlatti Inheritance
The Osterman Weekend
The Matlock Paper (Review)
The Rhinemann Exchange
Trevayne (Review)
The Cry of the Halidon
The Road to Gandolfo
The Gemini Contenders (Review)
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Holcroft Covenant (Review)
The Matarese Circle
The Bourne Identity (Essay)
The Parsifal Mosaic (Review)
The Aquitaine Progression (Review)
The Bourne Supremacy (Review)
The Icarus Agenda
The Bourne Ultimatum (Review)
The Road to Omaha
The Scorpio Illusion
The Apocalypse Watch (Essay)
The Matarese Countdown
The Prometheus Deception
Those looking for a list of the entire corpus associated with the Ludlum name may of course find it at Wikipedia's very thorough and well-organized page devoted to Ludlum's bibliography.
The Scarlatti Inheritance
The Osterman Weekend
The Matlock Paper (Review)
The Rhinemann Exchange
Trevayne (Review)
The Cry of the Halidon
The Road to Gandolfo
The Gemini Contenders (Review)
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Holcroft Covenant (Review)
The Matarese Circle
The Bourne Identity (Essay)
The Parsifal Mosaic (Review)
The Aquitaine Progression (Review)
The Bourne Supremacy (Review)
The Icarus Agenda
The Bourne Ultimatum (Review)
The Road to Omaha
The Scorpio Illusion
The Apocalypse Watch (Essay)
The Matarese Countdown
The Prometheus Deception
Those looking for a list of the entire corpus associated with the Ludlum name may of course find it at Wikipedia's very thorough and well-organized page devoted to Ludlum's bibliography.
What Was the Last "Real" Robert Ludlum Novel?
Robert Ludlum is one of those authors who has famously been more "prolific" in death than in life. Publishing 22 novels during his lifetime in the 30 year period between 1971 and 2001 (excluding the first of the formally "co-authored" Covert One series), five more "Robert Ludlum" novels were "posthumously published" in the next five years, while we have had up to three more "Ludlum novels" every year since. (Thus are there now some nineteen Jason Bourne novels written to exploit the success of the Matt Damon-starring films, with two more scheduled for release in 2025, along with a trickle of the associated Treadstone novels, and more of those Covert One books, and Paul Janson books, and apparently an attempt at yet another series with The Blackbriar Genesis.)
Of course, alert readers with even a minimum of experience of these things know that such works tend to be very obviously not "the real thing," and often not even different-but-good--just "phoned in," formula, stuff cashing in on the Big Name slapped on the cover. Indeed, I remember that reading that first Covert One book, The Hades Factor, I felt the difference from the very first paragraph. Consider how it set the scene in London for the opening of the story proper in Chapter One, telling us of a cold October rain upon the crush of traffic at the intersection of London's Brompton Road and Sloan Street on the weekend, while slipping in the sentence "The world economy was good, the shops were full, and New Labor was rocking no one's boat" before getting on to how tourists now came to the city all year round.
This laughable neoliberal benediction upon post-Thatcher London was very obviously not the writing of Ludlum, who to his credit never offered an opening this unintentionally silly--but it was very, very much of that era in which supposedly learned people took Thomas Friedman seriously. Still, it seems to me that such material was appearing under the Ludlum name long before such tripe as the first Covert One novel, with indeed The Scorpio Illusion already giving such an impression. A simple tale of an intelligence officer brought out of retirement to chase a terrorist intent on assassination, in spite of its element of mischief in high places, that book's story lacked the texture of his plots--and of Ludlum's much-criticized but nevertheless distinctive prose. The contrast was even more pointed in the follow-up The Apocalypse Watch, and on it went through the decade (with The Matarese Countdown, with The Prometheus Deception). Indeed, even if they were officially by Ludlum I wondered if the books were not actually written in significant part by others, or failing that heavily worked over for a more "contemporary" reader before they hit the market, as recently looking at The Road to Omaha it seems to me that that book, not just in spite of but because of its faults, was the last "real" Ludlum novel--while given its making a comedy rather than a thriller out of its story of political intrigue, the book before it, The Bourne Ultimatum, the last "real" Ludlum thriller.
Of course, alert readers with even a minimum of experience of these things know that such works tend to be very obviously not "the real thing," and often not even different-but-good--just "phoned in," formula, stuff cashing in on the Big Name slapped on the cover. Indeed, I remember that reading that first Covert One book, The Hades Factor, I felt the difference from the very first paragraph. Consider how it set the scene in London for the opening of the story proper in Chapter One, telling us of a cold October rain upon the crush of traffic at the intersection of London's Brompton Road and Sloan Street on the weekend, while slipping in the sentence "The world economy was good, the shops were full, and New Labor was rocking no one's boat" before getting on to how tourists now came to the city all year round.
This laughable neoliberal benediction upon post-Thatcher London was very obviously not the writing of Ludlum, who to his credit never offered an opening this unintentionally silly--but it was very, very much of that era in which supposedly learned people took Thomas Friedman seriously. Still, it seems to me that such material was appearing under the Ludlum name long before such tripe as the first Covert One novel, with indeed The Scorpio Illusion already giving such an impression. A simple tale of an intelligence officer brought out of retirement to chase a terrorist intent on assassination, in spite of its element of mischief in high places, that book's story lacked the texture of his plots--and of Ludlum's much-criticized but nevertheless distinctive prose. The contrast was even more pointed in the follow-up The Apocalypse Watch, and on it went through the decade (with The Matarese Countdown, with The Prometheus Deception). Indeed, even if they were officially by Ludlum I wondered if the books were not actually written in significant part by others, or failing that heavily worked over for a more "contemporary" reader before they hit the market, as recently looking at The Road to Omaha it seems to me that that book, not just in spite of but because of its faults, was the last "real" Ludlum novel--while given its making a comedy rather than a thriller out of its story of political intrigue, the book before it, The Bourne Ultimatum, the last "real" Ludlum thriller.
Remembering Be Kind Rewind
Michel Gondry has his first English-language feature in a decade out this summer, the musical Golden--a fact that doesn't seem to have been accorded much fanfare considering how much press he once got here, if you recall the fulsomeness of the praises for The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
As it happens that movie made less of an impression on me than his later Be Kind Rewind--to which the critics were much less kind than to Spotless Mind, I think unjustly. Granting that the film was not all it might have been, the fact that it centered on characters of a kind you don't see so much in contemporary American film, its quirkiness without pretension, its element of satire that could seem like biting the hand that fed it given how it treated Hollywood's studios and what they give the public (none of which could be expected to endear it to those who give the orders to les claqueurs), this was all manifest in its portrayal of everyday people turning from consuming the corporate crap shoveled out to them to making their own entertainment.
I'm not sure that the critics, or the general audience, have grown much more appreciative of the film since. However, in the era of generative AI, in which the day in which "everyone" can be their own auteur may seem to be fast approaching (as it is everyone can at least look like the auteur of their own film in the trailers they are sticking up on YouTube), that theme of the public ceasing to be passive consumers and becoming creators seems more relevant all the time.
As it happens that movie made less of an impression on me than his later Be Kind Rewind--to which the critics were much less kind than to Spotless Mind, I think unjustly. Granting that the film was not all it might have been, the fact that it centered on characters of a kind you don't see so much in contemporary American film, its quirkiness without pretension, its element of satire that could seem like biting the hand that fed it given how it treated Hollywood's studios and what they give the public (none of which could be expected to endear it to those who give the orders to les claqueurs), this was all manifest in its portrayal of everyday people turning from consuming the corporate crap shoveled out to them to making their own entertainment.
I'm not sure that the critics, or the general audience, have grown much more appreciative of the film since. However, in the era of generative AI, in which the day in which "everyone" can be their own auteur may seem to be fast approaching (as it is everyone can at least look like the auteur of their own film in the trailers they are sticking up on YouTube), that theme of the public ceasing to be passive consumers and becoming creators seems more relevant all the time.
Of Techno-Hype and Truthiness
"Medical researchers are making revolutionary breakthroughs every day!"
"Really? That's great. Can you tell me about some of these breakthroughs?"
"Um, uh . . . um, uh . . ."
"I know! That cure for cancer people have been waiting for since forever. They've got that now, right?"
"Not exactly."
"Oh. Then greatly improved treatments for cancer, so that we don't have to cut pieces off of people and beat them up with chemo, and lung cancer, for instance, isn't a death sentence."
"Well, no."
"I see. Then we've made such breakthroughs in the area of viral diseases. Like the common cold--"
"Not the last time I checked."
"Okay, so we're not close to curing viral diseases, and maybe not so much better at treating them. But what about vaccines? We've improved those so that you don't, for instance, have to keep taking them every time a virus mutates. So you don't have to get a new flu shot every fall. Right?"
"No, we haven't done that either."
"Gene therapy--I remember how people were talking about that like it was going to be all over the place."
"Not quite . . ."
"Printed organs, so those who need a new heart or a new liver don't need human donors."
"Alas . . ."
"I remember hearing about plans for reservatrol-based anti-aging drugs that sounded like they would have had them on the market years ago . . ."
"Anti-aging drugs? I can't even guess where you got that one."
"New antibiotics, to help with those disease-causing bacteria that have developed resistance to the old antibiotics--"
"No."
"Okay. Then at least drugs for the conditions that have been treatable for years must be cheaper and more readily available than before. I'll bet drug prices have just fallen through the floor, and people's health insurance premiums and copays with them--"
"You wish."
"So then what are the big breakthroughs you're talking about?"
"Um, uh . . . medical researchers are making revolutionary breakthroughs every day!"
So does the conversation tend to go if anyone tries to point out the difference between the hype and the actual rate of technological progress with, well, almost everyone. They "know" that amazing progress must be ongoing--but they can't name specifics, because in many areas there aren't any, those grand promises that hack journalists make sound as if they've already happened (but for the ass-covering "may" with which they qualify their statement) never really coming to pass, the goods never materializing, but the constant promises leaving their impression, producing that state of expectancy. And so they don't let the lack of evidence dissuade them from their belief, the "truthiness" of the proposition in their minds absolutely invulnerable to questioning by any interlocutor they are likely to meet.
Alas, truthiness and truth are two different and often entirely opposed things.
"Really? That's great. Can you tell me about some of these breakthroughs?"
"Um, uh . . . um, uh . . ."
"I know! That cure for cancer people have been waiting for since forever. They've got that now, right?"
"Not exactly."
"Oh. Then greatly improved treatments for cancer, so that we don't have to cut pieces off of people and beat them up with chemo, and lung cancer, for instance, isn't a death sentence."
"Well, no."
"I see. Then we've made such breakthroughs in the area of viral diseases. Like the common cold--"
"Not the last time I checked."
"Okay, so we're not close to curing viral diseases, and maybe not so much better at treating them. But what about vaccines? We've improved those so that you don't, for instance, have to keep taking them every time a virus mutates. So you don't have to get a new flu shot every fall. Right?"
"No, we haven't done that either."
"Gene therapy--I remember how people were talking about that like it was going to be all over the place."
"Not quite . . ."
"Printed organs, so those who need a new heart or a new liver don't need human donors."
"Alas . . ."
"I remember hearing about plans for reservatrol-based anti-aging drugs that sounded like they would have had them on the market years ago . . ."
"Anti-aging drugs? I can't even guess where you got that one."
"New antibiotics, to help with those disease-causing bacteria that have developed resistance to the old antibiotics--"
"No."
"Okay. Then at least drugs for the conditions that have been treatable for years must be cheaper and more readily available than before. I'll bet drug prices have just fallen through the floor, and people's health insurance premiums and copays with them--"
"You wish."
"So then what are the big breakthroughs you're talking about?"
"Um, uh . . . medical researchers are making revolutionary breakthroughs every day!"
So does the conversation tend to go if anyone tries to point out the difference between the hype and the actual rate of technological progress with, well, almost everyone. They "know" that amazing progress must be ongoing--but they can't name specifics, because in many areas there aren't any, those grand promises that hack journalists make sound as if they've already happened (but for the ass-covering "may" with which they qualify their statement) never really coming to pass, the goods never materializing, but the constant promises leaving their impression, producing that state of expectancy. And so they don't let the lack of evidence dissuade them from their belief, the "truthiness" of the proposition in their minds absolutely invulnerable to questioning by any interlocutor they are likely to meet.
Alas, truthiness and truth are two different and often entirely opposed things.
My Posts on Madame Web's Box Office Performance (Collected)
During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of Madame Web I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.
1/19/24
BoxOffice Pro's Prediction for Madame Web is Out (and Not Looking Good)
Boxoffice Pro has produced its first long-range projection for Madame Web. Right now their tracking-based estimate is that the movie will open to $25-$35 million and have a final North American gross in the $56-$101 million range.
This is a long way from the openings for other Valentine's Day weekend superhero releases like Black Panther (a whopping $202 million in just its first three days of the long weekend in 2018) or Deadpool ($132 million in 2016). It's even a long way from what the much-maligned Ben Affleck-starring Daredevil scored two highly inflationary decades ago (pulling in $40 million on the same weekend back in 2003, which is equal to $67 million today)--and one might add, the success of its fellow Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise Venom (whose second film's $90 million opening back in late 2021 was a milestone in the box office's post-pandemic recovery).
Still, this is a relatively low-budgeted film about a comparatively obscure character put out there in a time of declining, not rising, prospects for the genre, without a particular hook or gimmick (Deadpool's beat-the-audience-over-the-head-with-its-obnoxious-postmodernism, the political claims made for Black Panther, etc.), with all that implies for what constitute reasonable expectations. (Indeed, looking at the numbers and the rest I find myself thinking of how Madame Web compares to the comparably priced and better-known Batgirl--which, of course, the WBD decided not to release in the end, apparently in favor of taking the tax break.) It does not help that the movie seems to have got off on the wrong foot publicity-wise--the consequences of which The Marvels made all too clear last year.
The result is that Madame Web having a box office performance in the vicinity of Blue Beetle or The Marvels seems eminently plausible--while I have a far easier time picturing the movie doing worse than doing much better than what BoxOffice Pro projects, something to keep in mind as they update their projection over the coming weeks.
2/2/24
Madame Web's Boxoffice Pro Forecast, Updated
The week's Boxoffice Pro long-range box office forecast is out--with bad news for Madame Web. The already low expectations for its opening have fallen further--from a weak $25-$35 million over Valentine's Day weekend to a weaker $20-$29 million. In the process the $100 million bar that Boxoffice Pro calculated as within the range of the possible two weeks ago has just edged out of reach--a fairly impressive multiplier (3.5+) required to get the movie anywhere near that from the opening now projected for it.
Alas, a drop like this in the weeks before the movie's release often goes with the actual release being worse. At the moment I have little inclination to speculate too precisely--but I can fairly easily picture the movie falling short of $50 million in the worst-case scenario, rather more easily than I can picture it breaking the $100 million barrier at this point.
Hollywood has had a lousy few months since Barbie and Oppenheimer finished their parts in bucking up its performance, and is heading into a year for which expectations are muted relative even to an ultimately underwhelming 2023 (already followed by an underwhelming January 2024)--and this particular film will not do much to improve the prospect.
2/15/24
Madame Web's Projection Slips Again
NOTE: I was delayed in putting this one up, but as it was already written and relevant to the more current post put up today, here it is.
Boxoffice Pro's first published long-range forecast for Madame Web (January 18) had the movie making $25-$35 million over the three-day Friday-to-Sunday period of Valentine's Day weekend--a far cry from not just what a Black Panther or a Deadpool made over the same time frame, but even what Daredevil did back in 2003.
The figure was already clearly slipping a week ago (February 1) with a $25-$35 million projection down to $20-$29 million last week.
Now (February 8) the projection is down to $15-$24 million--a 30 to 40 percent slippage of the range as a whole from what had initially been expected. The projection for the overall gross of the film has fallen with it, though not by as much. From $56-$101 million it has fallen to $42-$78 million.
This will, of course, be the publication's long-range forecast, the movie to be covered by the weekend forecast next week, as that is when it will actually hit theaters. But given the trend of prior weeks it seems plausible that there will be at least a little more slippage--and as I have often found, when the forecast keeps falling, there is a fair chance that the movie will do even less well than the bottom range of the forecast. (Recall, for instance, Expendables 4--a movie to which Madame Web seems a lot closer in level of anticipation and prospects than even last year's superhero flops.)
The result is that at this stage of things I think the film will be doing well even to gross $15 million, and would be much more surprised if it broke the $50 million mark than if it finished its run under it.
2/15/24
Madame Web: The Opening Weekend Forecast From Boxoffice Pro
Madame Web hit theaters Valentine's Day. Right now Boxoffice Pro, the projections from which continue to edge down in the way seen over the last two weeks, have the movie making $14 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, and a mere $20 million in its first five days of release. A drop even from the $15-$24 million the publication projected for the Friday-to-Sunday period last week, it seems to me that the movie will have a tough time getting to the $50 million mark, let alone up over it--the more in as I see little evidence that word-of-mouth will save this movie. The Rotten Tomatoes score is actually 18 percent for this one--while just in case the reader buys into all the sneering about the calculation of such scores, it seems entirely consistent with the evident reaction to go by this verbal survey of their assessments, while this review over at Polygon seems representative, if also better-written, than most.)
Considering all this let us acknowledge that there is a lot less riding on the success of Madame Web than was riding on, for instance, the success of Ant-Man 3 this same weekend last year. It is a much smaller production than that $200 million spectacle, with not nearly so important a function within its franchise than the launch of the MCU's "Phase Five" that movie was accorded--all as the bar for success is a lot lower these days. (Remember, last year Ant-Man 3 was judged a flop for bringing in a bit less than a half billion dollars--while by the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around numbers like that looked positively enviable.) Still, it will hardly be what Sony is looking to hear as it engages in what the critics are denouncing as a cynical yet incompetent attempt to create a new cinematic universe around the success of the consistently most salable superhero of all as the genre falls apart, while that seems the case simply because they seem to have lost all thought of anything but sticking with the increasingly flop-ridden path they followed in an increasingly remote heyday for the field.
2/20/24
Madame Web's Opening Weekend: A Few Thoughts
Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast for Madame Web anticipated a three-day (Friday-to-Sunday) gross in the $25-$35 million range.
Over the following four weeks the figure dropped repeatedly to more like $14-$20 million on the day of release--a forty percent fall. Meanwhile the film's six-day gross between its Valentine's Day release (February 14) and the conclusion of the four-day President's Day weekend (February 19) looked as if it would fall short of the bottom end of that initial projection for just the three-day period.
As it happened this was pretty close to the actual course of the debut. Over the Friday-to-Sunday period Madame Web pulled in about $15 million, and $26 million over the whole six day period.
For comparison purposes, Ant-Man 3 made $120 million in just the Friday-to-Monday period on this same weekend back in 2023--five times as much.
That film, considerably better-received than Madame Web, saw its legs buckle very quickly, the movie grossing 56 percent of its entire take by President's Day. Especially in light of its even longer opening (six days instead of four) and word-of-mouth being so unlikely to save this one (the Rotten Tomatoes score that was so appallingly low last week has actually fallen further), I do not expect this movie to do much better than that--with the result that (again) I would be very surprised if it got very far past $50 million--much more so than if it fell short of $50 million.*
The story hardly seems following much further than that--but there does seem to me something worth saying about the remarks of the critics, specifically their function of damage control reminiscent of what we saw with Captain Marvel 2. "Yes," they say, "this movie is a failure, and not simply because of Russian robots and trolls and so forth, but because it is just not a very good movie. And yes, we've had a lot of this with superhero movies lately. So those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies."
Pay special attention to that last part: those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies. Such remarks have as their function heading off any suggestion that the situation has anything to do with a genre that has been exploited very intensively for a very long time being run down by this point ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), let alone the model of filmmaking by which Hollywood has lived so long being in crisis--just the studios getting complacent, sloppy, flabby. They just need to get off the couch and diet and get back in shape!
As I have argued again and again, I see abundant reason to think the trouble goes way, way deeper than that. But just as the claqueurs will not tell the public that, the courtiers to the Hollywood elite will not tell their patrons that. The question, then, is whether that elite is intelligent enough not to trust its sycophants.
Alas, "intelligent" and "Hollywood" have not deservedly been spoken in the same sentence very much for a very long time--all as, sadly, the culture of the elite C. Wright Mills described so well favors always speaking "to the well-blunted point" and "soften[ing] the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," rather than facing the facts and thinking hard about how to really deal with them, with results we see all around us every day in this Age of Polycrisis. Hollywood shows no sign of being an exception to that unhappy pattern.
* Last week the critics' score was 18 percent; now it is 12 percent. Meanwhile the audience score is 56 percent. By comparison Ant-Man 3's less than brilliant scores were 46 and 82 percent, respectively.
2/27/24
Madame Web's Second Weekend
Following its underwhelming Valentine's Day debut Boxoffice Pro predicted a 59 percent drop in box office gross for Madame Web from its first weekend to its second, leaving it with about $6.3 million collected and a total of $35.5 million in the till after twelve days.
This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.
Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)
4/7/24
Checking in with Madame Web
Madame Web came out over Valentine's/President's Day weekend to a very weak, if not really worse than expected, audience response.
How do things stand now?
The film, which was in 27th place at the box office on the weekend of March 22-24, finished up well short of the $50 million mark domestically (under $44 million actually), and did not do much better internationally--pulling in just under $56 million there, to leave its global total a bit below $100 million at last report from Box Office Mojo. It is not inconceivable that the movie will somehow make the remaining $800,000 or so to break the $100 million barrier, and thus technically be a "$100 million hit," but that just does not mean what it used to--especially for a franchise superhero film, and at that, one from the Spider-Man universe.
One may add to this that the film's audience scores are 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.6 on Internet Movie Data Base.
The result is that in contrast with those role films that manage to triumph over a poor start (like last year's Elemental), this movie's flop status still stands--and shows every sign of continuing to stand, with all that implies for any schemes for spinning off other movies from this one, the Sony Spider-Man Universe that already took a hit rather than scored one with 2022's Morbius, every other scheme for squeezing more money out of audiences through the use of less well-known superheroes in lower-key films, and the superhero genre generally, though of course, a good many such efforts are doubtless locked in, and the fact remains that Hollywood has no plans for what to do with itself as its longstanding model of filmmaking becomes untenable. Except, perhaps, to bet on mighty Artificial Intelligences somehow coming to its rescue, the same as the rest of the business community these days (no matter how much certain billionaires would have us believe otherwise as they flog silly Frankenstein complex stuff on TV).
1/19/24
BoxOffice Pro's Prediction for Madame Web is Out (and Not Looking Good)
Boxoffice Pro has produced its first long-range projection for Madame Web. Right now their tracking-based estimate is that the movie will open to $25-$35 million and have a final North American gross in the $56-$101 million range.
This is a long way from the openings for other Valentine's Day weekend superhero releases like Black Panther (a whopping $202 million in just its first three days of the long weekend in 2018) or Deadpool ($132 million in 2016). It's even a long way from what the much-maligned Ben Affleck-starring Daredevil scored two highly inflationary decades ago (pulling in $40 million on the same weekend back in 2003, which is equal to $67 million today)--and one might add, the success of its fellow Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise Venom (whose second film's $90 million opening back in late 2021 was a milestone in the box office's post-pandemic recovery).
Still, this is a relatively low-budgeted film about a comparatively obscure character put out there in a time of declining, not rising, prospects for the genre, without a particular hook or gimmick (Deadpool's beat-the-audience-over-the-head-with-its-obnoxious-postmodernism, the political claims made for Black Panther, etc.), with all that implies for what constitute reasonable expectations. (Indeed, looking at the numbers and the rest I find myself thinking of how Madame Web compares to the comparably priced and better-known Batgirl--which, of course, the WBD decided not to release in the end, apparently in favor of taking the tax break.) It does not help that the movie seems to have got off on the wrong foot publicity-wise--the consequences of which The Marvels made all too clear last year.
The result is that Madame Web having a box office performance in the vicinity of Blue Beetle or The Marvels seems eminently plausible--while I have a far easier time picturing the movie doing worse than doing much better than what BoxOffice Pro projects, something to keep in mind as they update their projection over the coming weeks.
2/2/24
Madame Web's Boxoffice Pro Forecast, Updated
The week's Boxoffice Pro long-range box office forecast is out--with bad news for Madame Web. The already low expectations for its opening have fallen further--from a weak $25-$35 million over Valentine's Day weekend to a weaker $20-$29 million. In the process the $100 million bar that Boxoffice Pro calculated as within the range of the possible two weeks ago has just edged out of reach--a fairly impressive multiplier (3.5+) required to get the movie anywhere near that from the opening now projected for it.
Alas, a drop like this in the weeks before the movie's release often goes with the actual release being worse. At the moment I have little inclination to speculate too precisely--but I can fairly easily picture the movie falling short of $50 million in the worst-case scenario, rather more easily than I can picture it breaking the $100 million barrier at this point.
Hollywood has had a lousy few months since Barbie and Oppenheimer finished their parts in bucking up its performance, and is heading into a year for which expectations are muted relative even to an ultimately underwhelming 2023 (already followed by an underwhelming January 2024)--and this particular film will not do much to improve the prospect.
2/15/24
Madame Web's Projection Slips Again
NOTE: I was delayed in putting this one up, but as it was already written and relevant to the more current post put up today, here it is.
Boxoffice Pro's first published long-range forecast for Madame Web (January 18) had the movie making $25-$35 million over the three-day Friday-to-Sunday period of Valentine's Day weekend--a far cry from not just what a Black Panther or a Deadpool made over the same time frame, but even what Daredevil did back in 2003.
The figure was already clearly slipping a week ago (February 1) with a $25-$35 million projection down to $20-$29 million last week.
Now (February 8) the projection is down to $15-$24 million--a 30 to 40 percent slippage of the range as a whole from what had initially been expected. The projection for the overall gross of the film has fallen with it, though not by as much. From $56-$101 million it has fallen to $42-$78 million.
This will, of course, be the publication's long-range forecast, the movie to be covered by the weekend forecast next week, as that is when it will actually hit theaters. But given the trend of prior weeks it seems plausible that there will be at least a little more slippage--and as I have often found, when the forecast keeps falling, there is a fair chance that the movie will do even less well than the bottom range of the forecast. (Recall, for instance, Expendables 4--a movie to which Madame Web seems a lot closer in level of anticipation and prospects than even last year's superhero flops.)
The result is that at this stage of things I think the film will be doing well even to gross $15 million, and would be much more surprised if it broke the $50 million mark than if it finished its run under it.
2/15/24
Madame Web: The Opening Weekend Forecast From Boxoffice Pro
Madame Web hit theaters Valentine's Day. Right now Boxoffice Pro, the projections from which continue to edge down in the way seen over the last two weeks, have the movie making $14 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, and a mere $20 million in its first five days of release. A drop even from the $15-$24 million the publication projected for the Friday-to-Sunday period last week, it seems to me that the movie will have a tough time getting to the $50 million mark, let alone up over it--the more in as I see little evidence that word-of-mouth will save this movie. The Rotten Tomatoes score is actually 18 percent for this one--while just in case the reader buys into all the sneering about the calculation of such scores, it seems entirely consistent with the evident reaction to go by this verbal survey of their assessments, while this review over at Polygon seems representative, if also better-written, than most.)
Considering all this let us acknowledge that there is a lot less riding on the success of Madame Web than was riding on, for instance, the success of Ant-Man 3 this same weekend last year. It is a much smaller production than that $200 million spectacle, with not nearly so important a function within its franchise than the launch of the MCU's "Phase Five" that movie was accorded--all as the bar for success is a lot lower these days. (Remember, last year Ant-Man 3 was judged a flop for bringing in a bit less than a half billion dollars--while by the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around numbers like that looked positively enviable.) Still, it will hardly be what Sony is looking to hear as it engages in what the critics are denouncing as a cynical yet incompetent attempt to create a new cinematic universe around the success of the consistently most salable superhero of all as the genre falls apart, while that seems the case simply because they seem to have lost all thought of anything but sticking with the increasingly flop-ridden path they followed in an increasingly remote heyday for the field.
2/20/24
Madame Web's Opening Weekend: A Few Thoughts
Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast for Madame Web anticipated a three-day (Friday-to-Sunday) gross in the $25-$35 million range.
Over the following four weeks the figure dropped repeatedly to more like $14-$20 million on the day of release--a forty percent fall. Meanwhile the film's six-day gross between its Valentine's Day release (February 14) and the conclusion of the four-day President's Day weekend (February 19) looked as if it would fall short of the bottom end of that initial projection for just the three-day period.
As it happened this was pretty close to the actual course of the debut. Over the Friday-to-Sunday period Madame Web pulled in about $15 million, and $26 million over the whole six day period.
For comparison purposes, Ant-Man 3 made $120 million in just the Friday-to-Monday period on this same weekend back in 2023--five times as much.
That film, considerably better-received than Madame Web, saw its legs buckle very quickly, the movie grossing 56 percent of its entire take by President's Day. Especially in light of its even longer opening (six days instead of four) and word-of-mouth being so unlikely to save this one (the Rotten Tomatoes score that was so appallingly low last week has actually fallen further), I do not expect this movie to do much better than that--with the result that (again) I would be very surprised if it got very far past $50 million--much more so than if it fell short of $50 million.*
The story hardly seems following much further than that--but there does seem to me something worth saying about the remarks of the critics, specifically their function of damage control reminiscent of what we saw with Captain Marvel 2. "Yes," they say, "this movie is a failure, and not simply because of Russian robots and trolls and so forth, but because it is just not a very good movie. And yes, we've had a lot of this with superhero movies lately. So those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies."
Pay special attention to that last part: those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies. Such remarks have as their function heading off any suggestion that the situation has anything to do with a genre that has been exploited very intensively for a very long time being run down by this point ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), let alone the model of filmmaking by which Hollywood has lived so long being in crisis--just the studios getting complacent, sloppy, flabby. They just need to get off the couch and diet and get back in shape!
As I have argued again and again, I see abundant reason to think the trouble goes way, way deeper than that. But just as the claqueurs will not tell the public that, the courtiers to the Hollywood elite will not tell their patrons that. The question, then, is whether that elite is intelligent enough not to trust its sycophants.
Alas, "intelligent" and "Hollywood" have not deservedly been spoken in the same sentence very much for a very long time--all as, sadly, the culture of the elite C. Wright Mills described so well favors always speaking "to the well-blunted point" and "soften[ing] the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," rather than facing the facts and thinking hard about how to really deal with them, with results we see all around us every day in this Age of Polycrisis. Hollywood shows no sign of being an exception to that unhappy pattern.
* Last week the critics' score was 18 percent; now it is 12 percent. Meanwhile the audience score is 56 percent. By comparison Ant-Man 3's less than brilliant scores were 46 and 82 percent, respectively.
2/27/24
Madame Web's Second Weekend
Following its underwhelming Valentine's Day debut Boxoffice Pro predicted a 59 percent drop in box office gross for Madame Web from its first weekend to its second, leaving it with about $6.3 million collected and a total of $35.5 million in the till after twelve days.
This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.
Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)
4/7/24
Checking in with Madame Web
Madame Web came out over Valentine's/President's Day weekend to a very weak, if not really worse than expected, audience response.
How do things stand now?
The film, which was in 27th place at the box office on the weekend of March 22-24, finished up well short of the $50 million mark domestically (under $44 million actually), and did not do much better internationally--pulling in just under $56 million there, to leave its global total a bit below $100 million at last report from Box Office Mojo. It is not inconceivable that the movie will somehow make the remaining $800,000 or so to break the $100 million barrier, and thus technically be a "$100 million hit," but that just does not mean what it used to--especially for a franchise superhero film, and at that, one from the Spider-Man universe.
One may add to this that the film's audience scores are 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.6 on Internet Movie Data Base.
The result is that in contrast with those role films that manage to triumph over a poor start (like last year's Elemental), this movie's flop status still stands--and shows every sign of continuing to stand, with all that implies for any schemes for spinning off other movies from this one, the Sony Spider-Man Universe that already took a hit rather than scored one with 2022's Morbius, every other scheme for squeezing more money out of audiences through the use of less well-known superheroes in lower-key films, and the superhero genre generally, though of course, a good many such efforts are doubtless locked in, and the fact remains that Hollywood has no plans for what to do with itself as its longstanding model of filmmaking becomes untenable. Except, perhaps, to bet on mighty Artificial Intelligences somehow coming to its rescue, the same as the rest of the business community these days (no matter how much certain billionaires would have us believe otherwise as they flog silly Frankenstein complex stuff on TV).
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