Ruling-Class Artists on Strike: A Few More Thoughts

Recently reflecting on the Hollywood double-strike of 2023 it seemed to me there was something to be said of the irony of the writers and actors whose careers had been given over to churning out right-wing economic propaganda protesting the havoc wrought on them by the forces for which they had propagandized so breathlessly for so long. Filling our theaters and home theaters with the clash of foils and the musical thunder of grand pianos as they depicted the stately homes of the wealthy and "refined," elevating the language in the script when those who had money and position spoke in a fashion that could not but seem ridiculous to anyone who paid attention to the em dash substitution-filled stupidities of their real-life counterparts, made so much reference to "Harvard" one would think it was 1635 and no other university yet founded in the country, one strives in vain to think of a cliché of elitism and snobbery they have not embraced and endorsed and promoted a million times over as they wrapped up their economic heroes (Entrepreneurs! Billionaires! "Geniuses" from "Tech" and from Wall Street and the tippity-top of the tippity-top professions!) in every moronic piece of shorthand impressive to the feeble conventional mind, while offering little but insult to the "99 percent," screaming in their faces that they were inferior to the rich who were so much "smarter" than they, and so much "better" than they (the shorthand for intelligence in the minds of the stupid not at all coincidentally or innocently also the shorthand for wealth), all as they had no one but themselves to blame for the wretchedness of their own lot (which they did everything possible to make them feel was indeed wretched as they made affluence if not wealth seem like the human norm), with what passed for progressive their telling them that if they thought otherwise that was just "entitlement" as they burned incense to mammon in his present-day neoliberal form. People of conventional views use words like "aspirational" to describe this garbage (the more in as they round out the right-wing package with their endless extolling of the spirit of Horatio Alger and the Edisonade tales, giving the impression of a world awash in "self-made men" who have gone from rags to riches as they tell you "You can do it too!"), but a far more accurate characterization would be "class warfare from above" on the cultural and intellectual front, the more insidious because so few notice that it is propaganda (because, after all, it's only propaganda when the left does it, and whine as some might about Hollywood, when it came to this matter there weren't many lefties here!).

Of course, even in this irony-addicted age few if any of those with any platform to speak of confessed to seeing any irony in the spectacle of the destruction of those who made Hollywood run being ruined by the neoliberalism they so vehemently propagandized for--either because they were sympathetic to those who work in Hollywood as they struck to defend their rights and interests as workers and held that to be the important thing, or frankly because they didn't have much sympathy for people in those occupational categories at whom a great many are prone to scream "GET A JOB! GET A REAL JOB!"--and, as their kind typically do, approved those same economic forces themselves, and considered the "collateral damage" of their workings who protest "whiners" undeserving of consideration. But some of them must have noticed the irony nonetheless, the more in as at the time what portions of the media attend to such realities at all paid a more than usual amount of attention to those dwelling in the proverbial "Slums of Beverly Hills."

Considering these it wasn't as if "everyone" didn't already know that not everyone in Hollywood lived like "a movie star." The image of the aspiring actor or writer working tables or driving a cab as they wait for their "big break," and maybe skipping meals as they do so, is well-known. But the images can also be obfuscating. Because people look at it and think, well, those are people trying to make it, the "wannabes" who are probably mostly "neverwillbes" frankly because they don't have talent--claims to which, like "superior intelligence," people of conventional mind refuse to believe in in the absence of "a signal success," as they are (complacently, callously, self-servingly) sure that those who "deserve" to make it will make it, after which everything is gravy--as those who have tried to tell them it just ain't so make little impression. (I certainly doubt that Chris Pine's many references to the "blue-collar acting family" for whom Hollywood is "like a steel town" did much there--the clumsiness of his diction and imagery, perhaps not entirely his fault in a country where discussion of labor and class are so taboo, not helping.) But amid the strike we saw a good deal about just how badly off many of those we would think of as having "made it" actually were after "making it," with Kimiko Glenn showing just how little one gets from having been in forty-four episodes of one of Netflix's biggest all-time hit shows, or, as Daniel Bessner showed in his piece in Harper's, even creating a hit show. And those supposed to be Living the Dream just working stiffs like the rest of us, millions of people knowing their faces but unable to make rent as the old equation between celebrity and escape from the wretchednesses of being a nobody that is inseparable from the desire to be a celebrity loses all meaning.

Of course, the public being what it is, and the discourse of the epoch being what it is, a single expression of the truth coming atop a thousand fresh repetitions of the lie that the conventional wisdom usually is, which is promptly buried by a thousand fresher repetitions of the lie, tends not to make a great impression on many minds. But perhaps the attention to the bigger picture, for all its limitations, made an impression on the very impressionable people that artists, in Hollywood just like everywhere else, happen to be. Only time will tell about that.

If generative AI doesn't put them all out of work first.