Why Does Hollywood Do Such a Bad Job of Depicting Work?

It seems that most people seeing the kind of work they do, or have done, depicted in a movie are usually not impressed by the depiction, and often annoyed by the disparity between their lived experience, and what they see on the screen. Indeed, it is not infrequently the case that they are very annoyed by what they see.

It may well be that the movie wasn't terribly serious stuff. Usually it isn't. Still, it seems there is something to be said about why Hollywood so consistently gets it so wrong, perhaps the more in as pretentious Hollywood types and the press hacks who provide them with their publicity make such a big deal about the immense and painstaking "research" that writers, directors, actors, supposedly do as part of their creative work.

As it happens it isn't terribly hard to come up with explanations for that--not least the fact that with extremely rare exceptions Hollywood has no interest whatsoever in work as such, let alone depicting it realistically. We live in an age of high concept, after all, where images matter more than story, while even in a more story-oriented era of cinematic history what was the point of presenting us with a lawyer, doctor, cop or anything else of the kind? Often this was simply a matter of box-ticking ("I've written a character, now I have to give them a job, and I just don't know that many of them. I know! They'll be a lawyer/doctor/police officer"), with whatever occupational details they present just there to provide a backdrop on which to hang their jokes, melodramatics, spectacle, all as even when they take any interest in the professional doings of their characters they usually just present us with some kind of formulaic narrative based on the mythology, or fantasy, of what these people do, not its actuality.

That is as far as the ambitions of the Hollywood folk go, and with it their research--and as far as they are likely to think it needs to go because what they are out to do is not realistically depict some form of labor, but provide something immediately accessible and entertaining to a general audience, which the work that goes into most jobs generally isn't. Much of the activity of works happens in, is experienced in, the human brain, and how do you show that in a visual, dramatic medium, even when there is a physical task that would register visually? (Thus do depictions of people with jobs who do brain-work tend to emphasize not their actually working but their standing at the front of a room presenting the results of their work to people around a conference table--the architect, doing one of the few non-lawyer-doctor-police jobs of which Hollywood's hacks have heard, shown not designing a building but making that presentation to that tableful of people where they explain their "vision.") Today much of our work goes on within bureaucracies, private and public--but even as it does its large part in keeping the gears of everyday life turning bureaucracy may lend itself especially poorly to the kind of dramatization that a wide audience would find engaging (bureaucracy a "dead space of the imagination" as David Graeber had it). And so on and so forth. Besides, the thinking seems to go, most of the audience wouldn't know the difference anyway, and still less of it would care even if it did.

Still, it can seem that there is something amiss in just how extreme the disconnect is between what we see on the screen and all the rest of life. One would think that surely once in a while somebody, knowing something about a particular kind of work, could find some drama or humor or something in it that could be put on the screen in a way that could reach an audience while enlightening it (or at least, not heaping insult upon its intelligence with both their tiny hands)? Surely even when they are not foregrounding the work their characters they could occasionally give us a touch of reality, if only for the sake of the verisimilitude with which to grip us so that we attend that much more closely to what they really want to show us? Alas, that's a lot more than Hollywood usually gives us--with this testimony to just what a claustrophobically narrow thing its thought-world seems to be when we go by the range of its products, and how remote it all is from the lives of almost all of the country, and indeed humanity. Alas, we all know the answer that pointing that out gets from the idiots: Relax, it's only a movie! And so we don't even get that little as the writers continue to pile on the generic crapola instead, through their extreme incuriosity and laziness hastening the day when generative AI will finally do them out of a job and nobody know the difference between what Hollywood made before and what it made after because, if it is indeed the case that all these computer intelligences do is regurgitate the material of other people's scripts, that is all that the humans who preceded them in the business had been doing anyway for a very long time.