In comparing the original 1989 American Gladiators series with its 2008 NBC remake one sees the distance between one epoch and another in the history of television.
The original was part of a boom in a corner of the TV market that has long passed out of existence--first-run syndicated programming, filled mainly by relatively low-budget fare that promised light, unpretentious, often unashamedly cheesy entertainment to the audience. The blaring of the theme music legendary Hollywood composer Bill Conti wrote for the show set the tone in the opening sequence, evoking the arena scenes of the Roman epics of the Hollywood studio era and then playing on while the narrator introduced the members of the regular cast by their flashy codenames (Laser! Sabre! Zap!) as one by one they made their grand appearances on the arena floor in their individualized and distinctive red, white and blue costumes, the whole presentation altogether imbuing them with a flamboyance more like that of old-fashioned superheroes than athletes in a manner that (strangely enough) befit the "gladiatorial" spectacle.
The original show was also reflective of its moment in that it was a bridge between the world of sports and the broader world of entertainment of a kind much more common then than now, like morning workout shows of the kind they used to have on ESPN (a Bodyshaping, for instance), or the "special guest star" spots on that older style of scripted TV show that sports stars so often filled--with the way in which this particular show functioned as such a bridge relevant to what it had to offer. Specifically it had the comparative novelty of (presumably) "regular people" testing their mettle against professional athletes in games which involved few persons at a time (often just two), and were also relatively unusual (Breakthrough and Conquer, Assault, the Wall, etc.), as well as short, and presented without interruption between the cuts to commercial. Endowing the contests with a combination of simplicity, gimmickry, brevity, compactness, they could appeal to people who would never have the patience to sit through a three-hour football or baseball game with their elaborate rules and constant interruptions. The terms of the contests also made it easy for viewers to pay attention to the codenamed, costumed regulars as individuals in a way not the case with the participants in the more prominent team sports with their larger number of players in identical uniforms that (as football helmets do) often conceal the players' faces--and become fans in the process. (It also didn't hurt that, perhaps especially in an era when pin-ups from the world of fitness were popular, the show featured Gladiators like Raye Hollitt, Lori Fetrick, Erika Andersch . . .) In all that it was something different and new and for many appealing as they kicked back this offering of a local TV station some lazy Sunday afternoon.
By contrast the 2008 show put what was a low-budget syndicated show into not just prime time but Big Three network (NBC) prime time--a very different and arguably less appropriate sort of market for this kind of fare than the already nonexistent syndicated market (or the more plausible basic cable market where this might have had a chance). The show looked grander, flashier, slicker in line with the trend to rising budgets and production values in the two decades that had passed between one version of Gladiators and the other, but the sense of unpretentious, cheesy fun was absent. Yes, there were codenames and costumes, but the new names simply didn't have the flair of the old ones (Hellga? Really?), while the costumes were more visually subdued in a way that made it all feel less superhero-like--the shift in the Gladiators' wear comparable to the toning down of so many superhero costumes in the feature films of the twenty-first century, like the difference between the costuming of Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman back in the '70s TV series and Gal Gadot's in the Patty Jenkins films. For many this was less appealing in other ways too. (Many an admirer of the old show preferred the hot glamazons in star-spangled spandex of the original series to the stress on "inclusivity," "body positivity," "diversity" and reserve toward the "male gaze" that characterized the casting and costuming of the later crop at the price of the sex appeal that was, too, part of the fun of the original.) It did not help that the remake, which even in the best of circumstances could never have seemed as fresh and new as the old show in a market crammed with shows in which "regular people" were on television with celebrities engaged in implausible contests before an audience of millions, the producers leaned into the reality TV format by spending a lot more time on the supposed "human interest" of the contestants' personal stories, at the expense of the actual interest of the contests that were the whole point of the thing, and (again), the fun.
As with so many, many other remakes of a twenty-first century in which retreads of old hits can seem to have crowded out everything else the new Gladiators' producers completely missed the point as they showed that they knew a brand when they saw it (not a great intellectual feat given that making this easy is a brand's whole raison d'etre), but not that they can understand why it became a brand in the first place, as they unsurprisingly failed to realize their ambition for a hit (the new version lasting a mere two short seasons totaling 21 episodes whose sole evident legacy all these years later seems to have been helping Gina Carano become known outside the world of Mixed Martial Arts). Still, this was not to be the last attempt to bring Gladiators back. As it happened Gladiators had had its international spin-offs, not least in Britain, where the BBC revived its own version in a 2024 series we are told became a hit with viewers that encouraged the Amazon Prime streaming service to shoot not one but two new seasons of American Gladiators in that country (I imagine, to take advantage of a weak pound and British government subsidy, and maybe to spare the cost of a second, similar, facility at home). Will this new version prove more successful than its predecessor? Perhaps, perhaps not, though I suspect the folks calling the shots will hew closer to the 2008 version than the one we got in 1989, for better or worse.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
The Career of Gina Carano: A Few Thoughts
The career of Gina Carano would seem to have its points of interest for those considering the fortunes of celebrity broadly today, not least its beginnings for those who manage to attain it. Perhaps the last athlete to really successfully cross over from the wide, wide world of sports to the still wider world of entertainment to go by how the Mixed Martial Arts fighter became a Hollywood Name, she did so by way of the short-lived 2008 revival of American Gladiators--already an increasingly rare bridge between the world of sports and the rest of entertainment--as one of the Gladiators (codename: Crush). The new Gladiators was the umpteenth case of grubby media executives simple-mindedly seizing on a past success without understanding that success--how the show worked, what it brought to the market in which was a hit--as they gave viewers a reality TV-ized version in an oversaturated reality market as they forgot what made the original fun for so many, and made the mistake, too, of putting it on in the particularly contested and declining market that was Big Three network prime time, with the predictable result that the show flopped. But Carano did get visibility and a fan base she wouldn't otherwise have had (it probably helping that those who, far outside the media's respectable domains, complained that the new crop of female Gladiators was less appealing than their famously sexy predecessors felt her to be an exception, a view reflected in her making the cover of the 2009 edition of ESPN The Magazine's "Body" issue--its now-defunct semi-p.c. answer to Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue). In short order came the Hollywood career, which in this case went beyond the B-movie level so common for such celebrities to include the lead role in critical darling Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, supporting roles in films of the blockbuster Fast and Furious and Deadpool franchises, and of course, a place in the regular cast of Disney-Lucasfilm's flagship show for its effort to bring the Star Wars franchise to the small screen, The Mandalorian.
There simply hasn't been anything to really compare with that since, all as, less happily for Ms. Carano and her fans, the way in which it all came to a screeching halt in early 2021 seems equally telling of the times--not least, in the muddle surrounding the affair. While Carano was fired from The Mandalorian because of a social media post which compared the situation of sympathizers of the political right in the United States generally and Hollywood particularly to that of victims of the Holocaust some have spun the situation to make it appear as if the "woke outrage mob" had "canceled" a "conservative" voice. Certainly those who do espouse "woke" opinions can be expected to find a light-minded treatment of Anti-Semitism and the most notorious atrocity in its history objectionable, but the truth is also that the post offended a great many people beyond that quarter in ways that would matter for any high-profile corporation displaying the normal concern for public image, if only for purely business reasons (let alone a company in the particularly delicate and even fraught position of Disney in recent years), and that would seem to have factored into their decision much more strongly than mere "woke" outrage.
However, the narrative that came to predominate was about the presumed dominance of the media by a "woke" opinion and its "cancel culture," and the idea that the right is persecuted, especially in Hollywood--all of which would seem to have been to the advantage of the anti-woke right, enabling it to position itself as not just the victim in the situation but the champion of "free speech" against censorious champions of "social justice." With this all encouraged by the continuation of the drama as "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk financed Carano's inevitable suit against the bête noire that Disney had become for the right, concluded by a settlement this past August whose undisclosed terms left Carano telling the world she was "smiling."
Considering the more complex reality one might usefully compare Carano's treatment with that of her fellow combat sports-turned-Fast and Furious actress, Ronda Rousey (whose transition wasn't nearly as successful as Carano's seemed to be). Prior to Carano's troubles in 2021 the Bernie Sanders-supporting Rousey probably suffered more for her progressive political opinions than Carano for her right-wing ones (certainly to go by how much flak she has got for her acting or her off-screen life), though the media doing the penalizing has not been nearly as prone to tell that story, less congenial as it is from the standpoint of the conventional wisdom it so ceaselessly promotes on our screens.
There simply hasn't been anything to really compare with that since, all as, less happily for Ms. Carano and her fans, the way in which it all came to a screeching halt in early 2021 seems equally telling of the times--not least, in the muddle surrounding the affair. While Carano was fired from The Mandalorian because of a social media post which compared the situation of sympathizers of the political right in the United States generally and Hollywood particularly to that of victims of the Holocaust some have spun the situation to make it appear as if the "woke outrage mob" had "canceled" a "conservative" voice. Certainly those who do espouse "woke" opinions can be expected to find a light-minded treatment of Anti-Semitism and the most notorious atrocity in its history objectionable, but the truth is also that the post offended a great many people beyond that quarter in ways that would matter for any high-profile corporation displaying the normal concern for public image, if only for purely business reasons (let alone a company in the particularly delicate and even fraught position of Disney in recent years), and that would seem to have factored into their decision much more strongly than mere "woke" outrage.
However, the narrative that came to predominate was about the presumed dominance of the media by a "woke" opinion and its "cancel culture," and the idea that the right is persecuted, especially in Hollywood--all of which would seem to have been to the advantage of the anti-woke right, enabling it to position itself as not just the victim in the situation but the champion of "free speech" against censorious champions of "social justice." With this all encouraged by the continuation of the drama as "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk financed Carano's inevitable suit against the bête noire that Disney had become for the right, concluded by a settlement this past August whose undisclosed terms left Carano telling the world she was "smiling."
Considering the more complex reality one might usefully compare Carano's treatment with that of her fellow combat sports-turned-Fast and Furious actress, Ronda Rousey (whose transition wasn't nearly as successful as Carano's seemed to be). Prior to Carano's troubles in 2021 the Bernie Sanders-supporting Rousey probably suffered more for her progressive political opinions than Carano for her right-wing ones (certainly to go by how much flak she has got for her acting or her off-screen life), though the media doing the penalizing has not been nearly as prone to tell that story, less congenial as it is from the standpoint of the conventional wisdom it so ceaselessly promotes on our screens.
The Sports Celebrity's Decline, Revisited
Discussing the decline of celebrity some factors seem to have relevance across that whole range of activities which make celebrities of individuals. One is the transformation of media culture--in particular the way in which contemporary life became hyper-mediated, and the associated media culture fragmented, with the combination at once leaving would-be celebrities forced to promote themselves to such a degree that they are far too overexposed to retain the control of their image so important to maintaining their mystique even as they are still close to being lost in the crowd, while the revolution wrought by social media and reality TV may be said to have cheapened the idea of celebrity itself. Other factors are more particular to specific kinds of celebrity, such as that of the movie star (whose standing declined as the theatrical experience waned, the "Age of Movies" passed, the franchise overshadowed the performer), or the supermodel (representing as the supermodel did a fantasy of old-fashioned luxury, elegance, beauty with new-fashioned lucre, freedom and sexiness, it derived additional vibrancy from the early days of the digital age, but palled with the arrival of harder times, and the rise of the "Influencer").
So does it also go with the sports star. As already remarked even here, the erosion of the audience for sports has been part of that, and so too the diminution of the bridges between the sports world and the rest of entertainment. Morning workout shows, for example, were such a bridge, and so too was the filling of "special guest star" spots on TV shows, and the way that sports celebrities so often parlayed their success into "fitness expert" status with its attendant opportunities providing celebrity endorsements, and all that could follow from them. Exemplary of this might be the career of six time Ms. Olympia bodybuilder Cory Everson, whose public profile extended far beyond the practitioners and audience for the sport, with her gigs on Bodyshaping and Gotta Sweat on ESPN, her books like Flex Appeal, her appearance on shows like Home Improvement, and her involvement with the promotion of brands like Reebok and goods like FlexTrainer--and all this enabled and supported, like the acting career that saw her amass a not inconsiderable list of credits in shows like the syndicated action-adventure series' Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, and films from Double Impact to Natural Born Killers, and the extent to which, rather than just endorsing other brands "Cory Everson" became a brand name herself, promoting on the QVC home shopping network Cory Everson-branded goods like the Cory Everson Solutions line of weight loss products and fitness equipment like the Cory Everson 15-in-1 Body Sculpting Bench.
Today the workout shows no longer exist, TV is much less inclined to use special guest stars in the old episodic way, the market for selling fitness advice to the masses has been taken over by a multitude of "influencers," and advertising generally is less drawn to the celebrity endorsement, not least because their stars shining less brightly than they once did their endorsement would not mean as much as it once would have. Of course, there were other factors in Everson's particular prominence, like the comparative novelty of female bodybuilding at the time that got her and colleagues like Rachel McLish a good deal of attention (this was the era of the Pumping Iron II documentary), and frankly the pin-up/sex symbol status Cory Everson, among many other female bodybuilders (like Ms. McLish) acquired. (Saying it all is how in one photo shoot for Muscle & Fitness magazine Everson playfully dressed up as a succession of film icons and sex symbols from the past--Jane Russell in The Outlaw, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, a leopard print-bikinied Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.. Meanwhile that same appeal was certainly very relevant to many of her TV appearances, as her three episodes as Atalanta on Hercules demonstrate, "Ares" perhaps the first and certainly one of the very few occasions in which an actress, let alone an Everson-grade pin-up, wore a thong through a whole hour of over-the-air television--and allowed the audience to enjoy the fact so thoroughly--in a costuming choice that was to also inform her appearance as Mara in Tarzan.) However, those factors also put the change in perspective, given how along with the waning of public attention to sports the institution of the sex symbol declined, certainly across the culture broadly, but especially as a factor in a career like Everson's--partly because of how female bodybuilding's standards changed, embracing an extreme muscularity less consistent with a Cory Everson-like appeal, but primarily because of how feminist concern for women's sports has become very inimical to a female athlete's gaining attention that way (such that today's bodybuilding magazine is rather less likely to feature any shoot like the one described above). The result is that the media-pop cultural ecosystem in which Cory Everson became a Big Name has simply ceased to exist--and a good many persons who remember Ms. Everson's name well would probably have a very hard time naming anyone who won the Ms. Olympia title since.
So does it also go with the sports star. As already remarked even here, the erosion of the audience for sports has been part of that, and so too the diminution of the bridges between the sports world and the rest of entertainment. Morning workout shows, for example, were such a bridge, and so too was the filling of "special guest star" spots on TV shows, and the way that sports celebrities so often parlayed their success into "fitness expert" status with its attendant opportunities providing celebrity endorsements, and all that could follow from them. Exemplary of this might be the career of six time Ms. Olympia bodybuilder Cory Everson, whose public profile extended far beyond the practitioners and audience for the sport, with her gigs on Bodyshaping and Gotta Sweat on ESPN, her books like Flex Appeal, her appearance on shows like Home Improvement, and her involvement with the promotion of brands like Reebok and goods like FlexTrainer--and all this enabled and supported, like the acting career that saw her amass a not inconsiderable list of credits in shows like the syndicated action-adventure series' Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, and films from Double Impact to Natural Born Killers, and the extent to which, rather than just endorsing other brands "Cory Everson" became a brand name herself, promoting on the QVC home shopping network Cory Everson-branded goods like the Cory Everson Solutions line of weight loss products and fitness equipment like the Cory Everson 15-in-1 Body Sculpting Bench.
Today the workout shows no longer exist, TV is much less inclined to use special guest stars in the old episodic way, the market for selling fitness advice to the masses has been taken over by a multitude of "influencers," and advertising generally is less drawn to the celebrity endorsement, not least because their stars shining less brightly than they once did their endorsement would not mean as much as it once would have. Of course, there were other factors in Everson's particular prominence, like the comparative novelty of female bodybuilding at the time that got her and colleagues like Rachel McLish a good deal of attention (this was the era of the Pumping Iron II documentary), and frankly the pin-up/sex symbol status Cory Everson, among many other female bodybuilders (like Ms. McLish) acquired. (Saying it all is how in one photo shoot for Muscle & Fitness magazine Everson playfully dressed up as a succession of film icons and sex symbols from the past--Jane Russell in The Outlaw, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, a leopard print-bikinied Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.. Meanwhile that same appeal was certainly very relevant to many of her TV appearances, as her three episodes as Atalanta on Hercules demonstrate, "Ares" perhaps the first and certainly one of the very few occasions in which an actress, let alone an Everson-grade pin-up, wore a thong through a whole hour of over-the-air television--and allowed the audience to enjoy the fact so thoroughly--in a costuming choice that was to also inform her appearance as Mara in Tarzan.) However, those factors also put the change in perspective, given how along with the waning of public attention to sports the institution of the sex symbol declined, certainly across the culture broadly, but especially as a factor in a career like Everson's--partly because of how female bodybuilding's standards changed, embracing an extreme muscularity less consistent with a Cory Everson-like appeal, but primarily because of how feminist concern for women's sports has become very inimical to a female athlete's gaining attention that way (such that today's bodybuilding magazine is rather less likely to feature any shoot like the one described above). The result is that the media-pop cultural ecosystem in which Cory Everson became a Big Name has simply ceased to exist--and a good many persons who remember Ms. Everson's name well would probably have a very hard time naming anyone who won the Ms. Olympia title since.
The Upcoming Spartacus: House of Ashur: Some Reflections
The STARZ Channel's series Spartacus was not a hit on anywhere near the scale of, for example, The Sopranos, or perhaps more comparable in being a period soap opera, Game of Thrones. This was not surprising. Not only was it the case that STARZ had a smaller subscriber base than HBO (which pretty consistently had about 50 percent+ more subscribers through the relevant years), but it was also a relative latecomer to the original series' game. It was, too, the case that (at least with the more culturally literate portion of their audience) this particular show had more baggage than those who greenlit it seemed aware, given the number of retellings of the story of Spartacus over the years, not least in a genuine Hollywood classic, the multi-Oscar winning Kirk Douglas-produced, Dalton Trumbo-scripted, Anthony Mann- and Stanley Kubrick-directed 1960 adaptation of Howard Fast's 1951 novel. It matters, too, just what that classic offered. If Fast's truly extraordinary novel is (unfortunately) little read today its humane sensibility still managed to survive A Clockwork Orange director Kubrick's extreme misanthropy, and his predictable flirtation with the Cold Warrior anti-revolutionism Arthur Koestler displayed in his treatment of the theme in The Gladiators (due to Kubrick's not having complete creative control here).
Anyone who admired that film, or even simply had impressions of how the story of Spartacus ought to be told on the basis of its reputation, could easily be leery of a retelling of the tale for a twenty-first century cable milieu addicted to grimdarkness, edgelordism and the equation of what is vile with what is "realistic." More consequential for a contemporary audience, however, is what we know more specifically about the production. If Sam Raimi has won a good deal of respect as a director working in certain popular genres, and even got some respect for a handling of more "serious" fare suggestive of unrealized potentials, the idea of him making an action-adventure-themed show set in the ancient world starring Lucy Lawless . . . well, I suppose most think less Hollywood classic and more Xena: Warrior Princess, a show beloved by its fans, but which (fairly or unfairly) few would regard as a very promising precedent for a serious treatment of this material, all as the grimdarkness of Xena's concluding season could seem in itself suggestive of the direction in which the new show would go, an expectation the show promptly confirmed when it started to air. Thus one had something many found at once silly and nihilistic, all as however much the "sex and violence" so much a part of that may be draws there are different ways to handle them, to different result. After all, it is not sex that sells but the sex-y, all as those selling it have to be careful not to kill its appeal by blending it with the un-sexy that can very quickly kill all interest--and as it happened the show's combining gut-wrenching violence with the brutality of social relations within this world of literal masters and slaves, and the decision to go thoroughly "modern" here with regard to gender politics and "representation," meant that there was a lot in this "pornography of cruelty" as the detractors had it that would make many a viewer change the channel in a hurry. And altogether this probably did much to limit the show to a cult rather than a general following.
The result is that STARZ's returning to the well with The House of Ashur seems that much more obviously a matter of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel for even marginal successes it can prequel, sequel, reboot, remake and spin off in its desperate yet undeniably crass and shabby way as the folks in the C-Suites seize on anything and everything they can to make the attempt go over, not least the "alternate timeline" idea. As it happens the character of Ashur positioned at the center of this sequel died in the "original" Spartacus series (beheaded, so there is no room for the usual soap operatic nonsense about an implausible story about how he survived), but this is a parallel universe version where that never happened--reflecting how this gimmick has been so congenial to the schlockmeisters of Tinseltown that they are now willing to use it in "grounded" fare such as something they are calling an "historical drama."
Anyone who admired that film, or even simply had impressions of how the story of Spartacus ought to be told on the basis of its reputation, could easily be leery of a retelling of the tale for a twenty-first century cable milieu addicted to grimdarkness, edgelordism and the equation of what is vile with what is "realistic." More consequential for a contemporary audience, however, is what we know more specifically about the production. If Sam Raimi has won a good deal of respect as a director working in certain popular genres, and even got some respect for a handling of more "serious" fare suggestive of unrealized potentials, the idea of him making an action-adventure-themed show set in the ancient world starring Lucy Lawless . . . well, I suppose most think less Hollywood classic and more Xena: Warrior Princess, a show beloved by its fans, but which (fairly or unfairly) few would regard as a very promising precedent for a serious treatment of this material, all as the grimdarkness of Xena's concluding season could seem in itself suggestive of the direction in which the new show would go, an expectation the show promptly confirmed when it started to air. Thus one had something many found at once silly and nihilistic, all as however much the "sex and violence" so much a part of that may be draws there are different ways to handle them, to different result. After all, it is not sex that sells but the sex-y, all as those selling it have to be careful not to kill its appeal by blending it with the un-sexy that can very quickly kill all interest--and as it happened the show's combining gut-wrenching violence with the brutality of social relations within this world of literal masters and slaves, and the decision to go thoroughly "modern" here with regard to gender politics and "representation," meant that there was a lot in this "pornography of cruelty" as the detractors had it that would make many a viewer change the channel in a hurry. And altogether this probably did much to limit the show to a cult rather than a general following.
The result is that STARZ's returning to the well with The House of Ashur seems that much more obviously a matter of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel for even marginal successes it can prequel, sequel, reboot, remake and spin off in its desperate yet undeniably crass and shabby way as the folks in the C-Suites seize on anything and everything they can to make the attempt go over, not least the "alternate timeline" idea. As it happens the character of Ashur positioned at the center of this sequel died in the "original" Spartacus series (beheaded, so there is no room for the usual soap operatic nonsense about an implausible story about how he survived), but this is a parallel universe version where that never happened--reflecting how this gimmick has been so congenial to the schlockmeisters of Tinseltown that they are now willing to use it in "grounded" fare such as something they are calling an "historical drama."
Xena: Warrior Princess: A Few Reflections
Reading of STARZ's revival of its Spartacus television series put me in mind of that first big Sam Raimi-Lucy Lawless period drama collaboration, Xena: Warrior Princess. A spin-off of the then recent hit Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (where the Xena character first appeared) the Hercules/Xenaverse would seem emblematic of the contrast between television in the '90s and television today--not least in the existence then of a market for first-run syndicated drama that was often filled with relatively low-cost genre fare, and the tendency of such to unabashedly presenting the public with unpretentious light entertainment.
I imagine that it was mainly as such that most people came to enjoy those two particular shows, though there were differences, not least in how each show handled the darker elements in its premise. Hercules' backstory, consistent with the most well-known version of the mythology, makes the starting point of his adventures his murdering his wife and children in a fit of madness caused in him by his father Zeus' wife Hera in the course of her unending war on all the children he had sired in the course of his adulteries (the gods "petty and cruel" as the narration over the opening credits sequence had it). However, the backstory stayed in the back for the most part as the hero, if having tragedy behind him (and some tragedy ahead of him too), was just about always the uncomplicated, upright, pure-hearted champion of all that is right and good bounding knight errant-style from one adventure to the next fighting and defeating divine and human tyranny up to the last episode--and beyond.
By contrast the darker side of the tale is foregrounded in Xena's story because of what she had been before, a warlord with a long record of atrocity behind her who is now trying to move on from that and not finding the going easy, not least because the war god Ares was constantly trying to lure her back to her old ways, and because the consequences of her actions keep catching up with her, not least as former victims of hers become victimizers, and often came after her personally--most implacably, Callisto. Meanwhile, even where this is not the case Xena's particular adventures often denied her a way of saving the day through uncomplicated heroism, the character constantly having to choose the lesser of two evils, with the grimdark last season (the season of episodes like "Who's Gurkhan" and "Legacy," and "The Abyss") frequently not giving her much to choose between one and the other--such that if the end of Xena along with the end of her epoch was a controversial choice with fans it seems that that was the only credible one given where the producers had already decided to go with the series.
Looking back at those seasons after many decades of grimdark being so fashionable and so pervasive, what are we to make of that choice? Especially given how much of what David Walsh called "market pessimism" we are subject to--unearned pessimism, pessimism taken up as a style choice, however far from innocent taking it up may be politically--one may wonder if this is what went on here, especially given that this was, at least at the start, a lightweight adventure. However, a glance at, for example, the episode "To Helicon and Back" gives me pause here. After all, after the show's nearly six seasons of feminist Rah-Rah generally and regarding the Amazons particularly (a thing the makers of the show would not trifle with lightly given not just what a big piety this was then and since but how much that feminism did to lend Xena some cachet as more than "just another action hour" in the identity politics-obsessed '90s), here we saw a demigod lure the Amazons into a military trap so bloody the show's own makers called the Saving Private Ryan of the series and then, after the Amazons' ultimate victory over their foe, the survivors looking about themselves and seeing very few of themselves left, after which these few survivors each in succession get a close-up in which they look at the camera and say "To a strong Amazon nation" as the bitter irony hangs over all of them that an Amazon nation is what no longer exists as the episode draws to a close, and with it the last appearance of any "Amazon nation" on the show. Where previously the show had, rather light-mindedly, celebrated the idea of women living by the sword, here it showed them suffering what happens to all who live by the sword, their dying by it, in a tale of the futility, destructiveness and ultimate emptiness of war and revenge--not telling, showing. Looking at it it seems that rather than bleakness being an unearned style choice what we actually get is tragedy, and the charge of market pessimism that so many do deserve unwarranted this time around in a show that, at least by that stage of things, was rather more ambitious than non-fans generally seem to have recognized it for being--especially when we consider that the tragic course is not inappropriate for those telling a tale ultimately inspired by ancients who "clear in thought, but poor in technique," had a "faith in inevitable fate" to which humanity could do nothing but submit.
I imagine that it was mainly as such that most people came to enjoy those two particular shows, though there were differences, not least in how each show handled the darker elements in its premise. Hercules' backstory, consistent with the most well-known version of the mythology, makes the starting point of his adventures his murdering his wife and children in a fit of madness caused in him by his father Zeus' wife Hera in the course of her unending war on all the children he had sired in the course of his adulteries (the gods "petty and cruel" as the narration over the opening credits sequence had it). However, the backstory stayed in the back for the most part as the hero, if having tragedy behind him (and some tragedy ahead of him too), was just about always the uncomplicated, upright, pure-hearted champion of all that is right and good bounding knight errant-style from one adventure to the next fighting and defeating divine and human tyranny up to the last episode--and beyond.
By contrast the darker side of the tale is foregrounded in Xena's story because of what she had been before, a warlord with a long record of atrocity behind her who is now trying to move on from that and not finding the going easy, not least because the war god Ares was constantly trying to lure her back to her old ways, and because the consequences of her actions keep catching up with her, not least as former victims of hers become victimizers, and often came after her personally--most implacably, Callisto. Meanwhile, even where this is not the case Xena's particular adventures often denied her a way of saving the day through uncomplicated heroism, the character constantly having to choose the lesser of two evils, with the grimdark last season (the season of episodes like "Who's Gurkhan" and "Legacy," and "The Abyss") frequently not giving her much to choose between one and the other--such that if the end of Xena along with the end of her epoch was a controversial choice with fans it seems that that was the only credible one given where the producers had already decided to go with the series.
Looking back at those seasons after many decades of grimdark being so fashionable and so pervasive, what are we to make of that choice? Especially given how much of what David Walsh called "market pessimism" we are subject to--unearned pessimism, pessimism taken up as a style choice, however far from innocent taking it up may be politically--one may wonder if this is what went on here, especially given that this was, at least at the start, a lightweight adventure. However, a glance at, for example, the episode "To Helicon and Back" gives me pause here. After all, after the show's nearly six seasons of feminist Rah-Rah generally and regarding the Amazons particularly (a thing the makers of the show would not trifle with lightly given not just what a big piety this was then and since but how much that feminism did to lend Xena some cachet as more than "just another action hour" in the identity politics-obsessed '90s), here we saw a demigod lure the Amazons into a military trap so bloody the show's own makers called the Saving Private Ryan of the series and then, after the Amazons' ultimate victory over their foe, the survivors looking about themselves and seeing very few of themselves left, after which these few survivors each in succession get a close-up in which they look at the camera and say "To a strong Amazon nation" as the bitter irony hangs over all of them that an Amazon nation is what no longer exists as the episode draws to a close, and with it the last appearance of any "Amazon nation" on the show. Where previously the show had, rather light-mindedly, celebrated the idea of women living by the sword, here it showed them suffering what happens to all who live by the sword, their dying by it, in a tale of the futility, destructiveness and ultimate emptiness of war and revenge--not telling, showing. Looking at it it seems that rather than bleakness being an unearned style choice what we actually get is tragedy, and the charge of market pessimism that so many do deserve unwarranted this time around in a show that, at least by that stage of things, was rather more ambitious than non-fans generally seem to have recognized it for being--especially when we consider that the tragic course is not inappropriate for those telling a tale ultimately inspired by ancients who "clear in thought, but poor in technique," had a "faith in inevitable fate" to which humanity could do nothing but submit.
Howard Fast's Spartacus: Some Notes
Howard Fast's Spartacus would not seem to be much read today and it is not at all hard to understand why that is. If Fast's book is by no means simplistic in its treatment of its theme (Fast's historical sense was too nuanced for that, and the artist in him too developed for that), his leftist ideas are also quite apparent in it, and exactly what mainstream gatekeepers have been most prone to punish. The same goes for the straightforwardness of his writing, all as, in his presenting the Roman Empire not simply from the perspective of the oligarchs and warlords who made up the most outrageously over-romanticized ruling class in Western history but from that of the slaves as well he also did himself no favors with said gatekeepers among whom, even after losing that inadequate-to-be-useful-but-intimidating-to-the-callow smattering of Latin of which they were so proud, the fetishizing of all things Classical remains strong, with the same going for the prejudices of a Cato (or for that matter, the Cato Institute).
I suppose, too, that in the book Fast is so successful at realizing his vision of that era and its events only rankles their kind more--such that, if reading the book few who pick it up are likely to be surprised that the Roman Empire was founded on extreme violence all the way up to the genocidal level, plunder, tribute and slavery on a scale hitherto unseen within the Known World, after reading it one might find it impossible to look on the stones of Rome's still extant and admired works without thinking of the quantity of human blood and misery represented by every cobble in the roads, every building block of the aqueducts. With, one might add, the significant difference that where those who today point to the toll of toil and misery evident in the comparable works of our own civilization commonly do so to implicate their audience in the crime, to in a characteristically postmodernist fashion make the issue one of "personal responsibility," and personal guilt and personal shame for the sake of making them close their eyes to any question of the justice of the thing and never trouble the powerful over it, with Fast the issue is not the individual, especially the individual who knows little of it all and has no practical power over it whatsoever as they do what they must to survive within a world not of their own making, but the System. Befitting this is the fact that such irony as does appear in the tale is not that "smoke of indifference over the whole effort of and intention of mankind" that "is the worst form of snobbism" to which today's cultural elites are so addicted, but that "irony deep laid in the relations of life" that it is an artist's duty "to bring to the surface" (such as we got when Crassus showed his guests about a perfume manufactory he owned, incapable of comprehending how proletarians might one day form a consciousness of themselves as a class and rebel as the slaves were doing).
An extraordinary work I just about can't recall ever seeing equaled in making us feel the existence of that base of humanity on which Civilization stands, it plausibly derived something of its edge from the fact that its author Fast was at the time facing persecution himself--by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which jailed him for refusing to Name the Names of those who made charitable contributions to an orphanage. He actually wrote the manuscript of Spartacus while incarcerated--and when he tried to submit his manuscript to the publishing houses of Park Avenue was refused every time in ways that made it very, very clear that there was such a thing as censorship in America, driving him ultimately to publish it himself. Neither the first nor the last time that we would owe a great book to this means of bringing work before the public (not that the bashers of self-publishing are a group where one could expect to find sympathy for blacklist victims) he managed to find an audience, and indeed Kirk Douglas was to buy the rights and make a classic film from the material with the help of another blacklist victim, Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay and was credited for doing so--such that John Kennedy's walking through an American Legion picket line to see the film has since been remembered as marking the effective end of that blacklist, and with it that hysteria which does so much to make a mockery of the pretensions of those who speak of "free speech" in America.
But not the end of the damage it did--the deep damage to authors' reputations, the literary canon, the very standard by which we judge literature itself, warped to reflect the political imperatives of those the gatekeepers serve, from which it never wholly recovered, all as literature itself seems likely never to recover simply because of the way media technology and culture are moving on, making Philip Roth's quip that just a few years from now novel-reading will be as "cultic" an activity as reading the poetry of Spartacus' era in the original. Still, we can at least admire what Fast and other artists achieved then, do what we can to pull them out of the rubbish heap, and honor the heroism that made the work possible, the rarity of which is all too evident as we look at the dreck being churned out in every medium today as "Money Writes."
I suppose, too, that in the book Fast is so successful at realizing his vision of that era and its events only rankles their kind more--such that, if reading the book few who pick it up are likely to be surprised that the Roman Empire was founded on extreme violence all the way up to the genocidal level, plunder, tribute and slavery on a scale hitherto unseen within the Known World, after reading it one might find it impossible to look on the stones of Rome's still extant and admired works without thinking of the quantity of human blood and misery represented by every cobble in the roads, every building block of the aqueducts. With, one might add, the significant difference that where those who today point to the toll of toil and misery evident in the comparable works of our own civilization commonly do so to implicate their audience in the crime, to in a characteristically postmodernist fashion make the issue one of "personal responsibility," and personal guilt and personal shame for the sake of making them close their eyes to any question of the justice of the thing and never trouble the powerful over it, with Fast the issue is not the individual, especially the individual who knows little of it all and has no practical power over it whatsoever as they do what they must to survive within a world not of their own making, but the System. Befitting this is the fact that such irony as does appear in the tale is not that "smoke of indifference over the whole effort of and intention of mankind" that "is the worst form of snobbism" to which today's cultural elites are so addicted, but that "irony deep laid in the relations of life" that it is an artist's duty "to bring to the surface" (such as we got when Crassus showed his guests about a perfume manufactory he owned, incapable of comprehending how proletarians might one day form a consciousness of themselves as a class and rebel as the slaves were doing).
An extraordinary work I just about can't recall ever seeing equaled in making us feel the existence of that base of humanity on which Civilization stands, it plausibly derived something of its edge from the fact that its author Fast was at the time facing persecution himself--by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which jailed him for refusing to Name the Names of those who made charitable contributions to an orphanage. He actually wrote the manuscript of Spartacus while incarcerated--and when he tried to submit his manuscript to the publishing houses of Park Avenue was refused every time in ways that made it very, very clear that there was such a thing as censorship in America, driving him ultimately to publish it himself. Neither the first nor the last time that we would owe a great book to this means of bringing work before the public (not that the bashers of self-publishing are a group where one could expect to find sympathy for blacklist victims) he managed to find an audience, and indeed Kirk Douglas was to buy the rights and make a classic film from the material with the help of another blacklist victim, Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay and was credited for doing so--such that John Kennedy's walking through an American Legion picket line to see the film has since been remembered as marking the effective end of that blacklist, and with it that hysteria which does so much to make a mockery of the pretensions of those who speak of "free speech" in America.
But not the end of the damage it did--the deep damage to authors' reputations, the literary canon, the very standard by which we judge literature itself, warped to reflect the political imperatives of those the gatekeepers serve, from which it never wholly recovered, all as literature itself seems likely never to recover simply because of the way media technology and culture are moving on, making Philip Roth's quip that just a few years from now novel-reading will be as "cultic" an activity as reading the poetry of Spartacus' era in the original. Still, we can at least admire what Fast and other artists achieved then, do what we can to pull them out of the rubbish heap, and honor the heroism that made the work possible, the rarity of which is all too evident as we look at the dreck being churned out in every medium today as "Money Writes."
Those Who Didn't Walk Away From Self-Publishing
Those authors who elected to self-publish their books using such services as Kindle Direct Publishing these past two decades placed their hopes in certain possibilities--of particular note among them the possibilities of the e-book and e-book reader for low cost distribution of books and this amounting to something from a supply and demand and sales perspective, the Internet working in a fashion affording an author's book a chance of its "discovery" by readers, book bloggers creating a connection between the self-published author and potential readers, the highly touted promotional possibilities of social media, the "long tail."
All of these hopes have died brutally, horribly. The self-published learned the hard way that not only did retailing their e-book at 99 cents a copy mean making very, very little money per unit, but that doing so didn't move very many "units"; that they couldn't even give their books away, especially when e-book reader owners were a minority who got only so much use out of their devices, and there were so many other people trying the same thing. As if that were not bad enough there was also the fact that for all the market theologians' smarmy talk of INNOVATION! "disrupting" business what usually happens is that in the face of INNOVATION! Established business usually fights back and wins, with publishing no more an exception to this rule than energy, the automotive sector or computing. Thus with the help of their stooges in government, the media and other institutions, Big Publishing went on the counterattack against the low-priced e-book such a selling point for the e-book reader, and in the process crushed the e-book revolution out of existence, with one consequence the fact that those readers, far from becoming the ubiquitous consumer good they seemed destined to be when Amazon first introduced the Kindle to the world, have since become a niche item (hence the price of the e-reader going up, not down, the way we are accustomed to see with electronic devices).
Still, even had that not been the case the fact remained that, as noted above, authors were having a very hard time before that, with factoring significantly into that how online discovery was never a very good prospect for anyone because of the vastness of the web, and the competition for eyeballs on it, and the way that all the relevant technology actually works. If the promise of the web was that it would efficiently connect people with the objects of their interest, even when these were niche--as those likely to be interested in a work on offer by an author outside traditional publishing's channels were likely to be--then that promise was not only unkept, but increasingly broken as rather than getting better search became the overwhelmed, endlessly manipulated, crassly sold thing that it is today. Discovered? The Internet was a place to get lost, especially if what you were offering was a book, to which even those quadrants of the web devoted to books specifically became increasingly inhospitable. (The shrinkage of the portion of the books on Google Books accessible to previewing delighted corporate copyright Nazis, but those small-time authors who got some benefit out of Internet search leading web users to previews of their books took still another hit here, with no compensation whatsoever.)
Of course, those book blogs were supposed to offer something stronger than mere "presence on the Internet." Alas, blogging of every kind was always the chase of a great many content creators after a relatively small pool of potential readers, all as the small number of book blogs any one author was likely to regard as plausible venues for reviews of their particular work meant a great many would-be authors chasing spots on a relatively small number of blogs, such that those who decided to self-publish because they hated the soul-killing process of sending blind queries to people who responded with form rejection letters or silence, in trying to get their book reviewed by bloggers found themselves . . . sending blind queries to people who responded with form rejections or silence once again. Moreover, those book bloggers, on those rare occasions when they did agree to review their book some time, tended not to give them what they hoped or needed. Simply put, self-published authors, precisely because of their inexperience (and the sheer mendacity of those who write of the business) unaware of the "ugly" preparations that lie behind the "success" of a book, thought they needed reviews. But what they really needed to get their books looked at by the public was claquing, not reviewing, because that's what so much of the competition, not least that competition they got from the trad-published, had--all as in their reviewing-instead-of-claquing, far from showing the underdog sympathy were prone to be gratuitously brutal as they punitively applied a double standard to the self-published. (Don't judge a book by its cover, goes the adage. Well, if they didn't like the cover they certainly made an issue of it, all as typos they would have shrugged off in a book put out by one of the Big Five became occasions for hysterical denunciation.) In fact it is likely the case that the bad reviews hurt far more than the good reviews helped, such that to the extent that the self-published managed to extract any publicity at all from the book bloggers it all was likely not to their benefit. Still, even that fairly miserable option became less plausible, as the desperate chase after eyeballs went on getting more desperate still as the web shifted to a more audiovisual mode of content creation and sharing (itself, of course, not an auspicious sign for those who have bet on the public's appetite for long-form reading)--and the Internet gatekeepers went to war against the independently produced content in any medium as certain Silicon Valley executives compared it with the contents of a cesspool.
Social media was at least as bad a disappointment from the start. The prospect of individuals interacting with strangers and "building up followers" by way of whom publicity materials might be shared and reshared and that way getting an appreciable number of people to look at their book was just as desperate as anything else I describe here. After all, the sort of "attention economy" realities that made blogging of all kinds such a bitter disappointment were operative here too. (Indeed, looking at the stats on their own social media accounts authors could see in a way they could not with those book blogs whose owners they begged for attention just how low engagement rates were with anything put out there.) Besides, it was the case that where one could expect people who look at book blogs to have at least some interest in books the general audience for social media doesn't, all as this scene really was a cesspool in its saturation with the kind of brain-dead bullying scum who are the last people in the world that an artist struggling to keep up the nerve to personally present their book to an uninterested world (a job their having to do themselves is itself exceedingly cruel) needs to meet. Contrary to the glib and stupid boosterism surrounding social media as a sales vehicle very few people ever sold very many books this way, all as the time and energy and passion that the addicting and traumatizing sites sucked up doubtless added to the toll of the thankless task of "publicity." And as it happened, social media too changed, as its users withdrew from the crassness and chaos and viciousness into more private spaces, social media actually becoming about interacting socially with people they knew because they had been so much brutalized exposing themselves to encounters with people they didn't.
In short, the experience was just one letdown after another. Still, even after having one door slammed in their face after another as what they quickly learned were lousy options increasingly proved to really be no options at all they may have thought, okay, I haven't sold much, maybe scarcely sold anything at all, but that can change. Because of the LONG TAIL--the idea that in contrast with the way that physical products compete for a limited shelf space so that what doesn't sell today isn't going to still be on sale there tomorrow their material could stay up on their authors' pages on the book retail sites forever, such that the chance that people could still find it remained. Yesterday's flop, tomorrow's bestseller--or at least tomorrow's cult hit, or failing that the hope of a small but steady stream of sales which would see the (literal) pennies add up, and maybe even synergize with later efforts that would find a warmer welcome. Alas, if there ever was anything to it (and there probably wasn't) this prospect also waned as the amount of material out there just went on piling up, making the field ever more crowded so that whatever chance there was of an interested person coming across their books on the Internet shrank . . .
Amid it all I imagine many consoled themselves with the thought that "something will come up," something give the self-published writer a chance, something real unlike those earlier flashes-in-the-pan. Alas, it never did, as indeed the market for books generally went into freefall (e-book readers never took off, yet paperbacks disappeared), while "generative artificial intelligence" got in on the game . . . as a result of which it was probably the case that many a self-published writer going over their sales reports probably thought the depressingly poor results of their earlier years looked pretty good next to what they were getting for their trouble now. And today there seems no chance whatsoever of things getting any better as the written word becomes more and more marginal within contemporary culture, as the Internet becomes even less hospitable to the small content creator and the niche interest than they were before, with whatever signs there may have been of a "democratization" of content creation giving way to something more centralized and punitive and repressive than anything that had ever been in the fever dreams of "totalitarianism"-obsessed Cold Warriors (courtesy not of that system they spent their lives hysterically demonizing, but the capitalism they so loyally defended, and indeed the very technologies and firms that they have so relentlessly championed as the glory of the system for which they stood).
Still, so far as I can tell a great many people remain at the business of self-publishing, and it does not seem unreasonable to ask why. The obvious answer would seem to be the extent to which they had become invested in the activity, such that, much as the purveyors of pithy self-help advice criticize sticking with a course of action because of "sunk costs," they can't bear to walk away from all they put into it with nothing to show for it. Besides, there is why so many went down this path in the first place--the all too rarely admitted hope of a career where they have some independence, some control over their lives; where maybe, just maybe, they could go from being a nobody to being a somebody. After all, it isn't as if other possibilities are beckoning to them that way (indeed, the reason so many become writers, or try to become writers, is because this looks like the best shot most of us will ever have at it), or the need to do so any smaller than before. Quite the contrary, these last twenty, fifteen, ten, five years have seen the situation of the "nobody" grow only more desperate in a way that would seem summed up by how, amid a pandemic that made the morning commute not merely wretched but potentially deadly as Authority chose to leave the members of what it so delicately termed the "herd" to their fates, sneered at them for being fearful of death and disability ("Suck it up" said the billionaire), and, taking the extreme opposite of their attitude toward those describable as killed by the violence of designated enemies of the state, treated them as "unworthy" victims when they met those fates (even the deaths of the rich and famous didn't get the publicity that such events ordinarily got when they died of COVID-19), escaping the lot of a nobody in this society came more than ever before to seem a matter of life and death. And so, like a certain someone, believing in "the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us," they told themselves that they only had to "run faster, stretch out" their "arms further" until that "one fine morning" they would finally reach it, only to find themselves "borne back ceaselessly into the past," like so many pursuers of the cruel and destructive lie of that Dream before them.
All of these hopes have died brutally, horribly. The self-published learned the hard way that not only did retailing their e-book at 99 cents a copy mean making very, very little money per unit, but that doing so didn't move very many "units"; that they couldn't even give their books away, especially when e-book reader owners were a minority who got only so much use out of their devices, and there were so many other people trying the same thing. As if that were not bad enough there was also the fact that for all the market theologians' smarmy talk of INNOVATION! "disrupting" business what usually happens is that in the face of INNOVATION! Established business usually fights back and wins, with publishing no more an exception to this rule than energy, the automotive sector or computing. Thus with the help of their stooges in government, the media and other institutions, Big Publishing went on the counterattack against the low-priced e-book such a selling point for the e-book reader, and in the process crushed the e-book revolution out of existence, with one consequence the fact that those readers, far from becoming the ubiquitous consumer good they seemed destined to be when Amazon first introduced the Kindle to the world, have since become a niche item (hence the price of the e-reader going up, not down, the way we are accustomed to see with electronic devices).
Still, even had that not been the case the fact remained that, as noted above, authors were having a very hard time before that, with factoring significantly into that how online discovery was never a very good prospect for anyone because of the vastness of the web, and the competition for eyeballs on it, and the way that all the relevant technology actually works. If the promise of the web was that it would efficiently connect people with the objects of their interest, even when these were niche--as those likely to be interested in a work on offer by an author outside traditional publishing's channels were likely to be--then that promise was not only unkept, but increasingly broken as rather than getting better search became the overwhelmed, endlessly manipulated, crassly sold thing that it is today. Discovered? The Internet was a place to get lost, especially if what you were offering was a book, to which even those quadrants of the web devoted to books specifically became increasingly inhospitable. (The shrinkage of the portion of the books on Google Books accessible to previewing delighted corporate copyright Nazis, but those small-time authors who got some benefit out of Internet search leading web users to previews of their books took still another hit here, with no compensation whatsoever.)
Of course, those book blogs were supposed to offer something stronger than mere "presence on the Internet." Alas, blogging of every kind was always the chase of a great many content creators after a relatively small pool of potential readers, all as the small number of book blogs any one author was likely to regard as plausible venues for reviews of their particular work meant a great many would-be authors chasing spots on a relatively small number of blogs, such that those who decided to self-publish because they hated the soul-killing process of sending blind queries to people who responded with form rejection letters or silence, in trying to get their book reviewed by bloggers found themselves . . . sending blind queries to people who responded with form rejections or silence once again. Moreover, those book bloggers, on those rare occasions when they did agree to review their book some time, tended not to give them what they hoped or needed. Simply put, self-published authors, precisely because of their inexperience (and the sheer mendacity of those who write of the business) unaware of the "ugly" preparations that lie behind the "success" of a book, thought they needed reviews. But what they really needed to get their books looked at by the public was claquing, not reviewing, because that's what so much of the competition, not least that competition they got from the trad-published, had--all as in their reviewing-instead-of-claquing, far from showing the underdog sympathy were prone to be gratuitously brutal as they punitively applied a double standard to the self-published. (Don't judge a book by its cover, goes the adage. Well, if they didn't like the cover they certainly made an issue of it, all as typos they would have shrugged off in a book put out by one of the Big Five became occasions for hysterical denunciation.) In fact it is likely the case that the bad reviews hurt far more than the good reviews helped, such that to the extent that the self-published managed to extract any publicity at all from the book bloggers it all was likely not to their benefit. Still, even that fairly miserable option became less plausible, as the desperate chase after eyeballs went on getting more desperate still as the web shifted to a more audiovisual mode of content creation and sharing (itself, of course, not an auspicious sign for those who have bet on the public's appetite for long-form reading)--and the Internet gatekeepers went to war against the independently produced content in any medium as certain Silicon Valley executives compared it with the contents of a cesspool.
Social media was at least as bad a disappointment from the start. The prospect of individuals interacting with strangers and "building up followers" by way of whom publicity materials might be shared and reshared and that way getting an appreciable number of people to look at their book was just as desperate as anything else I describe here. After all, the sort of "attention economy" realities that made blogging of all kinds such a bitter disappointment were operative here too. (Indeed, looking at the stats on their own social media accounts authors could see in a way they could not with those book blogs whose owners they begged for attention just how low engagement rates were with anything put out there.) Besides, it was the case that where one could expect people who look at book blogs to have at least some interest in books the general audience for social media doesn't, all as this scene really was a cesspool in its saturation with the kind of brain-dead bullying scum who are the last people in the world that an artist struggling to keep up the nerve to personally present their book to an uninterested world (a job their having to do themselves is itself exceedingly cruel) needs to meet. Contrary to the glib and stupid boosterism surrounding social media as a sales vehicle very few people ever sold very many books this way, all as the time and energy and passion that the addicting and traumatizing sites sucked up doubtless added to the toll of the thankless task of "publicity." And as it happened, social media too changed, as its users withdrew from the crassness and chaos and viciousness into more private spaces, social media actually becoming about interacting socially with people they knew because they had been so much brutalized exposing themselves to encounters with people they didn't.
In short, the experience was just one letdown after another. Still, even after having one door slammed in their face after another as what they quickly learned were lousy options increasingly proved to really be no options at all they may have thought, okay, I haven't sold much, maybe scarcely sold anything at all, but that can change. Because of the LONG TAIL--the idea that in contrast with the way that physical products compete for a limited shelf space so that what doesn't sell today isn't going to still be on sale there tomorrow their material could stay up on their authors' pages on the book retail sites forever, such that the chance that people could still find it remained. Yesterday's flop, tomorrow's bestseller--or at least tomorrow's cult hit, or failing that the hope of a small but steady stream of sales which would see the (literal) pennies add up, and maybe even synergize with later efforts that would find a warmer welcome. Alas, if there ever was anything to it (and there probably wasn't) this prospect also waned as the amount of material out there just went on piling up, making the field ever more crowded so that whatever chance there was of an interested person coming across their books on the Internet shrank . . .
Amid it all I imagine many consoled themselves with the thought that "something will come up," something give the self-published writer a chance, something real unlike those earlier flashes-in-the-pan. Alas, it never did, as indeed the market for books generally went into freefall (e-book readers never took off, yet paperbacks disappeared), while "generative artificial intelligence" got in on the game . . . as a result of which it was probably the case that many a self-published writer going over their sales reports probably thought the depressingly poor results of their earlier years looked pretty good next to what they were getting for their trouble now. And today there seems no chance whatsoever of things getting any better as the written word becomes more and more marginal within contemporary culture, as the Internet becomes even less hospitable to the small content creator and the niche interest than they were before, with whatever signs there may have been of a "democratization" of content creation giving way to something more centralized and punitive and repressive than anything that had ever been in the fever dreams of "totalitarianism"-obsessed Cold Warriors (courtesy not of that system they spent their lives hysterically demonizing, but the capitalism they so loyally defended, and indeed the very technologies and firms that they have so relentlessly championed as the glory of the system for which they stood).
Still, so far as I can tell a great many people remain at the business of self-publishing, and it does not seem unreasonable to ask why. The obvious answer would seem to be the extent to which they had become invested in the activity, such that, much as the purveyors of pithy self-help advice criticize sticking with a course of action because of "sunk costs," they can't bear to walk away from all they put into it with nothing to show for it. Besides, there is why so many went down this path in the first place--the all too rarely admitted hope of a career where they have some independence, some control over their lives; where maybe, just maybe, they could go from being a nobody to being a somebody. After all, it isn't as if other possibilities are beckoning to them that way (indeed, the reason so many become writers, or try to become writers, is because this looks like the best shot most of us will ever have at it), or the need to do so any smaller than before. Quite the contrary, these last twenty, fifteen, ten, five years have seen the situation of the "nobody" grow only more desperate in a way that would seem summed up by how, amid a pandemic that made the morning commute not merely wretched but potentially deadly as Authority chose to leave the members of what it so delicately termed the "herd" to their fates, sneered at them for being fearful of death and disability ("Suck it up" said the billionaire), and, taking the extreme opposite of their attitude toward those describable as killed by the violence of designated enemies of the state, treated them as "unworthy" victims when they met those fates (even the deaths of the rich and famous didn't get the publicity that such events ordinarily got when they died of COVID-19), escaping the lot of a nobody in this society came more than ever before to seem a matter of life and death. And so, like a certain someone, believing in "the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us," they told themselves that they only had to "run faster, stretch out" their "arms further" until that "one fine morning" they would finally reach it, only to find themselves "borne back ceaselessly into the past," like so many pursuers of the cruel and destructive lie of that Dream before them.
The Politics of the Guardian Newspaper
For those inclining toward the left of today's very far rightward center the extreme narrowness of opinion the American news media ordinarily affords its viewers and readers--which is such that the newspaper of Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, David Brooks, "Abundance"-peddler Ezra Klein et. al. is often described as "liberal" in the American, liberal-means-left sense of the word without anyone laughing--may find the opinion pages in the U.S. edition of the Guardian newspaper a breath of fresh air, providing as they do space for views they would never see in any comparable American publication. Still, in considering the Guardian's "leftishness" one makes a profound mistake in failing to acknowledge its limits, and the ways in which they too testify to the tight bounds of the mainstream "discourse" in our time.
Consider, for example, the paper's broad orientation in regard to economic policy. Where it had long provided a rare platform from which to criticize the neoliberal orthodoxy of contemporary policymaking as such they flinched from doing so during Jeremy Corbyn's period as leader of the Labour Party, to which, in a display of contempt for its readership worthy of the Times, they became relentlessly hostile not just to Corbyn (with, whatever the arguments against Corbyn, the editorship of the Guardian evidently less interested in objective appraisal of their merits than their serviceability as excuses for their opposition), but to the criticism of neoliberalism, the "New Labour" that had stood for it, and all associated with them broadly. Indeed, it seems telling that the editors at this time provided Glen O'Hara a forum in which to make a short version of his case that the New Labour against which "Corbynism" represented a rebellion was "more left-wing than it's given credit for" on the web site of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change--and even buried a few words on Mr. Corbyn's behalf (one may imagine, a bit of cover against the charges that they were anti-Corbyn) at the bottom of a long tribute to Margaret Thatcher! Indeed, not long after the coup against Corbyn and his successor Keir Starmer's quick abandonment of his initial social democratic promises they provided a platform for the centrist Nick Cohen to sneer illiterately at the salience of neoliberalism as even a concept.
After all, it was one thing to let people shoot their mouths off about neoliberalism when it was securely in the saddle--another to do so when there was even the ghost of a chance of popular discontent with such policy finding expression in the Labour Party. Moreover, such displays of obsequiousness before things as they are, far from being exceptional, have been all too characteristic of the paper on the whole, as is to be seen in the respect that it accords those who may be termed spokespersons of the "status quo," and its withholding of like respect from said status quo's stauncher critics, in the same manner one sees in their more blatantly Establishment peers. Just compare their exceedingly sympathetic profile of Davos crowd court philosopher Steven Pinker with the piece that a former reporter for the paper that its editorship canceled a decade ago for making a quip on Twitter (curious, none of those "free speech absolutists" raced to his defense then) published in the magazine he launched himself after being thrown overboard, Current Affairs. Compare, too, the respect the Guardian accorded Jordan Peterson in his "Debate of the Century"(!) with pseudo-left court jester Slavoj Žižek with how the aforementioned ex-Guardian reporter treated Peterson in his own publication. Perhaps even more striking than that is the way in which those same editors afforded Douglas Coupland the space in which to publish twenty-five hundred words pouring abuse on Elon Musk's critics in his own appallingly illiterate fashion as they consistently respected Musk's claims to being a "free speech absolutist"--services for which Monsieur Musk would not seem to have been grateful to go by a Tweet in which he (consistent with the right's tendency to plead persecution by a "liberal media" even as that media bows and scrapes before them and persecutes their enemies) denounced the Guardian as "Strong candidate for most misanthropic publication on Earth!"
Of course, amid all this one may notice how packed the Guardian's pages are with sex, along particular lines, making very clear how seriously this publication takes the "centering of marginalized perspectives," and "decentering" of the conventional male perspective in this area of life as a political project, ecstatically celebrating every form of sexuality but one, which it subjects to relentless hostility that at times goes to unintentionally comic extremes--as when circa 2017 the Guardian just couldn't stop publishing pieces by the many, many, many ultra-feminist members of the staff registering their alarm at the supposedly imminent perils of heterosexual men having access to nonexistent then and still nonexistent now sex robots! (And their scorn for said men, of course.) All as, of course, they endlessly promote, without worrying overmuch about hard facts, the narratives of a growing "youth gender divide" and "masculinity in crisis" (entirely a matter of "outdated" male perspectives on gender and not anything else, such as a more general crisis of society, perish the thought, so say our invariably non-male "masculinity researchers"). Yup, woke gender politics is what you get here, such that I wonder if Musk, who has never been the most articulate of men, said "misanthropic" when he meant "misandrous," in which case many who do not ordinarily side with Musk might well have felt that, once you got past the malapropism, there was something in what he said after all on that one occasion.
In short, when it comes to the vast majority of the issues of the day the paper can be inconsistent at best--if many a time, again, an important outlet for views that cannot get a like platform anywhere else (a thing I do not belittle in this time in which the Washington Post's opinion page is being reinvented as the daily edition of Reason magazine, and Big Media shows its cowardice and intolerance at a headline-making level hourly), also frequently no better than the other papers that may be considered suitable points of comparison. Combining tepidity on the majority of really controversial "hard" issues with its utterly fire-breathing gender politics the paper not only fails progressives from the standpoint of its readiness to provide an alternate source of information and views, but reinforces the widespread (and for progressives, highly disadvantageous) misconception that the culture wars are the only real scene of political disagreement, and the identity politics so many find so insufferable what the left stands for, plain and simple. In truth there is nothing less left than the politics of subjectivity, difference and selfishness, of struggle across the lines of ethnicity and gender without end--with, indeed, Andrea Peters not long ago remarking how identity politics' "suppressing" awareness of "the reality of class conflict and blaming one layer of workers . . . white men" for the inequity in society that persons of that tendency are prepared to acknowledge amid worsening conditions for all produced the "frustration and disorientation" "fueling the growth of the far-right" that has brought the world to where it is now. In fact, it is the case that not only do those who bear the left's actual tradition keep saying so, but that the more literate and forthright members of the right admit as much, as Rod Dreher did in The American Conservative in the wake of the battle between the World Socialist Web Site and the New York Times over the latter's 1619 Project. As Mr. Dreher reminded his readers in a piece of classic understatement he is no socialist--but rather more than many a supposed progressive he displayed a clear grasp of the logic in those leftists' challenge to the 1619 Project's version of American history (a left burdened by identity politics incapable of "put[ting] together the kind of class-based political coalition that can win out over capital," a truth "[c]apitalists know" full well, hence their being "so heavily invested in 'diversity, inclusion and equity'"). Of course, the extent to which identity politics has--behind a progressive gloss that should have fooled no one but seems to have fooled nearly everyone--fulfilled the old function of the politics of identity as a weapon against those who would raise the politics of class is a feature and not a bug not just from the standpoint of capitalists as Dreher acknowledges, but many a supposed progressive as well, with all that implies about what one is to make of the Guardian's tendency in this respect.
Consider, for example, the paper's broad orientation in regard to economic policy. Where it had long provided a rare platform from which to criticize the neoliberal orthodoxy of contemporary policymaking as such they flinched from doing so during Jeremy Corbyn's period as leader of the Labour Party, to which, in a display of contempt for its readership worthy of the Times, they became relentlessly hostile not just to Corbyn (with, whatever the arguments against Corbyn, the editorship of the Guardian evidently less interested in objective appraisal of their merits than their serviceability as excuses for their opposition), but to the criticism of neoliberalism, the "New Labour" that had stood for it, and all associated with them broadly. Indeed, it seems telling that the editors at this time provided Glen O'Hara a forum in which to make a short version of his case that the New Labour against which "Corbynism" represented a rebellion was "more left-wing than it's given credit for" on the web site of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change--and even buried a few words on Mr. Corbyn's behalf (one may imagine, a bit of cover against the charges that they were anti-Corbyn) at the bottom of a long tribute to Margaret Thatcher! Indeed, not long after the coup against Corbyn and his successor Keir Starmer's quick abandonment of his initial social democratic promises they provided a platform for the centrist Nick Cohen to sneer illiterately at the salience of neoliberalism as even a concept.
After all, it was one thing to let people shoot their mouths off about neoliberalism when it was securely in the saddle--another to do so when there was even the ghost of a chance of popular discontent with such policy finding expression in the Labour Party. Moreover, such displays of obsequiousness before things as they are, far from being exceptional, have been all too characteristic of the paper on the whole, as is to be seen in the respect that it accords those who may be termed spokespersons of the "status quo," and its withholding of like respect from said status quo's stauncher critics, in the same manner one sees in their more blatantly Establishment peers. Just compare their exceedingly sympathetic profile of Davos crowd court philosopher Steven Pinker with the piece that a former reporter for the paper that its editorship canceled a decade ago for making a quip on Twitter (curious, none of those "free speech absolutists" raced to his defense then) published in the magazine he launched himself after being thrown overboard, Current Affairs. Compare, too, the respect the Guardian accorded Jordan Peterson in his "Debate of the Century"(!) with pseudo-left court jester Slavoj Žižek with how the aforementioned ex-Guardian reporter treated Peterson in his own publication. Perhaps even more striking than that is the way in which those same editors afforded Douglas Coupland the space in which to publish twenty-five hundred words pouring abuse on Elon Musk's critics in his own appallingly illiterate fashion as they consistently respected Musk's claims to being a "free speech absolutist"--services for which Monsieur Musk would not seem to have been grateful to go by a Tweet in which he (consistent with the right's tendency to plead persecution by a "liberal media" even as that media bows and scrapes before them and persecutes their enemies) denounced the Guardian as "Strong candidate for most misanthropic publication on Earth!"
Of course, amid all this one may notice how packed the Guardian's pages are with sex, along particular lines, making very clear how seriously this publication takes the "centering of marginalized perspectives," and "decentering" of the conventional male perspective in this area of life as a political project, ecstatically celebrating every form of sexuality but one, which it subjects to relentless hostility that at times goes to unintentionally comic extremes--as when circa 2017 the Guardian just couldn't stop publishing pieces by the many, many, many ultra-feminist members of the staff registering their alarm at the supposedly imminent perils of heterosexual men having access to nonexistent then and still nonexistent now sex robots! (And their scorn for said men, of course.) All as, of course, they endlessly promote, without worrying overmuch about hard facts, the narratives of a growing "youth gender divide" and "masculinity in crisis" (entirely a matter of "outdated" male perspectives on gender and not anything else, such as a more general crisis of society, perish the thought, so say our invariably non-male "masculinity researchers"). Yup, woke gender politics is what you get here, such that I wonder if Musk, who has never been the most articulate of men, said "misanthropic" when he meant "misandrous," in which case many who do not ordinarily side with Musk might well have felt that, once you got past the malapropism, there was something in what he said after all on that one occasion.
In short, when it comes to the vast majority of the issues of the day the paper can be inconsistent at best--if many a time, again, an important outlet for views that cannot get a like platform anywhere else (a thing I do not belittle in this time in which the Washington Post's opinion page is being reinvented as the daily edition of Reason magazine, and Big Media shows its cowardice and intolerance at a headline-making level hourly), also frequently no better than the other papers that may be considered suitable points of comparison. Combining tepidity on the majority of really controversial "hard" issues with its utterly fire-breathing gender politics the paper not only fails progressives from the standpoint of its readiness to provide an alternate source of information and views, but reinforces the widespread (and for progressives, highly disadvantageous) misconception that the culture wars are the only real scene of political disagreement, and the identity politics so many find so insufferable what the left stands for, plain and simple. In truth there is nothing less left than the politics of subjectivity, difference and selfishness, of struggle across the lines of ethnicity and gender without end--with, indeed, Andrea Peters not long ago remarking how identity politics' "suppressing" awareness of "the reality of class conflict and blaming one layer of workers . . . white men" for the inequity in society that persons of that tendency are prepared to acknowledge amid worsening conditions for all produced the "frustration and disorientation" "fueling the growth of the far-right" that has brought the world to where it is now. In fact, it is the case that not only do those who bear the left's actual tradition keep saying so, but that the more literate and forthright members of the right admit as much, as Rod Dreher did in The American Conservative in the wake of the battle between the World Socialist Web Site and the New York Times over the latter's 1619 Project. As Mr. Dreher reminded his readers in a piece of classic understatement he is no socialist--but rather more than many a supposed progressive he displayed a clear grasp of the logic in those leftists' challenge to the 1619 Project's version of American history (a left burdened by identity politics incapable of "put[ting] together the kind of class-based political coalition that can win out over capital," a truth "[c]apitalists know" full well, hence their being "so heavily invested in 'diversity, inclusion and equity'"). Of course, the extent to which identity politics has--behind a progressive gloss that should have fooled no one but seems to have fooled nearly everyone--fulfilled the old function of the politics of identity as a weapon against those who would raise the politics of class is a feature and not a bug not just from the standpoint of capitalists as Dreher acknowledges, but many a supposed progressive as well, with all that implies about what one is to make of the Guardian's tendency in this respect.
Has Video Game Creation Become Stagnant?
Has video game creation become stagnant? As is so often the case the answer to that question depends on which standard one has in mind when they ask it. As it happens the standard I have in mind is whether the development of the basic elements of gaming--game mechanics, game genres, game graphics--are evolving at rates like those we have seen in the past, or by comparison at a standstill, with it seeming to me fair to compare, for example, the 25-year 2000-2025 period with the equally lengthy preceding 1975-2000 period as at least a starting point for such a judgment.
Where those fundamentals I refer to here are concerned there is no question that there was rapid development in the earlier period. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s we saw gaming go from controllers with a joystick and a single button to the controller of the crosspad-and-eight button Super Nintendo that seems to have basically defined what we use since, and multiplayer gaming (with the Nintendo Entertainment System already having apparatus and games for four-player interaction in the Four Score and the Satellite), and the ability to save our progress rather than have to start all over again when we turn off the console or the computer. This same period also gave us the first quests with beginnings and middles and ends (and side quests too!), the first customizable characters and multi-player parties, the first interactions with non-player characters, the first cut scenes--as well as the first fighting systems (turn-based as well as real-time) and first systems for "leveling up," the first inventories and day/night cycles, the first games that one could play out in more than one way because the player had the range of choice in regard to where they went and what they did requisite for that, with those different courses possibly leading to different endings. This is the period that gave us the platformer (in 3-D as well as 2-D), the role-playing game, the first-person shooter, the martial arts fighting game, the vehicle simulator and the sports simulator in their various forms, the Tetris-style puzzler, the strategy game, the management game, and combinations thereof, like the "action RPG" for which games like the Zelda series and the second Castlevania were such big moments--as well as such novelties as the Dance Dance Revolution-type exercise/music/rhythm game. The same period also saw us go from the graphics of Pong to the graphics of Quake III Arena.
It seems impossible to point to anything like that level of fundamental innovation in the field in the following twenty-five years. New mechanics and new genres have been scarce. Talk about virtual reality all you like, it remains a fairly marginal thing (people had some fun waving the Wii controllers about, but then it was back to the standard seated, button-pushing mode of interaction), while the experimental games the indies make fall far short of being the "game-changers" those pointing to them as proof of the industry's dynamism would have us think they are, however interesting they may individually be as a change of pace. Graphics did get sharper than they were before, but even that improvement hit diminishing returns long ago, as seen in the fuss over "ray tracing" in imagery a far cry from the true photorealism that remains remote. (At a glance you can much more easily tell the difference between the standard of 1975 and 2000 than that of 2000 and 2025--and for that matter, between 2000 and 2010 as against 2010 and 2025.)
Consequently what innovation we have had has been in the use of the inherited modes. Particular elements did become more involved, like interactions with non-player characters, but much more often we saw developments of quantitative rather than qualitative kinds--like having a bigger world to navigate. Indeed, this seems minor next to the changes in the ways in which we access these games, with downloadable content of various kinds that may tweak an old adventure, the shift from the multiplayer of old to online multiplayer, and the mobility we now enjoy in an age in which rather than playing a relatively primitive game on a costly and specialized device such as only the truly dedicated would buy, people have far, far more choice of game on the little computer they now carry everywhere with them as a matter of course. The result is that if there have been changes, for those of a certain generation, whose tastes were formed in an earlier era and can remember the onrush of novelty in gaming itself that (however primitive the form it arrived in may look to the eyes of today's player) blew their minds again and again is behind us. This is all the more in as so much of what comes out is a sequel to something else, the football game fan still playing a Madden NFL game all these decades on, as Mario and Link and Sonic (and on the tier just below them, figures like Lara Croft) headline new adventures--new franchises and new icons just not coming along the way they used to do. As a result they may feel that in gaming, just like everywhere else, the gale of creative destruction is really a dead calm, as they see business devoting more creativity to the marketing of the product than to the product itself, which, however exciting this may be to those to whom the business pages cater, is what the players really care about.
Considering why that is one may see the trend in gaming as analogous to the trend in movies. With a shift to bigger, higher-risk productions in a more fragmented cultural context those who greenlight those productions prefer to exploit old franchises rather than try to launch new ones--the more in as the genres we have are very well-worn by this point, and the technology is not changing very much, and for that matter the whole culture we have with all it suggests for new ways of looking at the world is not changing very much. The result is that alongside the very real crassness and conservatism of those who greenlight what gets made, it is also the case that being really innovative is more of a challenge than it used to be, such that a revolution in video gaming at this relatively late stage of the form's history seems unlikely absent far, far bigger developments in technology, culture, and the world.
Where those fundamentals I refer to here are concerned there is no question that there was rapid development in the earlier period. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s we saw gaming go from controllers with a joystick and a single button to the controller of the crosspad-and-eight button Super Nintendo that seems to have basically defined what we use since, and multiplayer gaming (with the Nintendo Entertainment System already having apparatus and games for four-player interaction in the Four Score and the Satellite), and the ability to save our progress rather than have to start all over again when we turn off the console or the computer. This same period also gave us the first quests with beginnings and middles and ends (and side quests too!), the first customizable characters and multi-player parties, the first interactions with non-player characters, the first cut scenes--as well as the first fighting systems (turn-based as well as real-time) and first systems for "leveling up," the first inventories and day/night cycles, the first games that one could play out in more than one way because the player had the range of choice in regard to where they went and what they did requisite for that, with those different courses possibly leading to different endings. This is the period that gave us the platformer (in 3-D as well as 2-D), the role-playing game, the first-person shooter, the martial arts fighting game, the vehicle simulator and the sports simulator in their various forms, the Tetris-style puzzler, the strategy game, the management game, and combinations thereof, like the "action RPG" for which games like the Zelda series and the second Castlevania were such big moments--as well as such novelties as the Dance Dance Revolution-type exercise/music/rhythm game. The same period also saw us go from the graphics of Pong to the graphics of Quake III Arena.
It seems impossible to point to anything like that level of fundamental innovation in the field in the following twenty-five years. New mechanics and new genres have been scarce. Talk about virtual reality all you like, it remains a fairly marginal thing (people had some fun waving the Wii controllers about, but then it was back to the standard seated, button-pushing mode of interaction), while the experimental games the indies make fall far short of being the "game-changers" those pointing to them as proof of the industry's dynamism would have us think they are, however interesting they may individually be as a change of pace. Graphics did get sharper than they were before, but even that improvement hit diminishing returns long ago, as seen in the fuss over "ray tracing" in imagery a far cry from the true photorealism that remains remote. (At a glance you can much more easily tell the difference between the standard of 1975 and 2000 than that of 2000 and 2025--and for that matter, between 2000 and 2010 as against 2010 and 2025.)
Consequently what innovation we have had has been in the use of the inherited modes. Particular elements did become more involved, like interactions with non-player characters, but much more often we saw developments of quantitative rather than qualitative kinds--like having a bigger world to navigate. Indeed, this seems minor next to the changes in the ways in which we access these games, with downloadable content of various kinds that may tweak an old adventure, the shift from the multiplayer of old to online multiplayer, and the mobility we now enjoy in an age in which rather than playing a relatively primitive game on a costly and specialized device such as only the truly dedicated would buy, people have far, far more choice of game on the little computer they now carry everywhere with them as a matter of course. The result is that if there have been changes, for those of a certain generation, whose tastes were formed in an earlier era and can remember the onrush of novelty in gaming itself that (however primitive the form it arrived in may look to the eyes of today's player) blew their minds again and again is behind us. This is all the more in as so much of what comes out is a sequel to something else, the football game fan still playing a Madden NFL game all these decades on, as Mario and Link and Sonic (and on the tier just below them, figures like Lara Croft) headline new adventures--new franchises and new icons just not coming along the way they used to do. As a result they may feel that in gaming, just like everywhere else, the gale of creative destruction is really a dead calm, as they see business devoting more creativity to the marketing of the product than to the product itself, which, however exciting this may be to those to whom the business pages cater, is what the players really care about.
Considering why that is one may see the trend in gaming as analogous to the trend in movies. With a shift to bigger, higher-risk productions in a more fragmented cultural context those who greenlight those productions prefer to exploit old franchises rather than try to launch new ones--the more in as the genres we have are very well-worn by this point, and the technology is not changing very much, and for that matter the whole culture we have with all it suggests for new ways of looking at the world is not changing very much. The result is that alongside the very real crassness and conservatism of those who greenlight what gets made, it is also the case that being really innovative is more of a challenge than it used to be, such that a revolution in video gaming at this relatively late stage of the form's history seems unlikely absent far, far bigger developments in technology, culture, and the world.
Has Anime Changed Over the Years? (In a Word, Yes.)
Not long ago I had something to say about the comparative poverty of fan discourse in North America regarding anime compared to other subjects, and especially homegrown science fiction, in spite of anime's long having had a very wide viewership. This seemed to me a matter of North American audiences (and I would imagine pretty much any non-Japanese audience), having little access to the tradition as a whole, and the cultural background producing it, imposing all sorts of limitations to their understanding of which the more astute cannot but be aware. Still, it does seem that there is something to be said about how anime has evolved over these last few decades which should be evident and meaningful even to those far removed from Japan. Simply sticking with the easiest, most clearly quantifiable and checkable, aspects of that change, let us start with a single genre, action-adventure. Looking at it you can see the way in which long series' have become much less common; how with even hit shows we are apt to get a single cour at a time, separated by gaps of years; and how episodic series' have become rarer, with more emphasis on long story arcs in series' of any length. It seems safe to say, too, that there has been a greater tendency to young adult protagonists "getting their start" rather than seasoned grown-ups; that even in this genre where action has always been prominent there is more emphasis on the action as such, and especially very long action sequences, relative to storytelling; and that where action-adventure is concerned we have fewer stories set in the contemporary "real" world, and less science fiction, and more fantasy; as should be clear from remembering how in the '70s and even the '80s figures like Lupin the Third, Fist of the North Star's Kenshiro and City Hunter's Ryo Saeba, and their very long-running adventures, loomed very, very large in anime's action-adventure landscape. You won't find anything like those series' (the protagonists and their themes, the tenor and rhythm and tone of their adventures) anywhere near the top of the field today the way they were in their heyday, if you can find really comparable work among the new stuff at all.
Moving away from the safest, most indisputable aspects of the matter--and from just this one part of the field to take in the broader view of the anime we have been getting (it's not all action-adventure, even if action-adventure likely accounts for more of it)--I can also point to the way in which the young adult-oriented fare has so often come from light novels relative to the manga with which the genre has historically been connected, and imported a certain sensibility along with them (aloof, cynical, with more than a little pseudo-maturity about it, the attitude of Haruhi Suzumiya's Kyon now commonplace). I can point, too, to the way more of the content seems to be aimed at the "hardcore" anime audience rather than a more general one, as seen not just in an increasingly frequent mining of the brand name and nostalgia value of old hits (like the belated "Parts" 4, 5 and 6 of Lupin III), but the propensity for material centered on "fan" characters and dense with allusion to their culture, epitomized by how much of the fantasy is of the "isekai" type, and this so frequently following a particular metafiction- and wish fulfillment-heavy pattern. (Specifically some "loser" suffers an accident and finds himself in a fantasy milieu where he can become a powerful hero, with said milieu likely to feel like a role-playing video game--e.g. they get hit by a garbage truck and wake up in the World of Warcraft, like in Jobless Reincarnation.) And I can point to how it seems that "shonen" material has come to dominate the market much more than was the case before, with fewer "seinen," "shojo" and "josei" hits (in particular shojo or josei score a hit on the scale of Fruits Basket or Nodame Cantabile now seem very rare), all as the "shonen" category would seem to have become more "female-friendly" in at least some respects (the "skirt-chasing" hero a lot rarer than in the day of Ryo Saeba). I think it also safe to say that the makers of anime seem to have played it "safe" more than before in ways extending beyond that reliance on old "brand names," both artistically (you probably won't see anything so experimental as Neon Genesis Evangelion today) and politically. (The way that a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex or Blood+ took up themes like war, imperialism, capitalism, is something you probably won't find in a major new series, while the change is evident even at the level of "school life" stuff. A series like Great Teacher Onizuka took a critical view of bourgeois success-striving as hollow and frequently life-destroying, but for all its apparent edginess Assassination Classroom was at the level of Message thoroughly, indeed heavy-handedly, conformist all the way through.)
Even a few of these changes would be transformative for a medium. Taken together the lot of them are that much more clearly so--all as I can't help but notice the parallels between the developments I have described here, and contemporaneous developments in American popular culture. After all, here, too, we have seen a shift to shorter production commitments, with even network TV producing shorter seasons and fewer of them; and for a long time a stress on young adult fare, action, and fantasy over science fiction (all three indeed, since Harry Potter exploded); as looking at Fist of the North Star and City Hunter we are likely to be reminded of the contemporaneous American action-adventure of the '80s that now looks rather retro. Thus does it also go with the exploitation of old franchises seemingly put to rest long ago, and the politics, cultural and otherwise, of such fare--this no great age for either original content or politically challenging material in North America either. It is a reminder that if anime is a Japanese product, in the main made for Japanese audiences, such that attempting to write deeply about the form from outside that milieu has not been easy, the world of Japanese pop culture is not hermetically sealed off from that of the rest of the world, and in fact long in dialogue with it, that of North America most certainly included, as people everywhere are touched by the same social and cultural forces.
Moving away from the safest, most indisputable aspects of the matter--and from just this one part of the field to take in the broader view of the anime we have been getting (it's not all action-adventure, even if action-adventure likely accounts for more of it)--I can also point to the way in which the young adult-oriented fare has so often come from light novels relative to the manga with which the genre has historically been connected, and imported a certain sensibility along with them (aloof, cynical, with more than a little pseudo-maturity about it, the attitude of Haruhi Suzumiya's Kyon now commonplace). I can point, too, to the way more of the content seems to be aimed at the "hardcore" anime audience rather than a more general one, as seen not just in an increasingly frequent mining of the brand name and nostalgia value of old hits (like the belated "Parts" 4, 5 and 6 of Lupin III), but the propensity for material centered on "fan" characters and dense with allusion to their culture, epitomized by how much of the fantasy is of the "isekai" type, and this so frequently following a particular metafiction- and wish fulfillment-heavy pattern. (Specifically some "loser" suffers an accident and finds himself in a fantasy milieu where he can become a powerful hero, with said milieu likely to feel like a role-playing video game--e.g. they get hit by a garbage truck and wake up in the World of Warcraft, like in Jobless Reincarnation.) And I can point to how it seems that "shonen" material has come to dominate the market much more than was the case before, with fewer "seinen," "shojo" and "josei" hits (in particular shojo or josei score a hit on the scale of Fruits Basket or Nodame Cantabile now seem very rare), all as the "shonen" category would seem to have become more "female-friendly" in at least some respects (the "skirt-chasing" hero a lot rarer than in the day of Ryo Saeba). I think it also safe to say that the makers of anime seem to have played it "safe" more than before in ways extending beyond that reliance on old "brand names," both artistically (you probably won't see anything so experimental as Neon Genesis Evangelion today) and politically. (The way that a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex or Blood+ took up themes like war, imperialism, capitalism, is something you probably won't find in a major new series, while the change is evident even at the level of "school life" stuff. A series like Great Teacher Onizuka took a critical view of bourgeois success-striving as hollow and frequently life-destroying, but for all its apparent edginess Assassination Classroom was at the level of Message thoroughly, indeed heavy-handedly, conformist all the way through.)
Even a few of these changes would be transformative for a medium. Taken together the lot of them are that much more clearly so--all as I can't help but notice the parallels between the developments I have described here, and contemporaneous developments in American popular culture. After all, here, too, we have seen a shift to shorter production commitments, with even network TV producing shorter seasons and fewer of them; and for a long time a stress on young adult fare, action, and fantasy over science fiction (all three indeed, since Harry Potter exploded); as looking at Fist of the North Star and City Hunter we are likely to be reminded of the contemporaneous American action-adventure of the '80s that now looks rather retro. Thus does it also go with the exploitation of old franchises seemingly put to rest long ago, and the politics, cultural and otherwise, of such fare--this no great age for either original content or politically challenging material in North America either. It is a reminder that if anime is a Japanese product, in the main made for Japanese audiences, such that attempting to write deeply about the form from outside that milieu has not been easy, the world of Japanese pop culture is not hermetically sealed off from that of the rest of the world, and in fact long in dialogue with it, that of North America most certainly included, as people everywhere are touched by the same social and cultural forces.
The Limits of North American Fan Discussion of Anime
First taking an interest in anime a long time ago I noticed that while it seemed that anime is very, very widely watched in North America the discourse about it has lacked the "breadth and depth" you find in discussions of the more comparable Hollywood stuff, for example. The kind of review that doesn't just give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" but really gives you the reasons why, and maybe teaches you about the artist, the art form, even the world in the process; the thoughtful essay that gives you a grasp of a trend or a tradition, a career or an era, and maybe even what it all meant; were much rarer here than, for example, such material about a Star Wars film or the adventures of some DC or Marvel comic book superhero.
It was pretty obviously relevant that we in North America tend to have a lot less background regarding anime than we do regarding homegrown stuff. For example, anyone growing up in North America in a certain period who was at all attracted to science fiction, without having to go far out of their way--just watching the movies that came out, watching what they happened upon on TV, etc.--was fairly likely to have got to know Star Trek and Star Wars, the major superheroes and their more significant media incarnations, perhaps even authors like Asimov and Clarke, and a good deal else that one might think of as comprising the genre's "canon." Of course, for all that the knowledge of said canon is uneven across the group (few have seen every last bit of it, the fandom the points of reference will differ somewhat with generation, "subculture," etc.), but there was still a sufficiently large number of people sharing a sufficiently large frame of reference regarding "North American sci-fi" for a meaningful number of them to be able to speak and write with some sophistication about the form or content of some work--because they can reach for suitable points of comparison, relate one work to another or to the broader cultural milieu from which it emerged (it is, after all, their milieu), etc. in trying to understand how such a work is put together and "works," for an interested audience able to understand them when they do so. This produced a virtuous cycle in which people do write about it, others read it, and they write in their turn, producing a fan literature that helped to pave the way for a more academic literature which, for all its imperfections, gives the interested that much more opportunity for a "big picture" view of the field's development. And indeed the relative vibrancy of the discussion of such material reflects that.
The situation among North American anime fans is very different. They are more remote from the genre's development, which went on literally an ocean away in Japan, so that their contact with that development was much more fragmentary--a movie here, a series there, just the bits that some distributor thought worth releasing in this market, with these often localized, the more in as North Americans are not great readers of subtitles. (Consider, for example, the fan who enjoyed Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy. If they want to see the original Kinnikuman series, regarded as a classic in Japan, they are out of luck because it was simply never released in North America in any form, and I do not expect that to change any time very soon.) It is also the case that this is all coming from a cultural context they do not know. (Even if they did see the old Kinnikuman series, how deeply could they analyze it without knowing the source material of the manga too? Without a broader knowledge of the sports anime/manga genre, and Japanese sports culture more generally? Without being able to appreciate the not infrequently untranslatable humor in comedies like these?) Rather than a picture in which there are gaps there is basically a giant "gap" with a very few pieces of picture, filling which would likely require fluent Japanese and a long stay in Japan itself. It makes a "big picture view" of the genre and its history--a sense of classics and canon and of the careers of particular artists, an awareness of how the form developed narratively and aesthetically (and the business commercially)--much harder to come by. That discourages attempts at such, which means that attempts to say much about it are few, with the paucity not doing much to encourage other attempts--with this reflected in the comparatively limited quantity of English-language works offering a serious history of anime (or for that matter, the history of anything Japanese, as you find if you actually try to read up about any such subject in a serious way).
The result is that few can say anything about it all going much beyond the expression of like and dislike--while even if they can they cannot expect much of an audience which will be able to appreciate it. This is not to say there is nothing for the interested--but the web sites attentive to the genre are that much less likely to offer what they do for homegrown science fiction, as those looking for anything meatier, if able to find it at all, are likely to do so only in a scattered way, on, for example, out-of-the-way blogs. And indeed I suspect the situation has got worse rather than better this way--certainly to go by how one anime news web site I looked at regularly for years has inclined away from the bit of retrospective and cultural background and deeper commentary it previously offered to simply pushing the latest material (indeed, often to clickbaity gossip about industry personnel). Meanwhile it has only got tougher and tougher for the bloggers and other small-timers out there as no matter what they put up the search (and answer) engines ignore them in favor of the higher-profile outlets that beneath the polish not only have less and less to say, but so often give the impression that those running them aren't even interested in saying anything at all.
It was pretty obviously relevant that we in North America tend to have a lot less background regarding anime than we do regarding homegrown stuff. For example, anyone growing up in North America in a certain period who was at all attracted to science fiction, without having to go far out of their way--just watching the movies that came out, watching what they happened upon on TV, etc.--was fairly likely to have got to know Star Trek and Star Wars, the major superheroes and their more significant media incarnations, perhaps even authors like Asimov and Clarke, and a good deal else that one might think of as comprising the genre's "canon." Of course, for all that the knowledge of said canon is uneven across the group (few have seen every last bit of it, the fandom the points of reference will differ somewhat with generation, "subculture," etc.), but there was still a sufficiently large number of people sharing a sufficiently large frame of reference regarding "North American sci-fi" for a meaningful number of them to be able to speak and write with some sophistication about the form or content of some work--because they can reach for suitable points of comparison, relate one work to another or to the broader cultural milieu from which it emerged (it is, after all, their milieu), etc. in trying to understand how such a work is put together and "works," for an interested audience able to understand them when they do so. This produced a virtuous cycle in which people do write about it, others read it, and they write in their turn, producing a fan literature that helped to pave the way for a more academic literature which, for all its imperfections, gives the interested that much more opportunity for a "big picture" view of the field's development. And indeed the relative vibrancy of the discussion of such material reflects that.
The situation among North American anime fans is very different. They are more remote from the genre's development, which went on literally an ocean away in Japan, so that their contact with that development was much more fragmentary--a movie here, a series there, just the bits that some distributor thought worth releasing in this market, with these often localized, the more in as North Americans are not great readers of subtitles. (Consider, for example, the fan who enjoyed Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy. If they want to see the original Kinnikuman series, regarded as a classic in Japan, they are out of luck because it was simply never released in North America in any form, and I do not expect that to change any time very soon.) It is also the case that this is all coming from a cultural context they do not know. (Even if they did see the old Kinnikuman series, how deeply could they analyze it without knowing the source material of the manga too? Without a broader knowledge of the sports anime/manga genre, and Japanese sports culture more generally? Without being able to appreciate the not infrequently untranslatable humor in comedies like these?) Rather than a picture in which there are gaps there is basically a giant "gap" with a very few pieces of picture, filling which would likely require fluent Japanese and a long stay in Japan itself. It makes a "big picture view" of the genre and its history--a sense of classics and canon and of the careers of particular artists, an awareness of how the form developed narratively and aesthetically (and the business commercially)--much harder to come by. That discourages attempts at such, which means that attempts to say much about it are few, with the paucity not doing much to encourage other attempts--with this reflected in the comparatively limited quantity of English-language works offering a serious history of anime (or for that matter, the history of anything Japanese, as you find if you actually try to read up about any such subject in a serious way).
The result is that few can say anything about it all going much beyond the expression of like and dislike--while even if they can they cannot expect much of an audience which will be able to appreciate it. This is not to say there is nothing for the interested--but the web sites attentive to the genre are that much less likely to offer what they do for homegrown science fiction, as those looking for anything meatier, if able to find it at all, are likely to do so only in a scattered way, on, for example, out-of-the-way blogs. And indeed I suspect the situation has got worse rather than better this way--certainly to go by how one anime news web site I looked at regularly for years has inclined away from the bit of retrospective and cultural background and deeper commentary it previously offered to simply pushing the latest material (indeed, often to clickbaity gossip about industry personnel). Meanwhile it has only got tougher and tougher for the bloggers and other small-timers out there as no matter what they put up the search (and answer) engines ignore them in favor of the higher-profile outlets that beneath the polish not only have less and less to say, but so often give the impression that those running them aren't even interested in saying anything at all.
Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II: Some Thoughts
Sitting down and properly watching the Gene Roddenberry scripted and produced made-for-television film (and would-be series pilot) Genesis II I was not only pleasantly surprised by the quality of the production, but struck by how consistent with the pattern of Star Trek it was, not only in its humane values, but in the character of the conception. Just as Star Trek was a blend of action-adventure science fiction straight out of the American magazines of the pulp era with the more cerebral stuff of the British tradition of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon (scientifically informed, socially critical, persuaded of the need for fundamental changes in humanity's way of living, Patrick Parrinder called this the "scientific world-view"), so was it the case here. With Star Trek, obviously, the pulpier tradition on which Roddenberry drew was the space opera. Here it is Buck Rogers--today remembered as a space opera hero himself, but originally the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic adventure tale in his original appearance in Philip Francis Nowlan's novella "Armageddon 2419 A.D." in the milestone August 1928 issue of old Hugo Gernsback's foundational Amazing Stories. Like Rogers, the Dylan Hunt who is the protagonist of Genesis II is an engineer put into suspended animation underground by an accident who awakens centuries later to find himself in a much-changed America, and caught up in its conflicts as different forces contend for power, with his scientific skills playing their part in the struggle. In Nowlan's tale the battle was simply a matter of nationalistic-racial resistance by Americans against the "Han" who had conquered the continent in a futuristic version of the then-popular "Yellow Peril" stories that inverted the reality of a China brutally colonized by the imperial powers into a tale of an imperial China colonizing the world (alas, a tradition far from dead even today). By contrast in Genesis II the struggle is between the militaristic slave society of the genetically altered Tyranians, and an organization called PAX--the heirs of the very scientists that Hunt worked with in his own day determined to preserve the best of the past and, if one may borrow the phrase, "build back better."
Comparing the movie with that reworking of its elements that was the TV show Andromeda I am struck by the differences even more than I am the similarities that initially had Genesis II getting my attention when I just chanced across it on what was probably still called the Sci-Fi Channel an eternity ago. The choice of a fallen intergalactic civilization rather than post-apocalyptic Earth as the setting for Hunt's adventure probably derived from an attempt to capitalize on Roddenberry's principal legacy being the creation of Star Trek--the more in as the 1990s were boom years for the small-screen space opera (with its continuations of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate: SG-1, Farscape and much else drawing audiences). Meanwhile going with a military man rather than an engineer or a scientist as the new incarnation of Dylan Hunt seemed consistent with a tilt toward flashy action-adventure over ideas--and a broadly more conservative bent politically, to be seen in Hunt's aspiration to "restoring the Commonwealth" (the monarchical Commonwealth, even in its heyday far from the rationality of the Federation, appearing a shining ideal amid a new Dark Age), as against the PAX organization's more radical mission, so reminiscent of Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come. Also in line with this difference of political vision Andromeda treated the war-like Nietzscheans with far more respect than Genesis II did those proto-Nietzscheans, the Tyranians--its Hunt, if initially taken in by the beneficent face the Tyranians presented him, soon enough seeing their brutality for what it was, and coming over to the PAX, the good guys here up against the bad guys the Tyranians clearly are, cultural relativism (and the indulgence of the far rightist, the reactionary, the privileged jealous of their rights to abuse and exploit behind a facade of broad-minded respect for tradition that this relativism usually is at bottom) be damned.
Indeed, after the viewing I was left that much more convinced that Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda was really just Andromeda, and the posthumous attachment of Roddenberry's name to it another case of cynical exploitation of a past success by invoking a "brand" without any understanding of how it became a success, or respect for what it had ever been about. At the same time looking at this particular tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth I found myself comparing it to the post-apocalyptic drama we have had in this century, with their misanthropic emphasis on reptile-brained survivalism in a world where the viewer is encouraged to see everyone who is not them as a brain-eating zombie--to all evidences the Wellsian impulse not at all a part of the political imaginary of contemporary Hollywood, with all that says about the age in which we live.
Comparing the movie with that reworking of its elements that was the TV show Andromeda I am struck by the differences even more than I am the similarities that initially had Genesis II getting my attention when I just chanced across it on what was probably still called the Sci-Fi Channel an eternity ago. The choice of a fallen intergalactic civilization rather than post-apocalyptic Earth as the setting for Hunt's adventure probably derived from an attempt to capitalize on Roddenberry's principal legacy being the creation of Star Trek--the more in as the 1990s were boom years for the small-screen space opera (with its continuations of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate: SG-1, Farscape and much else drawing audiences). Meanwhile going with a military man rather than an engineer or a scientist as the new incarnation of Dylan Hunt seemed consistent with a tilt toward flashy action-adventure over ideas--and a broadly more conservative bent politically, to be seen in Hunt's aspiration to "restoring the Commonwealth" (the monarchical Commonwealth, even in its heyday far from the rationality of the Federation, appearing a shining ideal amid a new Dark Age), as against the PAX organization's more radical mission, so reminiscent of Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come. Also in line with this difference of political vision Andromeda treated the war-like Nietzscheans with far more respect than Genesis II did those proto-Nietzscheans, the Tyranians--its Hunt, if initially taken in by the beneficent face the Tyranians presented him, soon enough seeing their brutality for what it was, and coming over to the PAX, the good guys here up against the bad guys the Tyranians clearly are, cultural relativism (and the indulgence of the far rightist, the reactionary, the privileged jealous of their rights to abuse and exploit behind a facade of broad-minded respect for tradition that this relativism usually is at bottom) be damned.
Indeed, after the viewing I was left that much more convinced that Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda was really just Andromeda, and the posthumous attachment of Roddenberry's name to it another case of cynical exploitation of a past success by invoking a "brand" without any understanding of how it became a success, or respect for what it had ever been about. At the same time looking at this particular tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth I found myself comparing it to the post-apocalyptic drama we have had in this century, with their misanthropic emphasis on reptile-brained survivalism in a world where the viewer is encouraged to see everyone who is not them as a brain-eating zombie--to all evidences the Wellsian impulse not at all a part of the political imaginary of contemporary Hollywood, with all that says about the age in which we live.
Remembering Andromeda: The Politics of "Slipfighter the Dogs of War"
With an immediacy and specificity rare in scripted television due to the lag time between the conception of an episode and its airing the November 2002 Andromeda episode "Slipfighter the Dogs of War" dove into the political fray of its moment with a plot very obviously taking a side in one of the more consequential controversies of American politics in the twenty-first century. Here in the wake of the recent restoration of the Commonwealth that was its hero's object from the two-part opener forward, the protagonist Dylan Hunt discovers evidence that the oppressive and aggressive planet of "Marduk" is producing "nova bombs," and decides that the only right-thinking action is to put a stop to it militarily with a strike on the "reactor" producing the required "voltronium," which he and two of his crew execute in "slipfighters."
"Nova bombs," of course, were the Andromeda universe's equivalent of nuclear weapons, "voltronium" an obvious analogy with the fissile material required to make nuclear weapons that is frequently produced in nuclear "reactors," and "Marduk" the name of the Babylonian hero-god in an all too obvious evocation of the nation-state today occupying Babylon's territory, Iraq--which the Bush II administration had, of course, accused of secretly attempting to acquire a nuclear arsenal and other weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to make it a threat to the world. At the same time the episode evoked an earlier action specifically directed against a nuclear reactor which other nations claimed Iraq intended to use to produce fissile material for bombs--the Israeli air strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, which was executed with the fighter aircraft that are the real-world counterpart of the show's slipfighters.
The writers of the episode, apparently approving and valorizing the 1981 strike, and commending such military action as the proper course in such a situation, specifically seemed to think it was an appropriate precedent for the military action that the Bush II administration advocated against Iraq, which ultimately took the form of the 2003 invasion that was presented to the world as a "preventive war" securing a presumably necessary "regime change." Indeed, even as one of the sticking points in the American debate about the action was the objection of the international community to the invasion that in many eyes made it illegal, illegitimate and the more likely to miscarry for the lack of broad support from allies, the episode had the authorities of the Commonwealth (readable as a stand-in for that international community as represented by the United Nations) winking at the action that Hunt would take in apparently "loose cannon" fashion to give them "plausible deniability"--the implication here that "Those foreign politicians can't admit they want us to do this, but they know full well that this thing has to be done and that we're the ones to do it, so don't take their objections seriously, all theater don't you know," all as they rather patronizingly told the public that really, it would all be very tidy and practically over before you know it, except for the ways that the world would be changed for the better! (For of course, it all goes exactly according to plan here, despite the misgivings of an unusually anxious and reluctant Tyr.)
Considering the episode, a reminder of the simple-mindedness or dishonesty of those insistent on Hollywood's "liberalism," I am struck by how un-Gene Roddenberry this all was for all the selling of the show as "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda." Of course, one cannot know for sure what Mr. Roddenberry would have thought and said about events that happened over a decade after his death. This is all the more the case as people do change, and in these years politics was moving rightward in just about every way that mattered, such that by that point this complex figure may not have been the same man who overcame the prejudices and the odds of Cold War-era America to (to the misanthropic fury of those who despise Star Trek for that, and have been crapping disgustingly all over it ever since, not least the Suits at Paramount and the online nitwits who justify them) give us Star Trek's Wellsian-Stapledonian vision of a rational, peaceful, progressing interstellar World State. Still, the existence of room for speculation about what Roddenberry might or might not have endorsed in 2002 is a different thing from attaching his name to such a blatant piece of propaganda for the opposite of what he had stood for in life, and frankly seems more in tune with the outlook and influence of "Friends of Abe" member Kevin Sorbo than Mr. Roddenberry, who was not merely the star of the show but a producer with rather clear ideas about where he wanted the show to go. (Good guys vs. bad guys! Zap, biff, pow!) At the same time, if all things considered this rather minor syndicated space opera's influence on the march to war in Iraq that proved such a disaster for the region and the world (the consequences of which extend beyond two decades of metastasizing conflict in the Middle East the very opposite of the wave of democratization and peace the neoconservatives promised, to the monetary policy that precipitated the 2007 financial crisis, and the subsequent Great Recession and refugee crisis that have so fed extremism in and outside the region), few today would consider it a creditable one. At the same time few would defend the results as art, "Slipfighter" a reminder that contrary to the great art lies, yes, all art is propaganda, rightist art included, and yes, bad rightist art is no better than bad leftist art, especially from the standpoint of those who cannot even accord it any credit for at least having had a Worthy Message to offer, or any great need of courage to present it.
"Nova bombs," of course, were the Andromeda universe's equivalent of nuclear weapons, "voltronium" an obvious analogy with the fissile material required to make nuclear weapons that is frequently produced in nuclear "reactors," and "Marduk" the name of the Babylonian hero-god in an all too obvious evocation of the nation-state today occupying Babylon's territory, Iraq--which the Bush II administration had, of course, accused of secretly attempting to acquire a nuclear arsenal and other weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to make it a threat to the world. At the same time the episode evoked an earlier action specifically directed against a nuclear reactor which other nations claimed Iraq intended to use to produce fissile material for bombs--the Israeli air strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, which was executed with the fighter aircraft that are the real-world counterpart of the show's slipfighters.
The writers of the episode, apparently approving and valorizing the 1981 strike, and commending such military action as the proper course in such a situation, specifically seemed to think it was an appropriate precedent for the military action that the Bush II administration advocated against Iraq, which ultimately took the form of the 2003 invasion that was presented to the world as a "preventive war" securing a presumably necessary "regime change." Indeed, even as one of the sticking points in the American debate about the action was the objection of the international community to the invasion that in many eyes made it illegal, illegitimate and the more likely to miscarry for the lack of broad support from allies, the episode had the authorities of the Commonwealth (readable as a stand-in for that international community as represented by the United Nations) winking at the action that Hunt would take in apparently "loose cannon" fashion to give them "plausible deniability"--the implication here that "Those foreign politicians can't admit they want us to do this, but they know full well that this thing has to be done and that we're the ones to do it, so don't take their objections seriously, all theater don't you know," all as they rather patronizingly told the public that really, it would all be very tidy and practically over before you know it, except for the ways that the world would be changed for the better! (For of course, it all goes exactly according to plan here, despite the misgivings of an unusually anxious and reluctant Tyr.)
Considering the episode, a reminder of the simple-mindedness or dishonesty of those insistent on Hollywood's "liberalism," I am struck by how un-Gene Roddenberry this all was for all the selling of the show as "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda." Of course, one cannot know for sure what Mr. Roddenberry would have thought and said about events that happened over a decade after his death. This is all the more the case as people do change, and in these years politics was moving rightward in just about every way that mattered, such that by that point this complex figure may not have been the same man who overcame the prejudices and the odds of Cold War-era America to (to the misanthropic fury of those who despise Star Trek for that, and have been crapping disgustingly all over it ever since, not least the Suits at Paramount and the online nitwits who justify them) give us Star Trek's Wellsian-Stapledonian vision of a rational, peaceful, progressing interstellar World State. Still, the existence of room for speculation about what Roddenberry might or might not have endorsed in 2002 is a different thing from attaching his name to such a blatant piece of propaganda for the opposite of what he had stood for in life, and frankly seems more in tune with the outlook and influence of "Friends of Abe" member Kevin Sorbo than Mr. Roddenberry, who was not merely the star of the show but a producer with rather clear ideas about where he wanted the show to go. (Good guys vs. bad guys! Zap, biff, pow!) At the same time, if all things considered this rather minor syndicated space opera's influence on the march to war in Iraq that proved such a disaster for the region and the world (the consequences of which extend beyond two decades of metastasizing conflict in the Middle East the very opposite of the wave of democratization and peace the neoconservatives promised, to the monetary policy that precipitated the 2007 financial crisis, and the subsequent Great Recession and refugee crisis that have so fed extremism in and outside the region), few today would consider it a creditable one. At the same time few would defend the results as art, "Slipfighter" a reminder that contrary to the great art lies, yes, all art is propaganda, rightist art included, and yes, bad rightist art is no better than bad leftist art, especially from the standpoint of those who cannot even accord it any credit for at least having had a Worthy Message to offer, or any great need of courage to present it.
Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda: A Few Reflections
The small-screen space opera Andromeda (2000-2005) went off the air two decades ago. In spite of having a run longer than most of its similarly syndicated contemporaries (it made it all the way to its fifth season) it does not seem to have left much of an impression pop culturally--rather less so than, for example, Xena: Warrior Princess. Still, it had some notable aspects, not least its association with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (like the earlier Earth: Final Conflict--or rather, Gene Roddenberry's Earth Final Conflict--Andromeda was marketed as Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda), one with some basis in that the show did clearly rework some of his old ideas. (Those who have ever happened upon the old Gene Roddenberry-scripted and produced sci-fi TV movie Genesis II know that Andromeda's was not the first Dylan Hunt who, due to his having been placed in "suspended animation" in a situation in which things did not go according to plan, found himself two centuries removed from his time in a post-apocalyptic future where he had to contend with a genetically altered warrior race intent on conquest.)
Of course, if the show did have a real connection with Roddenberry its actual representativeness of his work seems questionable, certainly if one compares this show produced after his passing with what we saw of his work when he was alive, not least the space opera with which he made his name, Star Trek and perhaps especially Star Trek: The Next Generation. If looking at Star Trek many dismissively refer to long-outworn clichés about "space Westerns" the reality is that the show's place in science fiction and pop cultural history is a matter of its marriage of space operatic adventure with the Wells-Stapledon tradition of socially critical, utopian, science fiction--its United Federation of Planets a "scientific World State" on an interstellar scale. (Indeed, this has much to do with the dismissal--the cruel-souled zealots of pessimism who have appointed themselves the tastemakers of the era despising its rationalism, humane values and progressive vision.)
By contrast in Andromeda the "Commonwealth" of which Dylan Hunt is always speaking, and which his fighting to restore is the premise of the series, seems rather a different creation from the Federation. Apart from having the disadvantage of having collapsed and as a result civilization succumbed to a new Dark Age, with all its less happy narrative implications (functioning societies don't fall apart like that), it does not seem to have stood for anything very particular--all as the Commonwealth's whiff of intergalactic monarchism and feudalism bespeaks the prevalence of space opera's penchant for high-tech barbarism rather than any Wellsian vision. So does the Commonwealth's resurrection by an old soldier on the basis of power-sharing by a last-days-of-the-Roman-Republic-style triumvirate--with the impression the more marked when one contrasts this with not just Star Trek but Genesis II. (That work may have had a post-apocalyptic context, but one can see in the scientific PAX endeavoring to "build back better" a civilization something like the members of Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come, with it relevant that its hero was an engineer rather than a military man like Hunt—by comparison with whom Hunt gives the impression of a barbarian chieftain with a little more vision than his contemporaries endeavoring to restore the romanticized glories of a Rome that, certainly seen from the bottom up, was not so glorious. )
I cannot say whether the show's creators and runners deliberately turned their backs on Roddenberry's thinking in favor of something less unfashionable in an increasingly cynical and nihilistic era--the arguments over the show's direction as commonly reported having been different from that in nature. (The emphasis in the show's press was on the battle between Robert Hewitt Wolfe's desire to have the show play out a long story arc over support from other producers for a more episodic narrative accessible to casual viewers, and--to go by producer and star Kevin Sorbo's remarks--a lighter, escapist, "good guys vs. bad guys" bim, boof, pow approach.) Still, however it happened, the divergence from Roddenberry's ideas seems inarguable--all as, unsurprisingly given the behind-the-camera conflicts and changes, whatever thinking they embraced as an alternative never seemed so sharp, so polished, as what we got in Star Trek (and still less, its incarnation as The Next Generation). Indeed, especially as the series progressed there was a haziness about it all, the episodes tending to feel half-made, and even dream-like, not least due to an abundance of hints that never went anywhere (just what is a "Paradine?"), and how what should have been big events never seemed to have any proper weight. (Thus did the episodes tell us that Hunt restored the Commonwealth--in surprisingly short order--but never really made us feel that the characters were operating in the service of a reestablished civilization, all as, of course, the fifth season was one big sideways shift from any main line of the story, straight into a junkyard like so much '80s-era post-apocalyptic B-movie fare, after which the series did not so much advance toward a resolution as slap on an ending and stop.) In short, if you were making J.J. Abrams' often opaque, "mystery box"-packed Lost even more muddled by making it as a space opera with intergalactic sprawl, genuine alien species' and cosmic stakes by way of a cheaper, more chaotic, sloppier, production process, this is what you would get. (A messier Lost--IN SPACE!) In the end the result was a show that, whatever the intentions that may have lain in back of it or the potentials it contained, is better remembered for its oddities, failings and smaller and more superficial pleasures than its narrative successes or its intellectual heft, and even by "cult" rather than mainstream standards has only a fairly slight following today.
Of course, if the show did have a real connection with Roddenberry its actual representativeness of his work seems questionable, certainly if one compares this show produced after his passing with what we saw of his work when he was alive, not least the space opera with which he made his name, Star Trek and perhaps especially Star Trek: The Next Generation. If looking at Star Trek many dismissively refer to long-outworn clichés about "space Westerns" the reality is that the show's place in science fiction and pop cultural history is a matter of its marriage of space operatic adventure with the Wells-Stapledon tradition of socially critical, utopian, science fiction--its United Federation of Planets a "scientific World State" on an interstellar scale. (Indeed, this has much to do with the dismissal--the cruel-souled zealots of pessimism who have appointed themselves the tastemakers of the era despising its rationalism, humane values and progressive vision.)
By contrast in Andromeda the "Commonwealth" of which Dylan Hunt is always speaking, and which his fighting to restore is the premise of the series, seems rather a different creation from the Federation. Apart from having the disadvantage of having collapsed and as a result civilization succumbed to a new Dark Age, with all its less happy narrative implications (functioning societies don't fall apart like that), it does not seem to have stood for anything very particular--all as the Commonwealth's whiff of intergalactic monarchism and feudalism bespeaks the prevalence of space opera's penchant for high-tech barbarism rather than any Wellsian vision. So does the Commonwealth's resurrection by an old soldier on the basis of power-sharing by a last-days-of-the-Roman-Republic-style triumvirate--with the impression the more marked when one contrasts this with not just Star Trek but Genesis II. (That work may have had a post-apocalyptic context, but one can see in the scientific PAX endeavoring to "build back better" a civilization something like the members of Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come, with it relevant that its hero was an engineer rather than a military man like Hunt—by comparison with whom Hunt gives the impression of a barbarian chieftain with a little more vision than his contemporaries endeavoring to restore the romanticized glories of a Rome that, certainly seen from the bottom up, was not so glorious. )
I cannot say whether the show's creators and runners deliberately turned their backs on Roddenberry's thinking in favor of something less unfashionable in an increasingly cynical and nihilistic era--the arguments over the show's direction as commonly reported having been different from that in nature. (The emphasis in the show's press was on the battle between Robert Hewitt Wolfe's desire to have the show play out a long story arc over support from other producers for a more episodic narrative accessible to casual viewers, and--to go by producer and star Kevin Sorbo's remarks--a lighter, escapist, "good guys vs. bad guys" bim, boof, pow approach.) Still, however it happened, the divergence from Roddenberry's ideas seems inarguable--all as, unsurprisingly given the behind-the-camera conflicts and changes, whatever thinking they embraced as an alternative never seemed so sharp, so polished, as what we got in Star Trek (and still less, its incarnation as The Next Generation). Indeed, especially as the series progressed there was a haziness about it all, the episodes tending to feel half-made, and even dream-like, not least due to an abundance of hints that never went anywhere (just what is a "Paradine?"), and how what should have been big events never seemed to have any proper weight. (Thus did the episodes tell us that Hunt restored the Commonwealth--in surprisingly short order--but never really made us feel that the characters were operating in the service of a reestablished civilization, all as, of course, the fifth season was one big sideways shift from any main line of the story, straight into a junkyard like so much '80s-era post-apocalyptic B-movie fare, after which the series did not so much advance toward a resolution as slap on an ending and stop.) In short, if you were making J.J. Abrams' often opaque, "mystery box"-packed Lost even more muddled by making it as a space opera with intergalactic sprawl, genuine alien species' and cosmic stakes by way of a cheaper, more chaotic, sloppier, production process, this is what you would get. (A messier Lost--IN SPACE!) In the end the result was a show that, whatever the intentions that may have lain in back of it or the potentials it contained, is better remembered for its oddities, failings and smaller and more superficial pleasures than its narrative successes or its intellectual heft, and even by "cult" rather than mainstream standards has only a fairly slight following today.
Do Young People Watch Old Movies?
Today it is common to look back at the summer of 2020 and its protests as the high point of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I personally remember the turning point of those protests--the moment in which they were defeated--as being when a discourse that was getting uncomfortably radical for some (talk of reforming the police seemed to be going mainstream) suddenly changed topics to arguing over "Should Gone with the Wind be banned?"
Even by the standards of a national dialogue exceedingly susceptible to distraction by trivialities obscured by pompous bloviating about the significance of "symbolic issues" this was risible--something out of a Mel Brooks movie. After all, even symbolism is supposed to have to do with things that are visible, whereas this film, however much it may be regarded as a screen classic, isn't. "How many people under forty have even heard of this movie made eight decades earlier, before their grandparents were even born?" I wondered. Yet here they were talking about it in rather a frenzied fashion, the moment passed, the movement waned and the summer of '20 already become an object of nostalgia for those lamenting the supposed "death of wokeness."
Still, the question "How many people under forty have even heard of this movie?" has recurred to me since, and I recently tried finding out. Apparently, in spite of the brouhaha, no one knew or had bothered to find out, no poll testifying to awareness or lack of awareness of the film among the public, and certainly not its younger cohorts. In the process I found out that, for all the marketing significance the question would seem to have, there just isn't much serious examination of the extent to which films like this have really lingered in the public's memory, even as studio executives make claims about "back catalog value" in defense of their decisions to make sequels nobody asked for that seem unlikely to make a dime. That leaves us with just our speculations. This being a blog post and not an academic paper I don't see any harm in offering mine. For my part I will not say that older films seem to me to be entirely without any potential for appealing to the young. Those who have a sense of story, an ear for dialogue, a regard for drama (and it would be nice to think at least a few do), may find such films to have their pleasures--indeed, be a breath of fresh air given what passes for story, dialogue, drama in today's fare. Such films would even seem to have other attractions to go by, for example, how popular a choice the "1950s Super Panavision 70" style seems to be in generative AI-made trailers for nonexistent movies, with the muted colors and film grain of the visuals, the Mid-Century Modern "Airstream Futuropolis" aesthetic, the soft-featured beauty and old-fashioned feminine glamour of yesteryear's leading ladies, implying that some would be drawn to the look of older movies as well. All as, I would like to add, for all the right-wing mockery of the delicacy of woke youth, I doubt so very many young people would really find the less "diverse" cast or the old-fashioned portrayal of "gender roles" really so unbearable to their sensibilities as they have it.
Still, on the whole this would seem to be at best a matter of cult rather than really general audience interest, with the disadvantages of older film in competing for the public's attention seeming to me more significant where these demographics as a whole are concerned, not least because of the organization of our home entertainment options. Even when using a streaming service older people remain more used to doing what they did before streaming's availability, picking a channel and leaving it on, especially when they weren't in a mood to really sit down and take something in properly--the young to choosing particular movies or shows from the selection of "Recommendations" the service presents them, with those choices leading to subsequent offerings along the lines of what they already watched, making them less likely to "discover" things unlike what they have already seen. The result is that despite a lot of fuss about shows from the '00s, for example, finding purchase with streaming viewers, on the whole old TV is a much smaller part of people's casual viewing than it used to be, with the same going for old movies, all as the incentive of the young to seek out old movies seems to have gone in the opposite direction of their now unprecedentedly easy access to them. The day of popular, serious, interest in film as an art form is far, far behind us, as the young may be expected to not find older films very watchable at all given their habituation to certain forms of blockbuster spectacle--as well as faster pacing and "high concept" cinematography and editing that must leave the talkier, less action-packed, slower-paced, "low concept" film of yesteryear almost automatically off-putting. (Today even the Hallmark Channel's feather-light romantic comedies have the close takes and short shot lengths of an action movie, as you will notice observing how when the leads are having a conversation the film cuts from one to the other in line with whoever is speaking or reacting and on whom they accordingly want us to focus--two faces rarely visible together in a single frame.) It doesn't help that older films, especially those from before the late 1960s, may seem rather sanitized to addicts of "edgy" content. The old enthusiasm for period pieces would not seem to help with a generation that strongly prefers tales of the here and now, nor the fact that a movie made in the era of Gone with the Wind but set in the then present day is effectively a period piece to them, outside their frame of reference. (What would they make of, for example, His Girl Friday?) Indeed, it may be significant that those faux 1950s Super Panavision 70 trailers are almost invariably versions of more contemporary hits or upcoming releases (like The Fantastic Four) rather than imaginings of films that might actually have been made in the '50s.
Altogether, even for a comparative newcomer open to the pleasures of classic film it would probably take a really exceptional interest--extending to a readiness to do some cultural work--to spend much time with such movies, the more in as they have so many more alternatives of kinds to which they are accustomed being pressed upon them at all times. Indeed, considering their frame of reference I am reminded of that line in the film version of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about that "hot new director" Vincent Lepak's thinking "that cinema began with Quentin Tarantino." All these years later, so does it go with a great many younger people, many of them still unborn when Reservoir Dogs premiered, precisely because the whole older world of cinema is terra incognita to them.
I personally remember the turning point of those protests--the moment in which they were defeated--as being when a discourse that was getting uncomfortably radical for some (talk of reforming the police seemed to be going mainstream) suddenly changed topics to arguing over "Should Gone with the Wind be banned?"
Even by the standards of a national dialogue exceedingly susceptible to distraction by trivialities obscured by pompous bloviating about the significance of "symbolic issues" this was risible--something out of a Mel Brooks movie. After all, even symbolism is supposed to have to do with things that are visible, whereas this film, however much it may be regarded as a screen classic, isn't. "How many people under forty have even heard of this movie made eight decades earlier, before their grandparents were even born?" I wondered. Yet here they were talking about it in rather a frenzied fashion, the moment passed, the movement waned and the summer of '20 already become an object of nostalgia for those lamenting the supposed "death of wokeness."
Still, the question "How many people under forty have even heard of this movie?" has recurred to me since, and I recently tried finding out. Apparently, in spite of the brouhaha, no one knew or had bothered to find out, no poll testifying to awareness or lack of awareness of the film among the public, and certainly not its younger cohorts. In the process I found out that, for all the marketing significance the question would seem to have, there just isn't much serious examination of the extent to which films like this have really lingered in the public's memory, even as studio executives make claims about "back catalog value" in defense of their decisions to make sequels nobody asked for that seem unlikely to make a dime. That leaves us with just our speculations. This being a blog post and not an academic paper I don't see any harm in offering mine. For my part I will not say that older films seem to me to be entirely without any potential for appealing to the young. Those who have a sense of story, an ear for dialogue, a regard for drama (and it would be nice to think at least a few do), may find such films to have their pleasures--indeed, be a breath of fresh air given what passes for story, dialogue, drama in today's fare. Such films would even seem to have other attractions to go by, for example, how popular a choice the "1950s Super Panavision 70" style seems to be in generative AI-made trailers for nonexistent movies, with the muted colors and film grain of the visuals, the Mid-Century Modern "Airstream Futuropolis" aesthetic, the soft-featured beauty and old-fashioned feminine glamour of yesteryear's leading ladies, implying that some would be drawn to the look of older movies as well. All as, I would like to add, for all the right-wing mockery of the delicacy of woke youth, I doubt so very many young people would really find the less "diverse" cast or the old-fashioned portrayal of "gender roles" really so unbearable to their sensibilities as they have it.
Still, on the whole this would seem to be at best a matter of cult rather than really general audience interest, with the disadvantages of older film in competing for the public's attention seeming to me more significant where these demographics as a whole are concerned, not least because of the organization of our home entertainment options. Even when using a streaming service older people remain more used to doing what they did before streaming's availability, picking a channel and leaving it on, especially when they weren't in a mood to really sit down and take something in properly--the young to choosing particular movies or shows from the selection of "Recommendations" the service presents them, with those choices leading to subsequent offerings along the lines of what they already watched, making them less likely to "discover" things unlike what they have already seen. The result is that despite a lot of fuss about shows from the '00s, for example, finding purchase with streaming viewers, on the whole old TV is a much smaller part of people's casual viewing than it used to be, with the same going for old movies, all as the incentive of the young to seek out old movies seems to have gone in the opposite direction of their now unprecedentedly easy access to them. The day of popular, serious, interest in film as an art form is far, far behind us, as the young may be expected to not find older films very watchable at all given their habituation to certain forms of blockbuster spectacle--as well as faster pacing and "high concept" cinematography and editing that must leave the talkier, less action-packed, slower-paced, "low concept" film of yesteryear almost automatically off-putting. (Today even the Hallmark Channel's feather-light romantic comedies have the close takes and short shot lengths of an action movie, as you will notice observing how when the leads are having a conversation the film cuts from one to the other in line with whoever is speaking or reacting and on whom they accordingly want us to focus--two faces rarely visible together in a single frame.) It doesn't help that older films, especially those from before the late 1960s, may seem rather sanitized to addicts of "edgy" content. The old enthusiasm for period pieces would not seem to help with a generation that strongly prefers tales of the here and now, nor the fact that a movie made in the era of Gone with the Wind but set in the then present day is effectively a period piece to them, outside their frame of reference. (What would they make of, for example, His Girl Friday?) Indeed, it may be significant that those faux 1950s Super Panavision 70 trailers are almost invariably versions of more contemporary hits or upcoming releases (like The Fantastic Four) rather than imaginings of films that might actually have been made in the '50s.
Altogether, even for a comparative newcomer open to the pleasures of classic film it would probably take a really exceptional interest--extending to a readiness to do some cultural work--to spend much time with such movies, the more in as they have so many more alternatives of kinds to which they are accustomed being pressed upon them at all times. Indeed, considering their frame of reference I am reminded of that line in the film version of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about that "hot new director" Vincent Lepak's thinking "that cinema began with Quentin Tarantino." All these years later, so does it go with a great many younger people, many of them still unborn when Reservoir Dogs premiered, precisely because the whole older world of cinema is terra incognita to them.
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