The Drama Over It Ends With Us Just Isn't Ending

Remarking It Ends With Us from the standpoint of its box office prospects last summer I saw the film as worth discussing for two reasons--namely what it may indicate about the prospects for translating bestsellers into cinematic blockbusters (shakier these days, I think, for some telling and important reasons), and for what seemed to me Hollywood's most viable way forward, making movies with a deep appeal to a slice of the audience (while holding the budget down) rather than aiming at something mildly appealing to the broad public (and hoping this will permit a meaningful profit on a colossal outlay). Consistent with my expectations on both counts the movie was not a record-crushing box office behemoth, but it showed every evidence of proving very profitable on the basis I discussed (the $25 million production pulling in over $350 million globally, almost as much as the $200 million Twisters, with all that implies for the profit margin).

Of course, that was not an analysis in which Hollywood, or its courtiers in the entertainment press, were much interested, insistent as they are on sticking to business as usual (such that there was far more interest in the box office success of Ends With Us star Blake Lively's husband's movie Deadpool as validating their preferences--very questionably as that movie's success too can seem to be a triumph won by appealing deeply to a specific demographic). Now the box office success of the movie, and whatever implications it may have for the industry, are also being overshadowed by the legal war between the costars, the associated enterprises and everyone else somehow caught up in this (the length of which list of personages may be as absurd as it is frightening).

This scandal/legal battle is the kind of thing I usually try to avoid writing about--and would have not even acknowledged here were it not for the fact that I had taken such an interest in the film's box office performance and its implications, and frankly, the role of the New York Times in this mess. I make no pretense to sorting out the claims and counterclaims of Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Baldoni et. al.. However, I certainly think it possible to say something about the paper's conduct--for if the Times' handling of such affairs is far from the most serious of the malfeasance on which they engage on a daily basis, the paper, like the rest of the mainstream media, displays its worst tendencies when faced with the mix of celebrity, scandal and sex, while it is harder and harder to dismiss this malfeasance as mere tabloid crap given the way such forces have exploited the cultural politics generally involved in them.

Considering the Times' jumping into the fray with its December 21, 2024 story "'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine" accusing Mr. Baldoni of having deployed such a "smear machine" against Ms. Lively from that perspective I will not say that the paper has necessarily wronged Mr. Baldoni. But as Theodore Dreiser reminded his readers again and again not only the media's blatant lies but its highly selective truth-telling as well are apt to align with other agendas less obvious to the public. In this case what seems to be going on is that the Times hastened to seize on (yet another) Hollywood harassment scandal because it fit in with, and seemed to reinforce, the now eight year old (and recently flagging) #MeToo campaign. (Indeed, it seems relevant that Megan Twohey, who coauthored one of the two pieces on Harvey Weinstein that got the ball rolling, had the byline on this one too.) And however sincere others may be about the campaign's causes, the fact remains that for the media this has been above all a matter of pouring gasoline on the flames of the neverending kulturkampf, their doing which has gone into overdrive since the election this past November. Escalating their longtime gaslighting of the American public with smarmy "You've never had it so good" so "Don't worry, be happy" propaganda, and slighting the historic mismanagement of the Democratic Party's dumpster fire of a campaign (indeed, such mismanagement that some suspect still worse than mere mismanagement here), they sell the narrative that the outcome last November "It Wasn't the Economy, Stupid" in part by insisting that it was instead about the very divisions in the country whose exacerbation they pursue so relentlessly to divert that part of the public they cannot fool from the hard realities of the twenty-first century.