For years now the press has buzzed about an upcoming "Bond 26"--almost entirely on the basis of no actual information, instead simply recycling stale franchise gossip, offering speculations about the usual subjects ("Will Henry Cavill be the next James Bond?" they ask for the mind-numbing billionth time), and little "If I Were the Studio Boss"-type "think" pieces. A thin substitute for actual news, this clickbaity crap got very, very wearisome indeed. However those who follow the matter finally did get some real news this past February in the report that Amazon MGM had finally acquired complete creative control over the franchise, cutting the Broccoli family-Michael Wilson combination out of the picture entirely, after which there were at least semi-solid reports of development of a new Bond film being "fast-tracked" for production and "development" underway under the supervision of Amy Pascal and David Heyman with an eye to getting said film into theaters before the end of 2027.
Previously considering the lack of movement on the part of the franchise-runners in the over three year period since the release of the last Bond film (the Daniel Craig era capper No Time to Die) my guess had been that the executives were showing some caution and sitting tight given the huge question marks hanging over the film market since the pandemic, and what, after things started settling in 2023, we have seen of the post-pandemic market. This has been a significantly shrunken market for theatrical releases much less receptive to "tentpole"-type blockbusters than was the case a decade ago, where movies still can make big money but audiences have to be really excited for them if they are to come out at all, with the Bond films' standing here shaky in light of No Time to Die's softer gross and particular underperformance with the young, encouraging them to bide their time with this one, letting the field lie fallow, and given how insistent they were on coming back, at least trying to do so with something that a sizable audience would "really want."
Of course, as I have myself remarked, the studio bosses have been extremely resistant to these lessons, and now I suspect that those in charge of 007 were no exceptions to that pattern--that the delay has not been a reflection of the Suits showing some well-warranted circumspection about another go with another (let us be frank here) absolutely unnecessary iteration of a thoroughly exhausted franchise that could easily be left in the past, but rather the usual fight for control and egos and general stupidity that are the real "skill set" of the managerial class sitting atop the commanding heights of the economy here as well as everywhere else. This is, if anything, affirmed by the choice of producers for the project. In giving ex-Sony Boss Amy Pascal (who did as boss of that studio preside in some degree over prior Bond films) a closer involvement in this new film Amazon is bringing on board a toxic vulgarian unredeemed by any great competence. (As Sony CEO she actually seemed to have less grasp of the direction her own business was moving in than a casual reader of the Penske publications, while if the Suits' courtiers prefer to talk her up as having had a part in the success of Spider-Man--perhaps--we can also credit her with believing Will "The Slap" Smith's After Earth was the next Star Wars.) Coproducing the film with her is a dude who spent the last decade giving the world the profoundly ill-conceived cash grab that was the ultimately failed Fantastic Beasts series (in which, rather ominously for Bond, he banked on the affections of an aging audience that the producers took too much for granted as they signally failed to win over the younger crowd on the way to disappointing and dwindling ticket sales).
No, there was no sign of a learning process here, and the only thing about this whole situation that surprises me, really, is that I gave the folks running this show the benefit of the doubt, in this case leading me to have likely overestimated them. Moreover, none of this seems to me to bode well for the franchise at present, the more in as those who would make a successful Bond film in this market (or for that matter, any action film from a long-running franchise in this market) have such a big and difficult task on their hands. Of course, they may yet surprise us. But that's just it--their making a movie that really succeeds, artistically or commercially, would be a surprise, especially to the extent that the figures named here are able to claim any credit for said success.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
Why Don't Kurosawa's Films with Contemporary Settings Get More Attention?
Recently Hunter Derensis published a piece with Responsible Statecraft looking back at Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear--his drama about a family head suffering from anxiety about the very real prospect of nuclear war. As Derensis notes, the movie "is considered one of Kurosawa's minor works, lost in the shadow of his masterpieces." While some of those masterpieces have contemporary settings (Ikiru was sufficiently well-regarded to get a remake just a couple of years ago by Oliver Hermanus as Living), any listing of these, at least in the English-speaking world (and certainly in the United States), is apt to be dominated by Kurosawa's samurai-era films, the many films Kurosawa made about modern life, some of which are, again, acknowledged masterpieces, much, much less discussed. Just why is that?.
I can think of three reasons.
1. Here interest in Kurosawa, even among the relatively sophisticated and none too large group of people who would recognize the name, is substantially an extension of their interest in some very popular American/Western movies, which Kurosawa's films have been credited with inspiring. I suspect that more people know Kurosawa as the maker of a movie supposed to have inspired Star Wars than for any other reason (The Hidden Fortress). They also know him as the maker of a movie that inspired The Magnificent Seven, and thus in a way "grandfather" to innumerable direct and indirect derivatives of that move in its turn, all the way down to Rebel Moon (Seven Samurai). And they know him for having made still another movie that inspired For a Few Dollars, and the "Man with no Name" trilogy (Yojimbo). And their interest pretty much comes to an end there (the more in as an occasional Living is the kind of movie that gets Oscar nominations rather than breaks box office records).
2. Not only Americans but even American film buffs see comparatively little foreign film, and when they do mainly take an interest when a foreign movie very obviously offers something Hollywood isn't giving them at home. Admittedly serious drama about contemporary life has probably never been Hollywood's forte, but samurai sword-fighting is more obviously "exotic." Possibly reinforcing this is (to go by that whole Goethe-Schiller-Brecht theory about the division between the experience of the "epic" and the "dramatic") their finding it hard to get into a contemporary drama when it is obviously set in a foreign culture, and uses another language and requires them to read subtitles (especially as Americans, and Anglosphere film consumers generally, probably do less of that than their foreign counterparts), whereas this interferes less with their kicking back and enjoying an adventure set in a time long past in a distant place.
3. American critics may well be put off by what Kurosawa does with his contemporary dramas--certainly in a film like the nuclear war-themed I Live in Fear. Consider the matter this way: how many American movies of the 1950s addressed the theme of nuclear war, and especially the psychological effect of an ever-present danger of nuclear war on "ordinary" people, in so direct a fashion? Without any science fiction-al trappings or disaster movie spectacle, but rather contemporary drama, like this? (Especially if, as Derensis suggests we do, we rule out the very recent Oppenheimer, which not incidentally had such an unconventional method of presentation, and which the idiots in the media so often insisted, in spite of director Christopher Nolan's own explicit statements in substantive interviews, was not about nuclear war, but instead "AI.") Had there been such a film the critics would not have been friendly, trotting out the great "art lie" that still stands a century after Upton Sinclair Mammonart about "politics" being incompatible with the "true art" that necessarily confines itself to "timeless truths" (i.e. the prejudices of the idiot of a critic in question), and sneer at the results. Giving it a second look today they might well do the same--as usual when they behave in the conventional ways, doing Kurosawa's film an injustice, and leaving us culturally the poorer as they fail in their duty once more.
I can think of three reasons.
1. Here interest in Kurosawa, even among the relatively sophisticated and none too large group of people who would recognize the name, is substantially an extension of their interest in some very popular American/Western movies, which Kurosawa's films have been credited with inspiring. I suspect that more people know Kurosawa as the maker of a movie supposed to have inspired Star Wars than for any other reason (The Hidden Fortress). They also know him as the maker of a movie that inspired The Magnificent Seven, and thus in a way "grandfather" to innumerable direct and indirect derivatives of that move in its turn, all the way down to Rebel Moon (Seven Samurai). And they know him for having made still another movie that inspired For a Few Dollars, and the "Man with no Name" trilogy (Yojimbo). And their interest pretty much comes to an end there (the more in as an occasional Living is the kind of movie that gets Oscar nominations rather than breaks box office records).
2. Not only Americans but even American film buffs see comparatively little foreign film, and when they do mainly take an interest when a foreign movie very obviously offers something Hollywood isn't giving them at home. Admittedly serious drama about contemporary life has probably never been Hollywood's forte, but samurai sword-fighting is more obviously "exotic." Possibly reinforcing this is (to go by that whole Goethe-Schiller-Brecht theory about the division between the experience of the "epic" and the "dramatic") their finding it hard to get into a contemporary drama when it is obviously set in a foreign culture, and uses another language and requires them to read subtitles (especially as Americans, and Anglosphere film consumers generally, probably do less of that than their foreign counterparts), whereas this interferes less with their kicking back and enjoying an adventure set in a time long past in a distant place.
3. American critics may well be put off by what Kurosawa does with his contemporary dramas--certainly in a film like the nuclear war-themed I Live in Fear. Consider the matter this way: how many American movies of the 1950s addressed the theme of nuclear war, and especially the psychological effect of an ever-present danger of nuclear war on "ordinary" people, in so direct a fashion? Without any science fiction-al trappings or disaster movie spectacle, but rather contemporary drama, like this? (Especially if, as Derensis suggests we do, we rule out the very recent Oppenheimer, which not incidentally had such an unconventional method of presentation, and which the idiots in the media so often insisted, in spite of director Christopher Nolan's own explicit statements in substantive interviews, was not about nuclear war, but instead "AI.") Had there been such a film the critics would not have been friendly, trotting out the great "art lie" that still stands a century after Upton Sinclair Mammonart about "politics" being incompatible with the "true art" that necessarily confines itself to "timeless truths" (i.e. the prejudices of the idiot of a critic in question), and sneer at the results. Giving it a second look today they might well do the same--as usual when they behave in the conventional ways, doing Kurosawa's film an injustice, and leaving us culturally the poorer as they fail in their duty once more.
Robert Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript, and the Rise of Hitler
Robert Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript revolves around the pursuit of J. Edgar Hoover's secret files by competing members of America's "secret government," Inver Brass--and Peter Chancellor's haplessly finding himself in the middle of that deadly contest. However, Chancellor's first encounter with Inver Brass was over a quite different document, an actual "Chancellor Manuscript"--his doctoral dissertation. The reason why Inver Brass took an interest in such a seemingly mundane matter was its subject, Chancellor's historical research into the causes of World War II having revealed the role of American business in the building up of the Nazis, without which they would never have been in a position to pursue their war of aggression. ("The multinational corporations," the "colossi of international finance," a category that included "A number of the most honored industrial names in America" "could not feed the Nazi wolf pack fast enough," as they "conveniently overlooked," "obscured," "tolerated, ultimately accepted" the "wolf pack's objectives and methods" for the sake of "the swiftly rising lines on profit-and-loss charts.") The folks at Inver Brass meant to see that the dissertation was not accepted--and the findings not published--and Chancellor denied his academic career with all to which it might lead, for they saw it as part of their function "to protect men and institutions from the moral indictments borne of hindsight," and the more in as they were certain that "what was anathema today" had been "right forty years ago."
The kind of self-serving elite rationale that holds that what is good for the rich and powerful is good for the country, and that next to their notion of "order" and "stability" such little things as equality under the law, the responsibility that goes with power, the principles of democracy and historical truth count for nothing--ever preached to us by their lackeys in government, media, the Academy and elsewhere--we are little surprised to find out what those folks really are when the novel's real game begins, and these figures who think themselves the "best and brightest" quickly prove a pack of vile villains in what has long seemed to me the culmination of Ludlum's pre-shoot 'em up efforts, and perhaps his strongest work (Trevayne its only real competition). This seems to me the more the case given the specific revelations implied in the discussion. We may be a long way from when young Mr. Chancellor was making his investigation (1968), and today revelations about American businessmen being in bed with the Nazis are, for many, old news, with even worse than Ludlum hinted at long and well and even minutely established in the historiography. Indeed, we now know that such "honored industrial names" not only built up the Nazi war machine but went on producing critical material for it in Germany and German-occupied Europe even after the U.S. and Germany declared war on each other, sometimes with German-furnished slave labor, and selling even American-based production to Germany through third countries, practically until V-E Day--and that not only short-term profit but a powerful ideological sympathy was frequently operative (all as, of course, the government again and again looked the other way and never showed much interest in holding even outright law-breaking to real account).
However, the tendency in the history most likely to reach beyond the limited audience of intellectuals interested in such things remains to downplay all that in favor of more patriotic, "We're all doing our part!" "Greatest Generation" stuff. Indeed, in thinking about the rise of Hitler the tendency in the more popular historiography is to sideline the role of not just American business but business generally in Nazism's rise, brushing aside the reality that German business played the decisive role in putting Hitler in power for the sake of getting a government that would crush the left, break organized labor, and thus not only safeguard Property but boost Profitability by holding down wages and social outlays as it poured money into the only kind of "Big Government" their kind wholeheartedly approve, the military-industrial complex; and the fact that Hitler meant to and did deliver what they wanted; such that however much German businessmen grumbled the fact remained that German business did very, very well out of the arrangement all the way through the war as it benefited from the massive war spending and looting of occupied countries (exemplified by the data on how much more, and more modern, industrial capital German business had at war's end, and the way in which, thanks to its being allowed to hold onto it, it enabled Germany's post-war economic miracle).
Consistent with this the tendency is to rely on Cold Warrior fever dreams about the Madness of Crowds in the Age of Totalitarianism (by way of such as Hannah Arendt), theories about an unhappy sort of German "exceptionalism" (via figures like William Shirer and Daniel Goldhagen), and the dark side of the Great Man of history theory (through people like Allan Bullock), to explain the Third Reich, all as, with far rightist views increasingly mainstream, we are told that Nazism was unavoidable riposte to, or somehow even extension of, the Bolshevik Revolution (by way of a Timothy Snyder's historiography, or an Alice Weidel demonstrating the real intellectual caliber of the "highly educated" international elite from which this "populist" derives with her exceedingly transparent lie that Hitler "was a Communist").* Anything, it seems, will do but the obvious, the logical, the factually grounded, for such is not only the way intellectual life runs in our era, with its embrace of the contempt for hard fact and economic interest that Arendt was so quick to chalk up to the "totalitarians," the more in as the facts are so inconvenient for those who flatter themselves that they are the best and brightest of today.
The kind of self-serving elite rationale that holds that what is good for the rich and powerful is good for the country, and that next to their notion of "order" and "stability" such little things as equality under the law, the responsibility that goes with power, the principles of democracy and historical truth count for nothing--ever preached to us by their lackeys in government, media, the Academy and elsewhere--we are little surprised to find out what those folks really are when the novel's real game begins, and these figures who think themselves the "best and brightest" quickly prove a pack of vile villains in what has long seemed to me the culmination of Ludlum's pre-shoot 'em up efforts, and perhaps his strongest work (Trevayne its only real competition). This seems to me the more the case given the specific revelations implied in the discussion. We may be a long way from when young Mr. Chancellor was making his investigation (1968), and today revelations about American businessmen being in bed with the Nazis are, for many, old news, with even worse than Ludlum hinted at long and well and even minutely established in the historiography. Indeed, we now know that such "honored industrial names" not only built up the Nazi war machine but went on producing critical material for it in Germany and German-occupied Europe even after the U.S. and Germany declared war on each other, sometimes with German-furnished slave labor, and selling even American-based production to Germany through third countries, practically until V-E Day--and that not only short-term profit but a powerful ideological sympathy was frequently operative (all as, of course, the government again and again looked the other way and never showed much interest in holding even outright law-breaking to real account).
However, the tendency in the history most likely to reach beyond the limited audience of intellectuals interested in such things remains to downplay all that in favor of more patriotic, "We're all doing our part!" "Greatest Generation" stuff. Indeed, in thinking about the rise of Hitler the tendency in the more popular historiography is to sideline the role of not just American business but business generally in Nazism's rise, brushing aside the reality that German business played the decisive role in putting Hitler in power for the sake of getting a government that would crush the left, break organized labor, and thus not only safeguard Property but boost Profitability by holding down wages and social outlays as it poured money into the only kind of "Big Government" their kind wholeheartedly approve, the military-industrial complex; and the fact that Hitler meant to and did deliver what they wanted; such that however much German businessmen grumbled the fact remained that German business did very, very well out of the arrangement all the way through the war as it benefited from the massive war spending and looting of occupied countries (exemplified by the data on how much more, and more modern, industrial capital German business had at war's end, and the way in which, thanks to its being allowed to hold onto it, it enabled Germany's post-war economic miracle).
Consistent with this the tendency is to rely on Cold Warrior fever dreams about the Madness of Crowds in the Age of Totalitarianism (by way of such as Hannah Arendt), theories about an unhappy sort of German "exceptionalism" (via figures like William Shirer and Daniel Goldhagen), and the dark side of the Great Man of history theory (through people like Allan Bullock), to explain the Third Reich, all as, with far rightist views increasingly mainstream, we are told that Nazism was unavoidable riposte to, or somehow even extension of, the Bolshevik Revolution (by way of a Timothy Snyder's historiography, or an Alice Weidel demonstrating the real intellectual caliber of the "highly educated" international elite from which this "populist" derives with her exceedingly transparent lie that Hitler "was a Communist").* Anything, it seems, will do but the obvious, the logical, the factually grounded, for such is not only the way intellectual life runs in our era, with its embrace of the contempt for hard fact and economic interest that Arendt was so quick to chalk up to the "totalitarians," the more in as the facts are so inconvenient for those who flatter themselves that they are the best and brightest of today.
"The Not So Good War": Robert Ludlum's World War II
Looking back on the profusion of bestselling spy thrillers set during World War II in the 1970s it has seemed to some, myself included, plausible that the popularity of World War II as a setting for such thrillers was that it seemed a less fraught period in which, in contrast with a period where in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Frank Church hearings, détente, and much, much else, and any pretense of there being a consensus about the goodness of the West's security states against villainous Soviets was rather less tenable than it had seemed some years earlier, people could still broadly agree on who were the "good guys" and "bad guys." (Certainly this seems to well describe Ken Follett's blockbuster The Eye of the Needle, with its good guy Britons vs. bad guys Nazis plot, all as those more enduring novels then set in the present, like John le Carre's Karla trilogy, or Graham Greene's The Human Factor, tended to take a more jaundiced view of the West's relations with the developing world.)
Still, looking at Robert Ludlum's use of World War II in his books one gets something other than a flight into patriotic simplicities--his plots typically having American business in bed with the Nazis. Thus did it go in The Scarlatti Inheritance, where a scion of an American industrial dynasty used his family's fortune to bankroll the National Socialist Party at an early stage of its development. Ludlum set the first part of his later The Gemini Contenders during the war--but then ties that legacy in with the very present political struggles between a power-mad and militaristic Army officer and his liberal brother, while in The Rhinemann Exchange, Ludlum's only novel set entirely during World War II, American industry made a Faustian pact with its German counterparts. (U.S. industry needed to deliver a gyroscope to the Army for its bombers, which it did not have but which the Germans did have; while the Germans needed diamonds for their missile program, to which the Americans had superior access; and each sought to trade what they had for what they needed, with all that implied about America's own elite in even those romanticized times.) One could also see it all tied together in what is in many ways the high-water mark of Robert Ludlum's more intensely Anti-Establishment work, The Chancellor Manuscript, where his protagonist Peter Chancellor, nearing the end of grad school and about to embark on a career as a professor of history, sees his career derailed by the machinations of the country's "secret government" Inver Brass precisely because they do not want his dissertation's investigation into the financing of the Nazis, and what it said about "a number of the most honored industrial names in America"--an investigation to which he was drawn, Chancellor's own thoughts tell us, because of the infuriating "parallels with the present" of that episode with the present at the height of the Vietnam War (1968) that made it all too clear how "Nothing had changed . . . the lies of forty years ago still exist[ing]" and leaving him with the duty of telling the story, something he did even after his academic career was quashed. At the suggestion of the Inver Brass functionary whose job it was to prevent Chancellor's revelations as history he proceeded to a career as a novelist in which he told the truth in the guise of fiction--a metafictional touch that, perhaps playfully, perhaps not entirely so, invites us to wonder how much of what we are reading is history as the members of that secret government itself begin to contend with one another over possession of the files of J. Edgar Hoover. The past thus appears no different from the very fraught present--and indeed a reminder that far from the discontents of the moment being exceptional and passing, the Establishment was always rotten, and its agents in the moment working to elide memory itself where it was an obstacle to their objects.
Still, looking at Robert Ludlum's use of World War II in his books one gets something other than a flight into patriotic simplicities--his plots typically having American business in bed with the Nazis. Thus did it go in The Scarlatti Inheritance, where a scion of an American industrial dynasty used his family's fortune to bankroll the National Socialist Party at an early stage of its development. Ludlum set the first part of his later The Gemini Contenders during the war--but then ties that legacy in with the very present political struggles between a power-mad and militaristic Army officer and his liberal brother, while in The Rhinemann Exchange, Ludlum's only novel set entirely during World War II, American industry made a Faustian pact with its German counterparts. (U.S. industry needed to deliver a gyroscope to the Army for its bombers, which it did not have but which the Germans did have; while the Germans needed diamonds for their missile program, to which the Americans had superior access; and each sought to trade what they had for what they needed, with all that implied about America's own elite in even those romanticized times.) One could also see it all tied together in what is in many ways the high-water mark of Robert Ludlum's more intensely Anti-Establishment work, The Chancellor Manuscript, where his protagonist Peter Chancellor, nearing the end of grad school and about to embark on a career as a professor of history, sees his career derailed by the machinations of the country's "secret government" Inver Brass precisely because they do not want his dissertation's investigation into the financing of the Nazis, and what it said about "a number of the most honored industrial names in America"--an investigation to which he was drawn, Chancellor's own thoughts tell us, because of the infuriating "parallels with the present" of that episode with the present at the height of the Vietnam War (1968) that made it all too clear how "Nothing had changed . . . the lies of forty years ago still exist[ing]" and leaving him with the duty of telling the story, something he did even after his academic career was quashed. At the suggestion of the Inver Brass functionary whose job it was to prevent Chancellor's revelations as history he proceeded to a career as a novelist in which he told the truth in the guise of fiction--a metafictional touch that, perhaps playfully, perhaps not entirely so, invites us to wonder how much of what we are reading is history as the members of that secret government itself begin to contend with one another over possession of the files of J. Edgar Hoover. The past thus appears no different from the very fraught present--and indeed a reminder that far from the discontents of the moment being exceptional and passing, the Establishment was always rotten, and its agents in the moment working to elide memory itself where it was an obstacle to their objects.
What Does the Word "Markets" Mean to You? (Reflections on an Episode of Good Times)
In the Good Times episode "Where Have All the Doctors Gone?" (season 6, episode 17) Ms. Florida Evans and Dr. Paula Kelly had an exchange regarding the latter's intention of leaving the clinic where she works--a departure that, as she is the last doctor still working there, would mean the closing down of the clinic on which the residents of the neighborhood is reliant. In the course of said exchange Dr. Kelly, whose decision is admittedly about heading for greener pastures, tells Ms. Evans that she thinks the sacrifices she made in working at the clinic did not do much good anyway given the irresponsibility of the neighborhood's residents in regard to their health, as judged by, among other things, their diets. Ms. Evans replies that "in the ghetto" the issue is not health but "survival," its impoverished residents having no choice but to " buy what is cheapest, and the markets make damn sure it isn't cheap" (emphasis added).
To much of the public (and indeed, not just the public) that is exactly what markets are--the institution that makes sure that the necessities of life aren't cheap, that they are as expensive as the traffic will bear, to the benefit of corporate bottom lines and the disadvantage of the rest of society.
It can seem characteristic of the different era in which this show was a top ten hit that the dialogue acknowledged this view here so explicitly--that, indeed, the show was so socially critical, in this episode directing its barbs at even the medical profession before which television is usually reverent in this superficially irreverent era (the supposedly past exaltation of the doctor as a "god in a white coat" enduring here). It can seem characteristic of that era, too, that it showed parents like the Evanses who, in spite of not being "highly educated professionals," were clearly functional, conscientious, responsible, intelligent people; who in spite of being functional, conscientious, responsible, intelligent people did not have an upper-middle class, suburban, standard of living; and that the show showed such a person quite able to get the better of the highly educated professional above her in the social scale in an exchange that is not an occasion for the sort of cheap anti-intellectualism we see when figures like Frasier Crane are made fools of, but, beneath the one-liners, a serious dialogue about a serious subject.
Meanwhile it can seem characteristic of the way we live now that the actor who was for many (unfortunately) the face, or at least mascot, of that show recently went on TV in commercials in which he did his bit for the privatization of Medicare, all as the market made sure that health care, along with all the other necessities of life, grow ever less cheap.
To much of the public (and indeed, not just the public) that is exactly what markets are--the institution that makes sure that the necessities of life aren't cheap, that they are as expensive as the traffic will bear, to the benefit of corporate bottom lines and the disadvantage of the rest of society.
It can seem characteristic of the different era in which this show was a top ten hit that the dialogue acknowledged this view here so explicitly--that, indeed, the show was so socially critical, in this episode directing its barbs at even the medical profession before which television is usually reverent in this superficially irreverent era (the supposedly past exaltation of the doctor as a "god in a white coat" enduring here). It can seem characteristic of that era, too, that it showed parents like the Evanses who, in spite of not being "highly educated professionals," were clearly functional, conscientious, responsible, intelligent people; who in spite of being functional, conscientious, responsible, intelligent people did not have an upper-middle class, suburban, standard of living; and that the show showed such a person quite able to get the better of the highly educated professional above her in the social scale in an exchange that is not an occasion for the sort of cheap anti-intellectualism we see when figures like Frasier Crane are made fools of, but, beneath the one-liners, a serious dialogue about a serious subject.
Meanwhile it can seem characteristic of the way we live now that the actor who was for many (unfortunately) the face, or at least mascot, of that show recently went on TV in commercials in which he did his bit for the privatization of Medicare, all as the market made sure that health care, along with all the other necessities of life, grow ever less cheap.
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2024 Tournament: Some Thoughts
Deadline has (finally) presented the results of its Most Valuable Blockbusters tournament.
Reviewing the list of champions I was unsurprised to see Dune make the top ten (#7), Wicked the top five (#5), Despicable Me rank higher than Wicked (#4), Deadpool rank higher than that (#3), Moana higher still (#2) and Inside Out 2 land the top spot (#1). I was also unsurprised to see It Ends with Us place (#6), and Kung Fu Panda also make the cut (#8). And while I didn't mention them in the post that I wrote before the holidays (even if it only got up in early January) after seeing their grosses I wasn't surprised to see late holiday releases Mufasa or Sonic 3 round out the group (ranking at #9 and #10 respectively).
Of course, that leaves the matters of the smaller movies that turned relatively large profits, and of the year's biggest failures. I had no expectations about the "small movies, big profits" category, except that if It Ends with Us failed to make the top ten list it would end up here--and, I suppose, that horror movies would be a strong presence. That didn't happen, of course, leaving us with a list made up entirely of the year's higher-profile horror movies (A Quiet Place and Nosferatu followed by Smile 2, Speak No Evil and Longlegs). By contrast I did have expectations about the biggest flops, and I was, again, unsurprised that Joker 2 got the #1 spot, and that Furiosa, Megalopolis and Borderlands accounted for the next three places. (I had thought that Megalopolis would get the #2 spot, rather than #4, but it seems Lionsgate did well in the pre-Cannes screening foreign deals, such that the foreign distributors suffered much more from paying $50 million for rights to a movie that grossed just $7 million--a reminder that estimates are only that in the absence of knowledge of the details of the dealmaking.) I didn't have anything to say about Kraven the Hunter, but it's goetting the number five spot (for Sony's Spider-Man Universe movie it might be it still had a $110 million production budget, with a marketing budget to match) was, again, no shocker.
That said, I do not think the "smaller hits" or "biggest flops" lists tell us very much about the state of the market these days. That we had five horror movies on the "smaller hits" list is pretty consistent with past experience, and only affirms the old truism that horror remains by far the most consistently successful way to turn a relatively large profit on a small movie. The list of flops similarly affirms old truisms. Joker 2's colossal ($144 million in the red) failure merely demonstrates that if a successful filmmaker is intent on making his the sequel to a major hit of his a flop that will ruin any legacy he may have achieved with its predecessor, is empowered to act in such a fashion, and makes the fullest use of that opportunity by displaying utter, hate-filled, contempt for his fans, he has a fair chance of succeeding. Meanwhile Furiosa's flopping underlines the extent to which Mad Max: Fury Road was a money-losing flop rather than the success the financial illiterates of the press made it out to be back in 2015, and the hazards of making big-budget releases about side characters, the audience's limited appetite for prequels generally, and the dubious prospects of a film reliant on a connection with a release from a decade earlier. Megalopolis was another example of how "directorial vision" can miscarry at the box office, while Borderlands and Kraven the Hunter each seem footnotes in the stories of the video game adaptation and the superhero film, respectively. If Borderlands flopped very badly that was a matter of a much-delayed, bad buzz-burdened, poorly reviewed dump month release hitting theaters when a mega-hit was carrying everything before it, and far less significant than the many successes the genre has been piling up recently (most recently, Minecraft); while the December release of Kraven the Hunter only proved again the difficulty of selling superhero films centered on relatively minor characters, especially when they come from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with delay, bad buzz, poor reviews and a crowded market working against them.
Still, I think that if examination of the "smaller movies with big profits" and the flops is not very illuminating with respect to the larger picture of the post-pandemic film business the biggest hits do tell us something about the market, especially if we look past the surface. At first glance the movies may seem to affirm the salience of the established blockbuster mode, and with it the skepticism about Hollywood needing to change the way it does things of the kind that 2023 seemed to suggest. After all, not one of the movies was an original film based on an original screenplay, with, excluding the Dune movie (treatable as the second half of a larger story) seven of them actually sequels or prequels (with two of them a "Part 3" and two more of them a "Part 4"). Of those ten films nine (all but It Ends With Us) were science fiction or fantasy spectacles of some type. Five of those nine (counting Mufasa), and one might add the top two (the Inside Out and Moana sequels), were family-oriented animated spectacles, and the live-action movies a retread of a classic space opera, a Marvel superhero film, a stage-to-screen adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, and a video game-based adventure (with a computer-generated protagonist, even if the film is otherwise live-action). The list even seems an affirmation of Disney's dominance of this kind of filmmaking, with the company's movies having a highly disproportionate four of the top ten spots, including the top three (in the Inside Out, Moana and Deadpool sequels).
However, the actual financial data quickly complicates that view. Certainly I was struck by how the figures indicated lower spending on the big animated hits than I thought it they would. Illumination's reputation for efficiency (and the published price tags for the preceding Despicable Me franchise films) may not make the $100 million Despicable Me 4 was made for surprising, but this was still important to the bottom line, while it is worth remarking that Kung Fu Panda was made for half what its predecessors cost, and that if Mufasa was pricey ($200 million) it was still rather cheaper in inflation-adjusted, real, terms than 2019's The Lion King--all of which was even more important to their achieving these their profit margins, given their relatively low grosses compared with those predecessors.* I had a similar impression looking at Deadpool & Wolverine. Granted, that franchise began with a relatively low-budgeted film (as Deadpool's own endless breaking of the fourth wall constantly reminded us), but especially when we consider the charge bill for Marvel's movies in the past, the inflation of recent years, the cost of getting Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman together (a key selling point for the movie), and the film's being a threequel to a series launched by another studio, $200 million is far from extravagant, all as the final bill for "participations" ended up lower than I would have guessed between the series' history, the stars and the final colossal gross. (As the movie approached a Top Gun 2-like gross I had thought the numbers here could be Top Gun 2-like as well. It didn't play out that way in the end.) And so on and so forth, the kind of bank-breakers to which we were previously accustomed just not a presence, as the totals show. After all, gGoing by Deadline's figures, in 2019 the production bill for the ten most profitable films was at least $2 billion (perhaps much more, going by what has been reported about the full bill for the highest-grosser, Avengers: Endgame), which in 2024 dollars would work out to $2.4 billion+. By contrast the top ten films of 2024 cost perhaps $1.4 billion.. Meanwhile the total outlay (counting in distribution, promotion, etc.) was $5.3 billion for the top ten films in 2019, and $6.4 billion when we adjust the figure for 2024 dollars, while the comparable figure for the top ten films of 2024 was a comparatively modest $4.1 billion.
In considering these totals it is only fair to point out that 2024, and particularly the first half of 2024, saw fewer big movies come out than usual due to the delays caused by the Hollywood strike of the prior year (with this only partially compensated by the extent to which big movies slated for release in late 2023, like Dune, Part Two, were bumped over into 2024). Still, the fact that they were such typical blockbusters in franchises that had previously generated top ten-caliber hits, and that so many of them were franchise films with smaller budgets than their predecessors, works against any argument that this was simply a matter of the bar for such success having been lowered. Rather it suggestsif the release slate was thinner than with the fact remains that, as shown before, nine of the top ten were the kinds of movies we expect to be such blockbusters, while when we compare the budgets on those big movies to the cost of not just comparable earlier movies but often immediate predecessors in the same franchise (most obviously in the case of Kung Fu Panda, though as other cases show the trend is more broadly evident) it seems that Hollywood is responding to a tougher market by putting out the same old product, but endeavoring to make it more cheaply so as to lower the threshold for profitability. That
In other words, rather than rising to the challenge by trying to make movies people really want to see, they are staying the course, but pinching their pennies--and to go by some of the comment, cutting corners.
Still, in spite of the studios' predictable resistance to change the top ten do show us that even if they are shoveling the same . . . stuff . . . out to the moviegoer, the moviegoer is not necessarily acting in accordance with their plans, really needing to be excited to get to the theater. In their own ways those two seemingly very different films, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us, offer handy demonstration of this. If some would like to think Deadpool & Wolverine was a "four-quadrant" movie the truth was that it was a case of a movie with a very strong appeal to a particular slice of the audience which flocked to the theaters for a record opening weekend and kept business hopping for weeks afterward, not least because the makers of the film made such a point of giving that target audience what they wanted (to the point of caring more about that than making a movie that was "good" in the conventional sense in the view of some)--while the backers of It Ends With Us similarly aimed for a particular portion of the audience that was very interested in the movie rather than trying to bring in "everyone," and relative to their smaller investment did even better. (Deadpool saw a half billion dollars spent to make a profit of $400 million--whereas It Ends With Us saw a $150 million spent to net $200 million, a return of 130 percent as against the 80 percent on Deadpool.)
Again, as I have been arguing since seeing the data from 2023: rather than looking for returns by putting up the proverbial tentpole and expecting everyone to show up, the studios would do better to make movies for a smaller but really interested share of the audience. As the case of Deadpool shows this does not have to mean original fare, or low budgets, or low (absolute) grosses--but Deadpool would seem a comparative rarity, the more successful efforts more likely to look like an It Ends With Us than a Deadpool. And at this stage of things, with 2025 so far looking much more like 2023 than it does 2024, my guess is that this year, producing a bigger harvest of big-budget flops, will only provide more evidence for that argument--while my guess is also that those who call the shots in Tinseltown will continue to completely ignore that viewargument as they continue to barrage us with sequels and prequels and reboots and remakes no one ever asked for, with the sole difference from what they were doing before their making them in a cut-rate fashion.
* Kung Fu Panda 4 cost $85 million, as against the $185-$195 million the prior three films cost when adjusted for 2024 prices; while Mufasa's $200 million is a lot less than the $260 million, or $320 million in December 2024 terms, spent on The Lion King.
Reviewing the list of champions I was unsurprised to see Dune make the top ten (#7), Wicked the top five (#5), Despicable Me rank higher than Wicked (#4), Deadpool rank higher than that (#3), Moana higher still (#2) and Inside Out 2 land the top spot (#1). I was also unsurprised to see It Ends with Us place (#6), and Kung Fu Panda also make the cut (#8). And while I didn't mention them in the post that I wrote before the holidays (even if it only got up in early January) after seeing their grosses I wasn't surprised to see late holiday releases Mufasa or Sonic 3 round out the group (ranking at #9 and #10 respectively).
Of course, that leaves the matters of the smaller movies that turned relatively large profits, and of the year's biggest failures. I had no expectations about the "small movies, big profits" category, except that if It Ends with Us failed to make the top ten list it would end up here--and, I suppose, that horror movies would be a strong presence. That didn't happen, of course, leaving us with a list made up entirely of the year's higher-profile horror movies (A Quiet Place and Nosferatu followed by Smile 2, Speak No Evil and Longlegs). By contrast I did have expectations about the biggest flops, and I was, again, unsurprised that Joker 2 got the #1 spot, and that Furiosa, Megalopolis and Borderlands accounted for the next three places. (I had thought that Megalopolis would get the #2 spot, rather than #4, but it seems Lionsgate did well in the pre-Cannes screening foreign deals, such that the foreign distributors suffered much more from paying $50 million for rights to a movie that grossed just $7 million--a reminder that estimates are only that in the absence of knowledge of the details of the dealmaking.) I didn't have anything to say about Kraven the Hunter, but it's goetting the number five spot (for Sony's Spider-Man Universe movie it might be it still had a $110 million production budget, with a marketing budget to match) was, again, no shocker.
That said, I do not think the "smaller hits" or "biggest flops" lists tell us very much about the state of the market these days. That we had five horror movies on the "smaller hits" list is pretty consistent with past experience, and only affirms the old truism that horror remains by far the most consistently successful way to turn a relatively large profit on a small movie. The list of flops similarly affirms old truisms. Joker 2's colossal ($144 million in the red) failure merely demonstrates that if a successful filmmaker is intent on making his the sequel to a major hit of his a flop that will ruin any legacy he may have achieved with its predecessor, is empowered to act in such a fashion, and makes the fullest use of that opportunity by displaying utter, hate-filled, contempt for his fans, he has a fair chance of succeeding. Meanwhile Furiosa's flopping underlines the extent to which Mad Max: Fury Road was a money-losing flop rather than the success the financial illiterates of the press made it out to be back in 2015, and the hazards of making big-budget releases about side characters, the audience's limited appetite for prequels generally, and the dubious prospects of a film reliant on a connection with a release from a decade earlier. Megalopolis was another example of how "directorial vision" can miscarry at the box office, while Borderlands and Kraven the Hunter each seem footnotes in the stories of the video game adaptation and the superhero film, respectively. If Borderlands flopped very badly that was a matter of a much-delayed, bad buzz-burdened, poorly reviewed dump month release hitting theaters when a mega-hit was carrying everything before it, and far less significant than the many successes the genre has been piling up recently (most recently, Minecraft); while the December release of Kraven the Hunter only proved again the difficulty of selling superhero films centered on relatively minor characters, especially when they come from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with delay, bad buzz, poor reviews and a crowded market working against them.
Still, I think that if examination of the "smaller movies with big profits" and the flops is not very illuminating with respect to the larger picture of the post-pandemic film business the biggest hits do tell us something about the market, especially if we look past the surface. At first glance the movies may seem to affirm the salience of the established blockbuster mode, and with it the skepticism about Hollywood needing to change the way it does things of the kind that 2023 seemed to suggest. After all, not one of the movies was an original film based on an original screenplay, with, excluding the Dune movie (treatable as the second half of a larger story) seven of them actually sequels or prequels (with two of them a "Part 3" and two more of them a "Part 4"). Of those ten films nine (all but It Ends With Us) were science fiction or fantasy spectacles of some type. Five of those nine (counting Mufasa), and one might add the top two (the Inside Out and Moana sequels), were family-oriented animated spectacles, and the live-action movies a retread of a classic space opera, a Marvel superhero film, a stage-to-screen adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, and a video game-based adventure (with a computer-generated protagonist, even if the film is otherwise live-action). The list even seems an affirmation of Disney's dominance of this kind of filmmaking, with the company's movies having a highly disproportionate four of the top ten spots, including the top three (in the Inside Out, Moana and Deadpool sequels).
However, the actual financial data quickly complicates that view. Certainly I was struck by how the figures indicated lower spending on the big animated hits than I thought it they would. Illumination's reputation for efficiency (and the published price tags for the preceding Despicable Me franchise films) may not make the $100 million Despicable Me 4 was made for surprising, but this was still important to the bottom line, while it is worth remarking that Kung Fu Panda was made for half what its predecessors cost, and that if Mufasa was pricey ($200 million) it was still rather cheaper in inflation-adjusted, real, terms than 2019's The Lion King--all of which was even more important to their achieving these their profit margins, given their relatively low grosses compared with those predecessors.* I had a similar impression looking at Deadpool & Wolverine. Granted, that franchise began with a relatively low-budgeted film (as Deadpool's own endless breaking of the fourth wall constantly reminded us), but especially when we consider the charge bill for Marvel's movies in the past, the inflation of recent years, the cost of getting Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman together (a key selling point for the movie), and the film's being a threequel to a series launched by another studio, $200 million is far from extravagant, all as the final bill for "participations" ended up lower than I would have guessed between the series' history, the stars and the final colossal gross. (As the movie approached a Top Gun 2-like gross I had thought the numbers here could be Top Gun 2-like as well. It didn't play out that way in the end.) And so on and so forth, the kind of bank-breakers to which we were previously accustomed just not a presence, as the totals show. After all, gGoing by Deadline's figures, in 2019 the production bill for the ten most profitable films was at least $2 billion (perhaps much more, going by what has been reported about the full bill for the highest-grosser, Avengers: Endgame), which in 2024 dollars would work out to $2.4 billion+. By contrast the top ten films of 2024 cost perhaps $1.4 billion.. Meanwhile the total outlay (counting in distribution, promotion, etc.) was $5.3 billion for the top ten films in 2019, and $6.4 billion when we adjust the figure for 2024 dollars, while the comparable figure for the top ten films of 2024 was a comparatively modest $4.1 billion.
In considering these totals it is only fair to point out that 2024, and particularly the first half of 2024, saw fewer big movies come out than usual due to the delays caused by the Hollywood strike of the prior year (with this only partially compensated by the extent to which big movies slated for release in late 2023, like Dune, Part Two, were bumped over into 2024). Still, the fact that they were such typical blockbusters in franchises that had previously generated top ten-caliber hits, and that so many of them were franchise films with smaller budgets than their predecessors, works against any argument that this was simply a matter of the bar for such success having been lowered. Rather it suggestsif the release slate was thinner than with the fact remains that, as shown before, nine of the top ten were the kinds of movies we expect to be such blockbusters, while when we compare the budgets on those big movies to the cost of not just comparable earlier movies but often immediate predecessors in the same franchise (most obviously in the case of Kung Fu Panda, though as other cases show the trend is more broadly evident) it seems that Hollywood is responding to a tougher market by putting out the same old product, but endeavoring to make it more cheaply so as to lower the threshold for profitability. That
In other words, rather than rising to the challenge by trying to make movies people really want to see, they are staying the course, but pinching their pennies--and to go by some of the comment, cutting corners.
Still, in spite of the studios' predictable resistance to change the top ten do show us that even if they are shoveling the same . . . stuff . . . out to the moviegoer, the moviegoer is not necessarily acting in accordance with their plans, really needing to be excited to get to the theater. In their own ways those two seemingly very different films, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us, offer handy demonstration of this. If some would like to think Deadpool & Wolverine was a "four-quadrant" movie the truth was that it was a case of a movie with a very strong appeal to a particular slice of the audience which flocked to the theaters for a record opening weekend and kept business hopping for weeks afterward, not least because the makers of the film made such a point of giving that target audience what they wanted (to the point of caring more about that than making a movie that was "good" in the conventional sense in the view of some)--while the backers of It Ends With Us similarly aimed for a particular portion of the audience that was very interested in the movie rather than trying to bring in "everyone," and relative to their smaller investment did even better. (Deadpool saw a half billion dollars spent to make a profit of $400 million--whereas It Ends With Us saw a $150 million spent to net $200 million, a return of 130 percent as against the 80 percent on Deadpool.)
Again, as I have been arguing since seeing the data from 2023: rather than looking for returns by putting up the proverbial tentpole and expecting everyone to show up, the studios would do better to make movies for a smaller but really interested share of the audience. As the case of Deadpool shows this does not have to mean original fare, or low budgets, or low (absolute) grosses--but Deadpool would seem a comparative rarity, the more successful efforts more likely to look like an It Ends With Us than a Deadpool. And at this stage of things, with 2025 so far looking much more like 2023 than it does 2024, my guess is that this year, producing a bigger harvest of big-budget flops, will only provide more evidence for that argument--while my guess is also that those who call the shots in Tinseltown will continue to completely ignore that viewargument as they continue to barrage us with sequels and prequels and reboots and remakes no one ever asked for, with the sole difference from what they were doing before their making them in a cut-rate fashion.
* Kung Fu Panda 4 cost $85 million, as against the $185-$195 million the prior three films cost when adjusted for 2024 prices; while Mufasa's $200 million is a lot less than the $260 million, or $320 million in December 2024 terms, spent on The Lion King.
Yes, 2025 is Looking Like 2023 at the Box Office
Last year, as Hollywood's courtiers in the entertainment press gushed over the successes of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool 3 as proof that Hollywood's way of making and marketing movies, called into question by the succession of seemingly sure-fire tentpoles (The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, Captain Marvel 2, etc., etc.) that flopped spectacularly through 2023, had been proven ultimately sound and that that year could be dismissed as if it were no more than a bad dream, it seemed to me that 2024 was the anomaly, a result of there not being so many flopping tentpoles because there were far fewer tentpoles than usual for audiences to reject, whereas 2025 with its crowded release slate would probably end up playing like 2023 that way. And indeed, 2025 has already seen a big, supposedly new-era-of-the-Marvel-Cinematic-Universe Valentine's Day release and a live-action adaptation of a much-loved Disney animated classic both underperform badly--with the Marvel movie supposed to kick off the summer opening less well than hoped. The repetition of the pattern of 2023 is even evident in the year's principal success--an April release based on a hit video game franchise which has not impressed the critics but which definitely excited fans overperforming sensationally. (The folks at Boxoffice Pro projected $55-$75 million opening in its first forecast, through the next three weeks predicted
something only marginally higher in the $60-$80 million range and then on the Wednesday before opening weekend only a bit higher than that--$85-$100 million. The movie ended up pulling $163 million in its first three days in North American release--while displaying some staying power its domestic total as of its third weekend was a very respectable $345 million.)
Of course, we are at the time of this writing still less than a third of the way into the year. However, for the time being I see no reason to expect any divergence from the pattern just yet--however much those who have a stake in Hollywood being able to turn a profit delivering the same thing over and over and over again for many more years and therefore sneer at all the painful lessons of 2023 would like to believe otherwise as they cleave to anything that may indicate Tinseltown need only "stay the course" rather than actually make an effort to keep its audience.
Of course, we are at the time of this writing still less than a third of the way into the year. However, for the time being I see no reason to expect any divergence from the pattern just yet--however much those who have a stake in Hollywood being able to turn a profit delivering the same thing over and over and over again for many more years and therefore sneer at all the painful lessons of 2023 would like to believe otherwise as they cleave to anything that may indicate Tinseltown need only "stay the course" rather than actually make an effort to keep its audience.
Revisiting '90s SFTV
In North America the '90s saw a boom in first-run syndicated drama, new broadcast networks, and the burgeoning of made-for-cable programming--all of which were more daring with regard to genre material than the Big Three networks--resulting in a then-unprecedented volume of production of original live-action science fiction and fantasy television. This was not only the case with the number of shows produced at once. It was also the case with the readiness to keep them in production from season to season--certainly as compared with the notorious haste of the networks to cancel the few ventures they made in this area--which permitted a fair number of shows to give us something we really hadn't seen before. (If television had done "story arcs" before, none gave us the kind of tightly constructed multi-season narrative that Babylon 5 did, for example, while in the decades later that fact still stands out given how "story arcs" since then have mostly amounted to head games and soap opera and insufferable postmodernist flippancy toward the audience on the way to the underwhelming finales audiences now ritualistically lament after the last episode.) And in the process a fair number of these shows managed to make some impression on pop culture, broadly speaking (such that it was not just the sci-fi TV addict who knew who Jean-Luc Picard, Mulder and Scully, Buffy, Xena, all were).
All of this has made many see the '90s as a "golden age" for the form, an opinion I have certainly held in the past, and still hold now. Still, revisiting the subject today I find myself thinking about what I didn't write about then--or even see as meriting much discussion when summing up the period. Those years saw a great boom in space opera (Star Trek, Stargate, the aforementioned Babylon 5, etc.), fantasy of the contemporary urban (Highlander, the Buffyverse) and historical (the Hercules/Xenaverse) types, and of course, paranormal investigation (The X-Files). But in the '90s, the decade of the Internet, when cyberpunk's splash was still making ripples through pop culture (after cyberpunk we had "post-cyberpunk"), where was that genre in all this? One might also wonder where the superheroes were in that as well--certainly in the sense of secret identity-having, code-named, costumed personages.
In fairness there was a fair number of shows in both those genres. For cyberpunk we had TekWar, Robocop, Total Recall 2070, and of course, Dark Angel. And where superheroes were concerned we had M.A.N.T.I.S., and Malibu Comics' Nightman, and even Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Still, none of these shows was very long-lived, or made much of a splash by comparison with the bigger hits of the era. Cyberpunk on the small screen proved as tough a sell as it was on the big (apart from the at best partial exception of The Matrix, just how many of those '90s computer-themed films really got much of an audience?), while there was still less success for superheroes here than at the cineplex (when, even if the '90s was a far cry from the 21st century, we still had, besides the obvious case of Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Men in Black and assorted lesser successes).
One can argue over the strengths and failings of particular shows, and whether or not these shows deserved to find a bigger audience than they did, but all the same this was where the lot ended up, without the compensation of very much of a cult audience so far as I can tell. (Dark Angel certainly has its following--but the show itself seems to have been all but buried, with all that means for its impact.) The result is that it actually seems to me that these genres actually fared better in animation. I think a case can actually be made for Phantom 2040 as the most striking piece of cyberpunk North American television produced in these years--and a noteworthy superhero show as well--in these same years which also gave us Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, Batman: The Animated Series, HBO's well-received Spawn, and the FOX X-Men (whose lasting impression is confirmed by the new X-Men '97 follow-up series), as well as parodies like The Tick. One might see that as a matter of these themes simply lending themselves better to half-hour animated fare than hour-long live-action shows given producer expectations and the technical state of the art at the time, but one can also see it as a matter of the creators, in a period in which American animation displayed more than the usual ambition, the creators and showrunners and their staffs, in spite of such constraints as (in most of these cases) having to produce their shows for a younger audience with all the censorship that entailed, simply managed to outdo their better-positioned counterparts--with the result that the principal '90s screen legacy of these genres is to be found there.
All of this has made many see the '90s as a "golden age" for the form, an opinion I have certainly held in the past, and still hold now. Still, revisiting the subject today I find myself thinking about what I didn't write about then--or even see as meriting much discussion when summing up the period. Those years saw a great boom in space opera (Star Trek, Stargate, the aforementioned Babylon 5, etc.), fantasy of the contemporary urban (Highlander, the Buffyverse) and historical (the Hercules/Xenaverse) types, and of course, paranormal investigation (The X-Files). But in the '90s, the decade of the Internet, when cyberpunk's splash was still making ripples through pop culture (after cyberpunk we had "post-cyberpunk"), where was that genre in all this? One might also wonder where the superheroes were in that as well--certainly in the sense of secret identity-having, code-named, costumed personages.
In fairness there was a fair number of shows in both those genres. For cyberpunk we had TekWar, Robocop, Total Recall 2070, and of course, Dark Angel. And where superheroes were concerned we had M.A.N.T.I.S., and Malibu Comics' Nightman, and even Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Still, none of these shows was very long-lived, or made much of a splash by comparison with the bigger hits of the era. Cyberpunk on the small screen proved as tough a sell as it was on the big (apart from the at best partial exception of The Matrix, just how many of those '90s computer-themed films really got much of an audience?), while there was still less success for superheroes here than at the cineplex (when, even if the '90s was a far cry from the 21st century, we still had, besides the obvious case of Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Men in Black and assorted lesser successes).
One can argue over the strengths and failings of particular shows, and whether or not these shows deserved to find a bigger audience than they did, but all the same this was where the lot ended up, without the compensation of very much of a cult audience so far as I can tell. (Dark Angel certainly has its following--but the show itself seems to have been all but buried, with all that means for its impact.) The result is that it actually seems to me that these genres actually fared better in animation. I think a case can actually be made for Phantom 2040 as the most striking piece of cyberpunk North American television produced in these years--and a noteworthy superhero show as well--in these same years which also gave us Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, Batman: The Animated Series, HBO's well-received Spawn, and the FOX X-Men (whose lasting impression is confirmed by the new X-Men '97 follow-up series), as well as parodies like The Tick. One might see that as a matter of these themes simply lending themselves better to half-hour animated fare than hour-long live-action shows given producer expectations and the technical state of the art at the time, but one can also see it as a matter of the creators, in a period in which American animation displayed more than the usual ambition, the creators and showrunners and their staffs, in spite of such constraints as (in most of these cases) having to produce their shows for a younger audience with all the censorship that entailed, simply managed to outdo their better-positioned counterparts--with the result that the principal '90s screen legacy of these genres is to be found there.
Notes on the "Dad" Thriller
In recent years the term "dad thriller," and related terms like "dad action movie," seem to have come into vogue.
What do they really mean?
Simply put, they are thrillers that are supposed to be appealing to "dads"--stereotypically middle-aged and "middle-class" family men--because they have protagonists who are middle-aged, "middle-class," family men to whom they can easily relate, and premises with a special resonance for men of their social background, time of life, generation, as with the common "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenarios, which enable relatability because for all the implausibility unavoidable in the form they are fairly grounded compared to other kinds of action movie.
In the piece where he seems to have coined the term (and given us a fair bit of theorizing about the concept in the bargain) Max Reed references Harrison Ford a lot. (Indeed, Reed offers a handy list of questions for those wondering "Am I watching a Dad Thriller Right Now?" that begins with "Is Harrison Ford in the movie?) And it seems to me that Reed is right to do so--with, I think, Ford's 1992 Jack Ryan film Patriot Games a good example, precisely because of when and where Jack Ryan was in his life in that movie (and the novel that was its source material). Most hear the name "Jack Ryan" and think "CIA" and therefore "action hero," but Ryan was an analyst who moved very high up the administrative ranks very fast, not a field man (that's John Clark's territory), while that story was a prequel to The Hunt for Red October in which in spite of his past, brief, work for the Agency (again, in an analytical capacity) Ryan was still an historian teaching at Annapolis who found himself physically intervening in an assassination attempt and then as a result stuck in an "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenario.
In discussing such films Reed acknowledges that they were far more prominent at the box office in that period, the '90s--as one sees when comparing Patriot Games, which was made, marketed and released as one of the summer of '92's big action movies, and still more such movies as Ford's The Fugitive (1993) and Air Force One (1997), as against how the not dissimilar Firewall did, the former movies among their year's big hits, but Firewall (2006) coming and going scarcely noticed at the box office. Indeed, like many other stars Ford saw his career suffer along with the decline of the genre with which he was associated--the dad thrillers that were the post-Han Solo, post-Indiana Jones basis of his box office success broadly declining, with such movies no basis for what career recovery he has had since, these today "January release" material, when not simply made-for-streaming, and that often as a series rather than a two-hour film. Thus did it in fact go with the Jack Ryan franchise to which Patriot Games belonged--its last made-for-and-actually-released-in theaters feature, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit dumped in theaters in January 2015, with results that a decade on have not prompted another such Ryan movie, the more in as the figure seems to have found his new home on streaming in an Amazon TV series.
What happened to them? The answer is that the action movie changed. The genre became a lot more science fiction-al, not incidentally as it relied on bigger and flashier spectacle to keep audiences coming to theaters, with superheroes in particular taking over, as the genre got to be a lot more "young adult," both of which tendencies the consistent success of the Spider-Man franchise through the twenty-first century exemplifies (and in their way, so too such hits as the Fast and Furious franchise). The old dad thrillers couldn't compete with that for box office dollars, not least because these other options were more enticing to younger moviegoers--rather less likely to see them than prior cohorts at the same age. After all, back in the '90s the "dad thrillers" the big thrillers were dad thrillers, and the young action fan took them in stride, with one ironic result the appeal of the dad thriller now lying partly in nostalgia, today's "dads" having seen them long before they were dads, grown up on them and ended up nostalgic for them, as their children grow up on Marvel.
What do they really mean?
Simply put, they are thrillers that are supposed to be appealing to "dads"--stereotypically middle-aged and "middle-class" family men--because they have protagonists who are middle-aged, "middle-class," family men to whom they can easily relate, and premises with a special resonance for men of their social background, time of life, generation, as with the common "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenarios, which enable relatability because for all the implausibility unavoidable in the form they are fairly grounded compared to other kinds of action movie.
In the piece where he seems to have coined the term (and given us a fair bit of theorizing about the concept in the bargain) Max Reed references Harrison Ford a lot. (Indeed, Reed offers a handy list of questions for those wondering "Am I watching a Dad Thriller Right Now?" that begins with "Is Harrison Ford in the movie?) And it seems to me that Reed is right to do so--with, I think, Ford's 1992 Jack Ryan film Patriot Games a good example, precisely because of when and where Jack Ryan was in his life in that movie (and the novel that was its source material). Most hear the name "Jack Ryan" and think "CIA" and therefore "action hero," but Ryan was an analyst who moved very high up the administrative ranks very fast, not a field man (that's John Clark's territory), while that story was a prequel to The Hunt for Red October in which in spite of his past, brief, work for the Agency (again, in an analytical capacity) Ryan was still an historian teaching at Annapolis who found himself physically intervening in an assassination attempt and then as a result stuck in an "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenario.
In discussing such films Reed acknowledges that they were far more prominent at the box office in that period, the '90s--as one sees when comparing Patriot Games, which was made, marketed and released as one of the summer of '92's big action movies, and still more such movies as Ford's The Fugitive (1993) and Air Force One (1997), as against how the not dissimilar Firewall did, the former movies among their year's big hits, but Firewall (2006) coming and going scarcely noticed at the box office. Indeed, like many other stars Ford saw his career suffer along with the decline of the genre with which he was associated--the dad thrillers that were the post-Han Solo, post-Indiana Jones basis of his box office success broadly declining, with such movies no basis for what career recovery he has had since, these today "January release" material, when not simply made-for-streaming, and that often as a series rather than a two-hour film. Thus did it in fact go with the Jack Ryan franchise to which Patriot Games belonged--its last made-for-and-actually-released-in theaters feature, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit dumped in theaters in January 2015, with results that a decade on have not prompted another such Ryan movie, the more in as the figure seems to have found his new home on streaming in an Amazon TV series.
What happened to them? The answer is that the action movie changed. The genre became a lot more science fiction-al, not incidentally as it relied on bigger and flashier spectacle to keep audiences coming to theaters, with superheroes in particular taking over, as the genre got to be a lot more "young adult," both of which tendencies the consistent success of the Spider-Man franchise through the twenty-first century exemplifies (and in their way, so too such hits as the Fast and Furious franchise). The old dad thrillers couldn't compete with that for box office dollars, not least because these other options were more enticing to younger moviegoers--rather less likely to see them than prior cohorts at the same age. After all, back in the '90s the "dad thrillers" the big thrillers were dad thrillers, and the young action fan took them in stride, with one ironic result the appeal of the dad thriller now lying partly in nostalgia, today's "dads" having seen them long before they were dads, grown up on them and ended up nostalgic for them, as their children grow up on Marvel.
The Independent Blogger's Fate: An Economic Perspective
There is a pattern in modern economic life which is well-established in the historical record. Specifically a new sector emerges, which is initially a comparatively open field, into which many contenders enter--but fierce, and never remotely equal, with economies of scale paying off, competition thins out the field fast. Many get driven out of business altogether, some get swallowed up entirely by bigger operations on some terms or other, others continue to operate as apparent brand names in their own right but as a practical matter dependents of those bigger and more successful operators, as the scene turns into an oligopoly, if not a monopoly. Those big players strongly established, with the expansion of the winners and the increasing sophistication of the game having raised the amount of capital anyone needs to make a plausible entry into the field to immense proportions and the venture exceedingly risky, few are ready to try and fewer still of those who do so get anywhere, with the result that the rhetoric of "entrepreneurship" and "small business" and "startup" rings very hollow to anyone with an eye to facts rather than the pieties of orthodoxy--and indeed those who hope to build a small business into a big one prone to try their luck elsewhere, as the giants of the field find themselves in so secure a position that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of them as, unlike their small business counterparts, having moved out of the "market system" into a "planning system."
So did it go in such areas as automobiles, where there were over two thousand producers before the ascent to dominance of the "Big Three" (since which time the field has consolidated even more thoroughly), and aerospace, where the fewness of the high-end producers today is underscored every time a big defense contract is to be handed out (a whole two choices!). So has it gone in the computing field, where before Microsoft, Google, Facebook we had rather a larger number of contenders in the areas of operating system, search engine, social media platform. If less obviously, so is it also going with the creation of online content, at least to the extent that such content is expected to have any traction in the "attention economy." Independent bloggers may go on writing, but they get read less and less as the market is instead more and more dominated by big platforms--and launching your own blog today on your own, unsupported, in the hope that it will one day grow big, makes about as much sense as trying to launch your own operating system or social media platform in today's market.
This is most certainly not the web promised by the cyber-utopians. But it is most certainly the web that those familiar with economic history ought to have expected, the one we all too predictably got, and the one with which we are constrained to cope, for better or worse.
So did it go in such areas as automobiles, where there were over two thousand producers before the ascent to dominance of the "Big Three" (since which time the field has consolidated even more thoroughly), and aerospace, where the fewness of the high-end producers today is underscored every time a big defense contract is to be handed out (a whole two choices!). So has it gone in the computing field, where before Microsoft, Google, Facebook we had rather a larger number of contenders in the areas of operating system, search engine, social media platform. If less obviously, so is it also going with the creation of online content, at least to the extent that such content is expected to have any traction in the "attention economy." Independent bloggers may go on writing, but they get read less and less as the market is instead more and more dominated by big platforms--and launching your own blog today on your own, unsupported, in the hope that it will one day grow big, makes about as much sense as trying to launch your own operating system or social media platform in today's market.
This is most certainly not the web promised by the cyber-utopians. But it is most certainly the web that those familiar with economic history ought to have expected, the one we all too predictably got, and the one with which we are constrained to cope, for better or worse.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Blogger in 2025
The idea that someone is going to set up a blog online and amass a meaningful audience--enough for them to be thought of as a public figure in some degree, perhaps enough to make a living blogging, maybe even become rich and famous doing this, realizing that dream of celebrity that is for many the sole hope of escape from being a penniless Nobody in America--was always a longshot--and indeed, an extreme longshot (as with pretty much all of the aspiration commended to everyone in this culture). From the start the ratio of bloggers to audience was so high as to invite unfavorable comparison with buying a lottery ticket (less work, bigger prize than even the winners at this other game are likely to see), while even if the idea of competition did not lose all meaning amid the overwhelming crowdedness of the field, the Internet was the furthest thing from a "level playing field" that could be imagined.
But the terms of the "game" only got worse, much worse, over time, as winners leaped ahead of a field that just went on getting more crowded with all this meant in the pursuit of eyeballs--as the Internet we knew mutated into something else. What we call "search" was increasingly subject to manipulation by ad dollar-chasers and search engine manipulators, making it harder for the Internet user to find anything they actually wanted. Paywalls proliferated, obstructing movement for those who still had any inclination to search the web themselves. Social media accounts lured people away from old-fashioned Internet surfing to just logging into their accounts to passively stare at their feeds. And of course, it has to be acknowledged that in the process Internet culture, and culture as a whole, was shifting away from long-form writing to Tweet-length written communication, and indeed from the written to the audiovisual as the "vlogger" replaced the "blogger."
As if all that were not enough the Internet's gatekeepers (search engines, social media platforms, syndicators of written content, etc.) went to war against "fake news" and "misinformation" and "extremism," which campaign was really cover for (besides an assault on those whose opinions are really offensive to Silicon Valley) a war against Internet small fry--because the endless fake news put out by the big media outlets, and of course by those who paid them for advertising, was just fine by them (all as even the most perniciously fake news-flogging small-timers got a pass if they did made the companies money by hooking users so they were subject to more ads), after which so-called "helpful" updates dealt those not on their good side one blow after another.
At that point many a blogger looking at their current level of traffic and comparing it to what they had even a short time earlier may have felt themselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but as is so often the way with the survivors holding on in such a hellscape in tales of that sort yet another threat emerged to threaten the survivors with final extermination. Those chatbots over which Silicon Valley's courtiers in the media gushed so stupidly, in the course of replacing increasingly broken old-fashioned search by taking questions and giving answers, were spared their users the trouble of actually going to sites for information. (A Perplexity, for example, gives its sources, but I suspect few bother with them any more than they do the endnotes when they read a book, if they ever do.) The result is that much less actual human visitation for the sites the chatbots consult, with TollBit telling us that this last has meant a 96 percent collapse in traffic to publishers compared with search engines, just one visit for every twenty-five they would have got before, with every sign that this tendency will only increase, and fast, in the months and years to come.
In short, since at least the early twenty-first century pretty much every new development seems to have gone against the independent blogger, rather than for them--against their chances of "discovery" by, let alone "engagement" with members of a potential audience--with, I think, besides the fact of AI giving the public its answers sans any need for conventional research efforts of their own, the fact that AI may increasingly be the generator of content online, the merely human writer forced to compete with ever-growing armies of chatbots pouring forth words on command, perhaps not brilliantly, but certainly with a speed and tirelessness and versatility no human with their own interests and passions can match, making talk of "competition" an absurdity.
In spite of it all I suspect many who have stuck it out this long will refuse to wholly give up. But it is certainly making their blogging for an audience of none likely to just go on shrinking from even that level an ever more thankless task, as many others decide that it is time to walk away.
But the terms of the "game" only got worse, much worse, over time, as winners leaped ahead of a field that just went on getting more crowded with all this meant in the pursuit of eyeballs--as the Internet we knew mutated into something else. What we call "search" was increasingly subject to manipulation by ad dollar-chasers and search engine manipulators, making it harder for the Internet user to find anything they actually wanted. Paywalls proliferated, obstructing movement for those who still had any inclination to search the web themselves. Social media accounts lured people away from old-fashioned Internet surfing to just logging into their accounts to passively stare at their feeds. And of course, it has to be acknowledged that in the process Internet culture, and culture as a whole, was shifting away from long-form writing to Tweet-length written communication, and indeed from the written to the audiovisual as the "vlogger" replaced the "blogger."
As if all that were not enough the Internet's gatekeepers (search engines, social media platforms, syndicators of written content, etc.) went to war against "fake news" and "misinformation" and "extremism," which campaign was really cover for (besides an assault on those whose opinions are really offensive to Silicon Valley) a war against Internet small fry--because the endless fake news put out by the big media outlets, and of course by those who paid them for advertising, was just fine by them (all as even the most perniciously fake news-flogging small-timers got a pass if they did made the companies money by hooking users so they were subject to more ads), after which so-called "helpful" updates dealt those not on their good side one blow after another.
At that point many a blogger looking at their current level of traffic and comparing it to what they had even a short time earlier may have felt themselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but as is so often the way with the survivors holding on in such a hellscape in tales of that sort yet another threat emerged to threaten the survivors with final extermination. Those chatbots over which Silicon Valley's courtiers in the media gushed so stupidly, in the course of replacing increasingly broken old-fashioned search by taking questions and giving answers, were spared their users the trouble of actually going to sites for information. (A Perplexity, for example, gives its sources, but I suspect few bother with them any more than they do the endnotes when they read a book, if they ever do.) The result is that much less actual human visitation for the sites the chatbots consult, with TollBit telling us that this last has meant a 96 percent collapse in traffic to publishers compared with search engines, just one visit for every twenty-five they would have got before, with every sign that this tendency will only increase, and fast, in the months and years to come.
In short, since at least the early twenty-first century pretty much every new development seems to have gone against the independent blogger, rather than for them--against their chances of "discovery" by, let alone "engagement" with members of a potential audience--with, I think, besides the fact of AI giving the public its answers sans any need for conventional research efforts of their own, the fact that AI may increasingly be the generator of content online, the merely human writer forced to compete with ever-growing armies of chatbots pouring forth words on command, perhaps not brilliantly, but certainly with a speed and tirelessness and versatility no human with their own interests and passions can match, making talk of "competition" an absurdity.
In spite of it all I suspect many who have stuck it out this long will refuse to wholly give up. But it is certainly making their blogging for an audience of none likely to just go on shrinking from even that level an ever more thankless task, as many others decide that it is time to walk away.
Of the Attention Economy and the Real Economy
The "attention economy" is just like the rest of the economy to which it has become so integral. The chances of really big "success" are cynically and insanely overhyped, the luring of five thousand--five million--donkeys onward with a single carrot. Where the contest for that carrot is concerned it isn't a "level playing field," and it isn't a "meritocracy"--though this doesn't prevent people of small and conventional minds from insisting that they are. In what is very close to being a "winner take all" game the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Those who are in the former category get called "geniuses," regardless of whether they really merit the invidious label, while those who are in the latter category are sneered at as "losers," and anyone who is anything but satisfied with the outcome of their efforts is told that they have no one to blame but themselves, something many of them are sufficiently indoctrinated in the aforementioned conventionality to believe--while many more than will dare admit it don't believe, because the heresy in such thoughts is so little tolerated, and so consistently and brutally punished by the champions of orthodoxy without ever distressing the "free speech absolutists."
Life Without "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" Syndrome
One of the most interesting aspects of Theodore Dreiser's A Book About Myself (for me, at least) was his frankness about how he felt facing the forbidding Rat Race as a young man of modest background, without the advantages that many of his rivals had--in part because of how rare it was, and remains, for those coming from such backgrounds to ever tell their stories, and also because so few of any background own up to feeling that way.
That attitude is the opposite of the outlook that has variously been called the "temporarily embarrassed capitalist," "temporarily embarrassed millionaire," and "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"--and I think it worth consideration for more than its obvious interests for a reader of classics like Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood saga or An American Tragedy.
After all, consider the hard reality of being in a winner-take-all society where, for all the pieties about "equality of opportunity" no person of any intelligence truly believes for a second that the competition is remotely equal in its openness to talent--but at the same time Authority demands that "everyone" fling themselves into the scramble with the utmost enthusiasm in the belief that somehow or other they will be the one winner who takes all, be the donkey in five thousand who gets the carrot, on the basis of . . . nothing whatsoever. It is not an expectation of rational behavior, but in fact a demand that one be irrational, irrational in a particular way. Indeed, should one fail to manifest said irrationality their peers and superiors are apt to accuse them of, if not being "lazy" or "shiftless," then of lacking in "confidence," "faith" or "optimism," all unforgivable character traits indeed in their eyes.
It is, of course, a far from socially neutral matter--the convenience of the elite resting upon this outlook. (That the lower orders should look at social arrangements in a calculating way, that workers should work to live rather than live to work, is an outrage from the standpoint of those who think the lower orders exist only for their convenience rather than in their own right. And an outrage especially for the businessmen who think that the prerogative of economic calculation be taken up by anyone else, the rest of humanity, whether as worker, consumer, public official or anything else properly an object on which they as the only subjects can exert their will.)
Still, irrational and exploitative as it all is, few question it, with Dreiser lamenting the fact but not offering any serious intellectual challenge to it. If he could not help being horrified by the order around him and wishing there was another way, and not just for him, he also felt himself to be lacking for feeling the way he did, and indeed writing his "Trilogy of Desire" Dreiser imagined Frank Cowperwood as the man he wished he was (while I dare say, in a Forbes Gurney, brutally satirizing the man he actually thought himself to be)--though his view would seem to have evolved afterward. In the book generally thought Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, in Clyde Griffiths he presented a protagonist who had what Dreiser felt to be lacking inside himself--but also an even less advantageous background--with all this figuring into how he believed in and played by the rules of the game, and the consequences following therefrom. Summing it up I cannot possibly do better than David Walsh, who characterizes the tale as one of a man who born into this society, and "fervently believes in that society and wishes nothing more than to be a respected member of it," to the point of a "willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself," and in the process only suffer being ground up by that machinery and destroyed over the book's near-thousand pages, the American Dream become American Nightmare ultimately the source of the American Tragedy in what may be the greatest indictment of that vision of life ever put to paper.
That attitude is the opposite of the outlook that has variously been called the "temporarily embarrassed capitalist," "temporarily embarrassed millionaire," and "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"--and I think it worth consideration for more than its obvious interests for a reader of classics like Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood saga or An American Tragedy.
After all, consider the hard reality of being in a winner-take-all society where, for all the pieties about "equality of opportunity" no person of any intelligence truly believes for a second that the competition is remotely equal in its openness to talent--but at the same time Authority demands that "everyone" fling themselves into the scramble with the utmost enthusiasm in the belief that somehow or other they will be the one winner who takes all, be the donkey in five thousand who gets the carrot, on the basis of . . . nothing whatsoever. It is not an expectation of rational behavior, but in fact a demand that one be irrational, irrational in a particular way. Indeed, should one fail to manifest said irrationality their peers and superiors are apt to accuse them of, if not being "lazy" or "shiftless," then of lacking in "confidence," "faith" or "optimism," all unforgivable character traits indeed in their eyes.
It is, of course, a far from socially neutral matter--the convenience of the elite resting upon this outlook. (That the lower orders should look at social arrangements in a calculating way, that workers should work to live rather than live to work, is an outrage from the standpoint of those who think the lower orders exist only for their convenience rather than in their own right. And an outrage especially for the businessmen who think that the prerogative of economic calculation be taken up by anyone else, the rest of humanity, whether as worker, consumer, public official or anything else properly an object on which they as the only subjects can exert their will.)
Still, irrational and exploitative as it all is, few question it, with Dreiser lamenting the fact but not offering any serious intellectual challenge to it. If he could not help being horrified by the order around him and wishing there was another way, and not just for him, he also felt himself to be lacking for feeling the way he did, and indeed writing his "Trilogy of Desire" Dreiser imagined Frank Cowperwood as the man he wished he was (while I dare say, in a Forbes Gurney, brutally satirizing the man he actually thought himself to be)--though his view would seem to have evolved afterward. In the book generally thought Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, in Clyde Griffiths he presented a protagonist who had what Dreiser felt to be lacking inside himself--but also an even less advantageous background--with all this figuring into how he believed in and played by the rules of the game, and the consequences following therefrom. Summing it up I cannot possibly do better than David Walsh, who characterizes the tale as one of a man who born into this society, and "fervently believes in that society and wishes nothing more than to be a respected member of it," to the point of a "willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself," and in the process only suffer being ground up by that machinery and destroyed over the book's near-thousand pages, the American Dream become American Nightmare ultimately the source of the American Tragedy in what may be the greatest indictment of that vision of life ever put to paper.
Unpacking the Term "Populist"
We hear the word "populist" a lot these days.
As is usually the case with words that get tossed around very much by the sub-literates of the Media Establishment the word could stand some unpacking.
Fortunately at the simple definitional level this word's meaning is not very difficult. The word "populist" is commonly defined as a political tendency championing the rights and the self-determination of "the people" against an "elite" with whom they are presumed to be at odds due to the latter in some way failing to respect, exploiting and/or oppressing the former.
However, from here things get much trickier. At this moment the bit of that trickiness that I want to deal with is the plain and simple fact that in speaking of "populism," and thus "the people," we are obliged to say something of just "who" the people are--how we define this category of person, what and how they presumably think and feel, and why this or that purported appeal to them merits the label "populist."
In considering that it is essential to note that those who toss around the label "populist" on platforms sufficiently visible for us to be sensible of their doing so are not "of the people"--precisely because the media is a thoroughly elite enterprise, especially at its higher levels. (In social provenance, in acculturation and training, in their present condition and their aspirations and their identifications and their loyalties this most visible section of the chattering classes are most certainly of and for the elite, all while from their life experience and their more intellectual activity having very little contact with or respect for those persons who are not.) This makes it quite natural for them to think of "the people" as those who are "not like us."
At the same time said elite, reflecting its essential conservatism, reinforced by a postmodernism that is itself very much of the right no matter how much people of conventional mind insist otherwise, is far more comfortable interpreting political matters from the standpoint of "culture" rather than hard economic interest or social reality. (Thus do they treat the kulturkampf as the center of American politics as they drone on ceaselessly about "Red" and "Blue" states, the key to American politics all lying in the coloring of an electronic map seen in their asinine coverage of a presidential election a generation ago.)
The result is that they think of the people as those who are "not like us," and of those who are like or not like them as like or not like them in cultural terms. In doing so the "elites" make much of their "education"--not only in the narrow academic sense (they are very proud of having gone to Good Schools, for what little good their expensive schooling did their minds), but the broader, Jane Austen-ish sense of a whole upbringing. Where that is concerned they are from the great urban areas of the coasts, and especially the East Coast; they have traveled about, because of their parents' careers, because of the educations they often had far from home, because of their own career trajectories. By contrast those who are not of the elite can less say the same, and often not at all. They come from provincial areas, and unless their family was forced to relocate by hardship, know little but those areas, with even if they have one this extending even to their college education, for rather than going to the Good School (doing which would likely have required them to sell themselves into debt slavery, not that the elites ever think about that) they probably went to the local state U, and maybe that just after a stint in community college, and after graduating looked for a job in their "hometown," their whole life lived within that likely none-too-sophisticated area.
The result is that "the elite" are "cosmopolitan," whereas "the people" are localist in orientation, rooted in community, with all the difference in "prejudices" that goes with that, with said elite more urbane about and open to the wider world, "the people" less so--the latter more "localist," more "rooted" in family and neighborhood and community, more creatures of whatever tradition they were raised in, more fearful and suspicious of that bigger world generally and anything different from what they were brought up with particularly. All of this has had particular consequences given the way that a neoliberalism that it has been fashionable to identify with "globalization," and the "information" or "knowledge" age, has been at the center of political and economic and social life, namely the framing of the issue of what "globalization" meant for working people as against the elite not in material terms but cultural ones. Accordingly, rather than facing up to backlash against globalization as a matter of reaction to the ravages of deindustrialization working people suffered as the fortunes of the super-rich surged, such observers saw it as a matter of cultural dislike, of, as Barack Obama supposedly had it, people unsatisfied by "empty cosmopolitanism" and "just want[ing] to fall back into their own tribe."
That choice of word, "tribe," seems especially revealing of the understanding of populism discussed here--the populists those appealing not to the economic interests of the broad public as against elite, not to the demand for justice by working people for social justice, but to tribalism. There are, of course, other words that fit such a politics better than "populism." However, using "populism" is convenient for the sub-literate poltroons because other words would be much more harshly critical of those they describe as populists. Indeed, critics of the use of the term "populism" and its derivatives find that it has all but become an euphemism for "extremist," "racist" and "fascist," far more charged words that the "centrists" of our media hesitate to use (given their anti-leftist conservatism, and the way it makes them much more squeamish about criticizing the hard right than even the mildly "liberal"). It is also the case that equating populism with extremism, racism and other such attitudes has been a way of identifying them with a public the elites neither know nor respect, and avoiding the extent to which elites espouse and promote and exploit those attitudes; making the latter appear the protectors of what civility endures in contemporary life; and even implying that the broad public's backwardness makes its social grievances undeserving of attention, with, again, reference to globalization relevant here, those negatively "impacted" by the march of the global economy having no one to blame but themselves in the view of those respectful of market outcomes, with their very intolerance the reason for their troubles in an era in which openness paid off, and the motivation behind their objections.
As is usually the case with words that get tossed around very much by the sub-literates of the Media Establishment the word could stand some unpacking.
Fortunately at the simple definitional level this word's meaning is not very difficult. The word "populist" is commonly defined as a political tendency championing the rights and the self-determination of "the people" against an "elite" with whom they are presumed to be at odds due to the latter in some way failing to respect, exploiting and/or oppressing the former.
However, from here things get much trickier. At this moment the bit of that trickiness that I want to deal with is the plain and simple fact that in speaking of "populism," and thus "the people," we are obliged to say something of just "who" the people are--how we define this category of person, what and how they presumably think and feel, and why this or that purported appeal to them merits the label "populist."
In considering that it is essential to note that those who toss around the label "populist" on platforms sufficiently visible for us to be sensible of their doing so are not "of the people"--precisely because the media is a thoroughly elite enterprise, especially at its higher levels. (In social provenance, in acculturation and training, in their present condition and their aspirations and their identifications and their loyalties this most visible section of the chattering classes are most certainly of and for the elite, all while from their life experience and their more intellectual activity having very little contact with or respect for those persons who are not.) This makes it quite natural for them to think of "the people" as those who are "not like us."
At the same time said elite, reflecting its essential conservatism, reinforced by a postmodernism that is itself very much of the right no matter how much people of conventional mind insist otherwise, is far more comfortable interpreting political matters from the standpoint of "culture" rather than hard economic interest or social reality. (Thus do they treat the kulturkampf as the center of American politics as they drone on ceaselessly about "Red" and "Blue" states, the key to American politics all lying in the coloring of an electronic map seen in their asinine coverage of a presidential election a generation ago.)
The result is that they think of the people as those who are "not like us," and of those who are like or not like them as like or not like them in cultural terms. In doing so the "elites" make much of their "education"--not only in the narrow academic sense (they are very proud of having gone to Good Schools, for what little good their expensive schooling did their minds), but the broader, Jane Austen-ish sense of a whole upbringing. Where that is concerned they are from the great urban areas of the coasts, and especially the East Coast; they have traveled about, because of their parents' careers, because of the educations they often had far from home, because of their own career trajectories. By contrast those who are not of the elite can less say the same, and often not at all. They come from provincial areas, and unless their family was forced to relocate by hardship, know little but those areas, with even if they have one this extending even to their college education, for rather than going to the Good School (doing which would likely have required them to sell themselves into debt slavery, not that the elites ever think about that) they probably went to the local state U, and maybe that just after a stint in community college, and after graduating looked for a job in their "hometown," their whole life lived within that likely none-too-sophisticated area.
The result is that "the elite" are "cosmopolitan," whereas "the people" are localist in orientation, rooted in community, with all the difference in "prejudices" that goes with that, with said elite more urbane about and open to the wider world, "the people" less so--the latter more "localist," more "rooted" in family and neighborhood and community, more creatures of whatever tradition they were raised in, more fearful and suspicious of that bigger world generally and anything different from what they were brought up with particularly. All of this has had particular consequences given the way that a neoliberalism that it has been fashionable to identify with "globalization," and the "information" or "knowledge" age, has been at the center of political and economic and social life, namely the framing of the issue of what "globalization" meant for working people as against the elite not in material terms but cultural ones. Accordingly, rather than facing up to backlash against globalization as a matter of reaction to the ravages of deindustrialization working people suffered as the fortunes of the super-rich surged, such observers saw it as a matter of cultural dislike, of, as Barack Obama supposedly had it, people unsatisfied by "empty cosmopolitanism" and "just want[ing] to fall back into their own tribe."
That choice of word, "tribe," seems especially revealing of the understanding of populism discussed here--the populists those appealing not to the economic interests of the broad public as against elite, not to the demand for justice by working people for social justice, but to tribalism. There are, of course, other words that fit such a politics better than "populism." However, using "populism" is convenient for the sub-literate poltroons because other words would be much more harshly critical of those they describe as populists. Indeed, critics of the use of the term "populism" and its derivatives find that it has all but become an euphemism for "extremist," "racist" and "fascist," far more charged words that the "centrists" of our media hesitate to use (given their anti-leftist conservatism, and the way it makes them much more squeamish about criticizing the hard right than even the mildly "liberal"). It is also the case that equating populism with extremism, racism and other such attitudes has been a way of identifying them with a public the elites neither know nor respect, and avoiding the extent to which elites espouse and promote and exploit those attitudes; making the latter appear the protectors of what civility endures in contemporary life; and even implying that the broad public's backwardness makes its social grievances undeserving of attention, with, again, reference to globalization relevant here, those negatively "impacted" by the march of the global economy having no one to blame but themselves in the view of those respectful of market outcomes, with their very intolerance the reason for their troubles in an era in which openness paid off, and the motivation behind their objections.
Comparing the Digital Age with the Fordist Era
In considering the question of whether the digital era has really lived up to the hype for it one option would seem to be to compare this ostensible economic revolution with the rather unquestionable economic revolution that preceded it, which we broadly speak of as "Fordism." Centering on the switchover from steam to electricity as the power source for the factory (enabling assembly lines and powered machine tools), it exploited that development by way of high-tech and high-capital standardized mass production and mass consumption oriented toward consumer culture as we know it.
In considering Fordism one should acknowledge that the development was a lengthy process, and that it did not equally affect all manufacturing. (Consider how the textile industry works to this day.) Still, this type of production was both sufficiently revolutionary in productivity, and sufficiently widespread, that in the first half of the twentieth century U.S. manufacturing as a whole saw its workers on a per-head basis produce two and even three times as much per hour as the country's closest industrial rivals Britain and Germany, while it enjoyed a still greater edge over other countries.
The result was that the U.S. had an economic output far, far out of proportion to its share of the world's population (accounting for perhaps half of world manufacturing value added at the end of World War II). And without romanticizing or oversimplifying what was a very complex and not always happy social reality this productivity meant that American incomes and living standards were higher than for their foreign counterparts, and indeed enabled the development in America of a novel way of life that much of the rest of the world aspired to imitate (auto-subtopian consumerism). Meanwhile, the combination of wealth and its utilization translated to an extraordinary position of U.S. power in the world, not just the "hard" power that came from immense American resources and their usage in ways from leveraging international financial institutions to foreign aid programs to the country's global military establishment, but the "soft" power that came with America's demonstrated ability to generate riches, and the way in which at least its better-off residents lived (or at least appeared to). One may add that it was other countries' assimilating that American-created model that enabled them to achieve their post-war "economic miracles" (exemplified by the German and Japanese cases, and later Korea and China), exploding their incomes and living standards and diminishing the American lead.
It would be very hard to argue that the digital revolution, which can be regarded as similarly having emerged in America given that the fundamental inventions (the transistor and the MOSFET transistor, computer networks like the ARPANet) were generally the product of research by American government agencies and American businesses like IBM, AT & T and Xerox, did anything like that for America's economy, living standards, power. Indeed, when we look away from the hype we find that the digital age has been one of, by comparison with what America enjoyed in the early and middle twentieth century, productivity growth so weak that it has been an "embarrassment" for economists. (Yes, the robotized car factory, the "mini-mill" that yields a ton of steel with as little as half a man-hour of labor, are wonders, but the big picture is another matter--with it seeming ironic that those heavy "smokestack" industrial areas where productivity growth has been meaningful are the exact ones that the champions of the digital age sneered at as "declining" and "sunset" industries irrelevant to the country's prosperity.) All this has been reflected in weaker economic growth, with the extent to which growth has been seen at all as very likely "hollow" given such evidences of "deindustrialization" (from stagnating and declining manufacturing value added, to chronic and colossal manufactured goods trading deficits, to the falling high-tech content of production exemplified by petroleum products replacing aircraft and microchips as America's biggest export of the type).
Amid stagnant productivity, weak growth, deindustrialization, the experience of the American worker has been one of working harder for less--and indeed working Americans less and less able to enjoy that standard of living and that auto-subtopian way of life that once fascinated so many onlookers. The result is that these decades have, in spite of the bullishness of a significant part of the commentariat sure that deindustrialization must somehow be a matter of mere "growing pains" of the digital age (a view worn very thin as the experience has worn on), widely been perceived as an era of decline for American economic and especially industrial vitality, affluence and power at home and abroad--decline that the digital revolution obviously failed to stem, even though the world as a whole has suffered an epoch of slow productivity improvement and growth.
The result is that if there seem to be areas in which computers have brought new efficiencies and conveniences anyone looking to them for a genuine industrial revolution to compare with what Fordism wrought would seem to still be waiting for that to happen--just as Robert Gordon concluded was the case a quarter of a century ago. One may argue over why this is the case--whether there was potential for much more. What, for example, might have been the case had economic policymaking, in one form or another, favored investment in material production over "financialization," and raising labor productivity rather than lowering the price of labor? (After all, Fordism would not have developed anywhere near so fully as it did in the absence of the industrial policy, and other policy, that enabled it.) Still, however useful an exercise this might be (for instance, as a way of considering what courses of policy might be desirable now), they only affirm that in actuality we are in a very different place, one that in this case has been a disappointment as compared with what those who sang digitalization promised the world as the benefit of compliance with their vision.
In considering Fordism one should acknowledge that the development was a lengthy process, and that it did not equally affect all manufacturing. (Consider how the textile industry works to this day.) Still, this type of production was both sufficiently revolutionary in productivity, and sufficiently widespread, that in the first half of the twentieth century U.S. manufacturing as a whole saw its workers on a per-head basis produce two and even three times as much per hour as the country's closest industrial rivals Britain and Germany, while it enjoyed a still greater edge over other countries.
The result was that the U.S. had an economic output far, far out of proportion to its share of the world's population (accounting for perhaps half of world manufacturing value added at the end of World War II). And without romanticizing or oversimplifying what was a very complex and not always happy social reality this productivity meant that American incomes and living standards were higher than for their foreign counterparts, and indeed enabled the development in America of a novel way of life that much of the rest of the world aspired to imitate (auto-subtopian consumerism). Meanwhile, the combination of wealth and its utilization translated to an extraordinary position of U.S. power in the world, not just the "hard" power that came from immense American resources and their usage in ways from leveraging international financial institutions to foreign aid programs to the country's global military establishment, but the "soft" power that came with America's demonstrated ability to generate riches, and the way in which at least its better-off residents lived (or at least appeared to). One may add that it was other countries' assimilating that American-created model that enabled them to achieve their post-war "economic miracles" (exemplified by the German and Japanese cases, and later Korea and China), exploding their incomes and living standards and diminishing the American lead.
It would be very hard to argue that the digital revolution, which can be regarded as similarly having emerged in America given that the fundamental inventions (the transistor and the MOSFET transistor, computer networks like the ARPANet) were generally the product of research by American government agencies and American businesses like IBM, AT & T and Xerox, did anything like that for America's economy, living standards, power. Indeed, when we look away from the hype we find that the digital age has been one of, by comparison with what America enjoyed in the early and middle twentieth century, productivity growth so weak that it has been an "embarrassment" for economists. (Yes, the robotized car factory, the "mini-mill" that yields a ton of steel with as little as half a man-hour of labor, are wonders, but the big picture is another matter--with it seeming ironic that those heavy "smokestack" industrial areas where productivity growth has been meaningful are the exact ones that the champions of the digital age sneered at as "declining" and "sunset" industries irrelevant to the country's prosperity.) All this has been reflected in weaker economic growth, with the extent to which growth has been seen at all as very likely "hollow" given such evidences of "deindustrialization" (from stagnating and declining manufacturing value added, to chronic and colossal manufactured goods trading deficits, to the falling high-tech content of production exemplified by petroleum products replacing aircraft and microchips as America's biggest export of the type).
Amid stagnant productivity, weak growth, deindustrialization, the experience of the American worker has been one of working harder for less--and indeed working Americans less and less able to enjoy that standard of living and that auto-subtopian way of life that once fascinated so many onlookers. The result is that these decades have, in spite of the bullishness of a significant part of the commentariat sure that deindustrialization must somehow be a matter of mere "growing pains" of the digital age (a view worn very thin as the experience has worn on), widely been perceived as an era of decline for American economic and especially industrial vitality, affluence and power at home and abroad--decline that the digital revolution obviously failed to stem, even though the world as a whole has suffered an epoch of slow productivity improvement and growth.
The result is that if there seem to be areas in which computers have brought new efficiencies and conveniences anyone looking to them for a genuine industrial revolution to compare with what Fordism wrought would seem to still be waiting for that to happen--just as Robert Gordon concluded was the case a quarter of a century ago. One may argue over why this is the case--whether there was potential for much more. What, for example, might have been the case had economic policymaking, in one form or another, favored investment in material production over "financialization," and raising labor productivity rather than lowering the price of labor? (After all, Fordism would not have developed anywhere near so fully as it did in the absence of the industrial policy, and other policy, that enabled it.) Still, however useful an exercise this might be (for instance, as a way of considering what courses of policy might be desirable now), they only affirm that in actuality we are in a very different place, one that in this case has been a disappointment as compared with what those who sang digitalization promised the world as the benefit of compliance with their vision.