Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Remembering Paramilitary Action-Adventure: A History
What Ever Happened to the NFL's CTE Controversy?
Remember when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars? Of course you do.
Remember what led up to that infamous confrontation? Probably not, the origins of all that lost in the expressions of shock, the insistence of many that the event must have been staged, the criticism of Smith and of Rock and of the critics of Smith and Rock, the speculations about the motives lying behind it all and what it would mean for the persons involved and much, much else amid lurid talk of cuckoldry and many, many jokes of greatly varying wit and taste that made it no less stupid an affair than any of our other Internet-galvanizing tempests in a teacup. As it happened those origins lay in the #OscarsSoWhite protest against what some saw as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' shortchanging African-Americans in its nominations for its annual awards, which protest Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith supported, and wanted Chris Rock to also support by declining the job of hosting the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony--which Rock refused to do, apparently beginning the feud between them. Where all this was concerned it was relevant that Smith seems to have expected a nomination for playing Dr. Bennet Omalu in the docudrama Concussion about Dr. Omalu's discovery of the prevalence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in former players of the National Football League (NFL).
Remember that whole controversy? Probably not, because unlike such stupidities as Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, which the media milked to the last drop, said media was content to let that controversy be swept under the rug. After all, if the Smith-Rock slap was a piece of idiocy all the way down the line in this case there was a real threat to a colossal vested interest given what its becoming widely known that CTE is the price of a shot at gridiron glory potentially meant to the NFL, and professional football more broadly. Single football teams are valued at as much as $12 billion these days, the League as a whole hundreds of billions, with that far from the limit of the whole football-industrial complex. There is, for example, the multi-billion dollar business that is college football. There is the involvement of the broader media-industrial complex with it, the airing of football games being a big earner for them--indeed, a lifeline for the big but declining "legacy TV" business for which football still supplies the great majority of the most-viewed events of the year. Those invested in the vast enterprise do not allow such things as health concerns to interfere with them easily--all as, as is so often the case, Big Business was entirely able and willing to enlist the culture warriors on its side. After all, this wasn't just business, it was football! An American tradition, a major part of the fabric of life of much of the country--the real, heartland, Southern-Midwestern, small town America that the rest of the country only sees in reruns of Friday Night Lights--where playing on a team is a rite of passage and "maker of men," such that every grifting jackass running for office goes on and on about his what-in-the-name-of-high-school-football days where he gave a hundred and ten percent even if he never so much as tried out for the team. Were they going to let a bunch of Blue State coastal elitists sniveling about safety interfere with that? Hell no. Oh, hell no.
That combo of Big Business and the culture warriors proved plenty to thwart redress of a potentially apocalyptic climate-energy crisis (not least, by making adoration of fossil fuels incumbent on "real" Americans, for some reason) for decades. It was certainly more than a match for concern about some dudes getting head trauma, especially with the NFL promising to provide better protective gear, as one cannot help but notice seeing the aggressive promotion of the current football season, even if one isn't a fan of the sport (the publicity blitz stepped up this year) as the mainstream media scarcely breathed a word about a matter that so roiled up the business and the country a decade ago. Indeed, the concern was squashed so totally that this didn't even make very many parents leerier of their kids being on high school teams. Yes, somewhat fewer young people do play these days than, say, twenty years ago, but that has more to do with fewer parents having the money, or time, to enable their kids' participation in athletic programs (they are having a harder time even keeping food on the table), all as, frankly, there are a lot of kids you can't get away from their video games. But that still leaves some one million young men in grades nine to twelve playing football, scarcely less than was the case before (with, I might add, any grudging pursuit of the limited number of college football scholarships not to be overestimated as a factor). And so the sport and its place in American life endure--and Will Smith's slapping Chris Rock may well be the most significant legacy of a controversy which is behind us even as the problem that raised the controversy in the first place also endures--per the norm in our times.
Remember what led up to that infamous confrontation? Probably not, the origins of all that lost in the expressions of shock, the insistence of many that the event must have been staged, the criticism of Smith and of Rock and of the critics of Smith and Rock, the speculations about the motives lying behind it all and what it would mean for the persons involved and much, much else amid lurid talk of cuckoldry and many, many jokes of greatly varying wit and taste that made it no less stupid an affair than any of our other Internet-galvanizing tempests in a teacup. As it happened those origins lay in the #OscarsSoWhite protest against what some saw as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' shortchanging African-Americans in its nominations for its annual awards, which protest Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith supported, and wanted Chris Rock to also support by declining the job of hosting the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony--which Rock refused to do, apparently beginning the feud between them. Where all this was concerned it was relevant that Smith seems to have expected a nomination for playing Dr. Bennet Omalu in the docudrama Concussion about Dr. Omalu's discovery of the prevalence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in former players of the National Football League (NFL).
Remember that whole controversy? Probably not, because unlike such stupidities as Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, which the media milked to the last drop, said media was content to let that controversy be swept under the rug. After all, if the Smith-Rock slap was a piece of idiocy all the way down the line in this case there was a real threat to a colossal vested interest given what its becoming widely known that CTE is the price of a shot at gridiron glory potentially meant to the NFL, and professional football more broadly. Single football teams are valued at as much as $12 billion these days, the League as a whole hundreds of billions, with that far from the limit of the whole football-industrial complex. There is, for example, the multi-billion dollar business that is college football. There is the involvement of the broader media-industrial complex with it, the airing of football games being a big earner for them--indeed, a lifeline for the big but declining "legacy TV" business for which football still supplies the great majority of the most-viewed events of the year. Those invested in the vast enterprise do not allow such things as health concerns to interfere with them easily--all as, as is so often the case, Big Business was entirely able and willing to enlist the culture warriors on its side. After all, this wasn't just business, it was football! An American tradition, a major part of the fabric of life of much of the country--the real, heartland, Southern-Midwestern, small town America that the rest of the country only sees in reruns of Friday Night Lights--where playing on a team is a rite of passage and "maker of men," such that every grifting jackass running for office goes on and on about his what-in-the-name-of-high-school-football days where he gave a hundred and ten percent even if he never so much as tried out for the team. Were they going to let a bunch of Blue State coastal elitists sniveling about safety interfere with that? Hell no. Oh, hell no.
Cherry 2000's 2017: Some Thoughts
On its much-delayed release the film Cherry 2000 was not a commercial success, and rather predictably so--the backers, unsure of how to market a film they had spent a then very respectable $10 million to make, letting it sit on the shelf for over two years before dumping it in theaters with so little fanfare that the movie's own star Melanie Griffith herself apparently didn't know it had ever come out. Still, after that one didn't have to go out of one's way to find it on cable, where it seemed to have got a lot of play (helped perhaps by Griffith's career hitting its peak that very year with her Oscar-nominated turn as Tess McGill in Working Girl).
Ubiquitous as the film became attitudes toward the film don't seem to have warmed very much. Its Rotten Tomatoes score today stands at 42 percent with audiences--and an even worse 36 percent with critics. Still, I think a case can be made for the film having acquired a cult following, in part because even if most of it plays like just another post-Mad Max adventure tale about people driving around a desert in the wake of some vaguely sketched civilizational collapse it had the benefit of quirkiness. As it happens the reason why the protagonist of the film is out in the desert is that in the then far future year of 2017 he had a robot wife with whom he was very happy until an accident involving a washing machine caused her to short-circuit. Wanting her repaired he finds to his dismay that her particular model (the titular "Cherry 2000") is no longer manufactured, and that the only replacement parts he can get are stored outside the Zone where something like modern middle-class life goes on in a warehouse in what used to be Las Vegas in the wasteland beyond, and as a matter of practical necessity enlists a "Tracker" to help him reach it. That is the point where the film skews toward the Mad Max-ish stuff, but prior to that we see that robots and the desolation are not the only changes in the world, the relations between men and women having become very acrimonious indeed--as shown in one of the film's most commented-upon scenes, the hero's being dragged to a single's bar by his friends, which shows us what seeking non-robot "companionship" looks like. Here we see that in this era a pickup in such places is something one completes with the help of lawyers as they draw up a contract specifying exactly what may and may not be done on the date to follow (complete with all the melodramatic shouting and threatening that audiences expect of the movie-and-TV version of the legal profession's work).
Looking at such bits I can imagine that if the film was thought to be tough to market in 1987 it would have been tougher still to market in the actual 2017, the year that the #MeToo hashtag took the web and the culture by storm, and of a considerable hysteria against sex robots in spite of the fact that they didn't actually exist. Indeed, a few years on the Guardian, inconsistent and tepid on the left's traditional concerns regarding the domestic and international economic and political order, but utterly fire-breathing on gender, remarked the "hyperbole" of the period when observing that not only had such robots not materialized then but might never do so--while of course ignoring just how much that very newspaper participated in said hyperbole as it ran piece after piece denouncing sex robots, and the men who would want them (heterosexual male interest, of course, the primary thing agitating its writers about the matter). Still, if it would seem that there is much in the movie that adherents of "woke" gender politics would find completely unacceptable, the film still hewed to a pointedly feminist view in the protagonist ultimately giving up his robot to be with a flesh-and-blood woman instead, with this the more pointed still because as a Tracker Edith Johnson (make of her last name what you will) was the opposite of the fantasy of ultra-feminine domesticity that Cherry represented. The politics are clearer still when one contrasts the story's course of events with that in another human-robot love-themed comedy from the prior year, Making Mr. Right, where the female protagonist of the film does indeed find happiness with a male robot by film's end.
It is, of course, not fashionable or politic these days to point out any way in which the prevailing mores may be to the disadvantage of men (save in a "patriarchy is bad for men too!" way), but one can see a double standard there--namely that the prevailing opinion has as of late been prone to judge women much less harshly than men for flouting societal conventions in this area of life, with what one sees in matters such as involvement with a significantly younger "partner" extending to ignoring the Space Pope's injunction against seeking "robotic companionship." It appears reasonable to see this as connected with another double standard, namely the acceptability of devaluing members of one sex against the other--with this going so far as to make of the view that where women are concerned men are replaceable and altogether dispensable an uncriticized commonplace. Thus is the woman who chooses to be without a man not merely respected as having made a valid choice, but often praised for her independence and "empowering" decision, while even those quick to celebrate female singleness, and dismiss in tones of contempt any reference to male need see the single (heterosexual) man who elects to be so as suspect--as in some significant way flawed or failed, dismissing him as misogynistic reactionary, or at least someone who "never grew up." Thus is it also the case that the woman who would prefer to be with a man but finds the dating market frustrating is permitted to blame men for failing to live up to her standards ("All the good ones are taken!"), but men required to blame only themselves when similarly frustrated, and blamed by society at large even when they aren't frustrated, just single (all as pointing out the mathematical absurdity of blaming men for their singleness when so many women just aren't interested in a relationship with anyone is specifically forbidden).
Of course, when so much of what is obvious--and undeniable--is so unsayable, how can those concerned about these problems hope to get anywhere with regard to men and women learning to get on in a world very different from that of their great-grandparents? The plain and simple answer is that the thunderously promoted marriage of postmodernism and status politics has never been about addressing such problems, but rather distraction from the consideration of life's problems, and for the well-positioned, a tool for cynically getting ahead in the scramble of the petty bourgeois after "success" that defines their lives. Where all that is concerned it has certainly accomplished its end.
Ubiquitous as the film became attitudes toward the film don't seem to have warmed very much. Its Rotten Tomatoes score today stands at 42 percent with audiences--and an even worse 36 percent with critics. Still, I think a case can be made for the film having acquired a cult following, in part because even if most of it plays like just another post-Mad Max adventure tale about people driving around a desert in the wake of some vaguely sketched civilizational collapse it had the benefit of quirkiness. As it happens the reason why the protagonist of the film is out in the desert is that in the then far future year of 2017 he had a robot wife with whom he was very happy until an accident involving a washing machine caused her to short-circuit. Wanting her repaired he finds to his dismay that her particular model (the titular "Cherry 2000") is no longer manufactured, and that the only replacement parts he can get are stored outside the Zone where something like modern middle-class life goes on in a warehouse in what used to be Las Vegas in the wasteland beyond, and as a matter of practical necessity enlists a "Tracker" to help him reach it. That is the point where the film skews toward the Mad Max-ish stuff, but prior to that we see that robots and the desolation are not the only changes in the world, the relations between men and women having become very acrimonious indeed--as shown in one of the film's most commented-upon scenes, the hero's being dragged to a single's bar by his friends, which shows us what seeking non-robot "companionship" looks like. Here we see that in this era a pickup in such places is something one completes with the help of lawyers as they draw up a contract specifying exactly what may and may not be done on the date to follow (complete with all the melodramatic shouting and threatening that audiences expect of the movie-and-TV version of the legal profession's work).
Looking at such bits I can imagine that if the film was thought to be tough to market in 1987 it would have been tougher still to market in the actual 2017, the year that the #MeToo hashtag took the web and the culture by storm, and of a considerable hysteria against sex robots in spite of the fact that they didn't actually exist. Indeed, a few years on the Guardian, inconsistent and tepid on the left's traditional concerns regarding the domestic and international economic and political order, but utterly fire-breathing on gender, remarked the "hyperbole" of the period when observing that not only had such robots not materialized then but might never do so--while of course ignoring just how much that very newspaper participated in said hyperbole as it ran piece after piece denouncing sex robots, and the men who would want them (heterosexual male interest, of course, the primary thing agitating its writers about the matter). Still, if it would seem that there is much in the movie that adherents of "woke" gender politics would find completely unacceptable, the film still hewed to a pointedly feminist view in the protagonist ultimately giving up his robot to be with a flesh-and-blood woman instead, with this the more pointed still because as a Tracker Edith Johnson (make of her last name what you will) was the opposite of the fantasy of ultra-feminine domesticity that Cherry represented. The politics are clearer still when one contrasts the story's course of events with that in another human-robot love-themed comedy from the prior year, Making Mr. Right, where the female protagonist of the film does indeed find happiness with a male robot by film's end.
It is, of course, not fashionable or politic these days to point out any way in which the prevailing mores may be to the disadvantage of men (save in a "patriarchy is bad for men too!" way), but one can see a double standard there--namely that the prevailing opinion has as of late been prone to judge women much less harshly than men for flouting societal conventions in this area of life, with what one sees in matters such as involvement with a significantly younger "partner" extending to ignoring the Space Pope's injunction against seeking "robotic companionship." It appears reasonable to see this as connected with another double standard, namely the acceptability of devaluing members of one sex against the other--with this going so far as to make of the view that where women are concerned men are replaceable and altogether dispensable an uncriticized commonplace. Thus is the woman who chooses to be without a man not merely respected as having made a valid choice, but often praised for her independence and "empowering" decision, while even those quick to celebrate female singleness, and dismiss in tones of contempt any reference to male need see the single (heterosexual) man who elects to be so as suspect--as in some significant way flawed or failed, dismissing him as misogynistic reactionary, or at least someone who "never grew up." Thus is it also the case that the woman who would prefer to be with a man but finds the dating market frustrating is permitted to blame men for failing to live up to her standards ("All the good ones are taken!"), but men required to blame only themselves when similarly frustrated, and blamed by society at large even when they aren't frustrated, just single (all as pointing out the mathematical absurdity of blaming men for their singleness when so many women just aren't interested in a relationship with anyone is specifically forbidden).
Of course, when so much of what is obvious--and undeniable--is so unsayable, how can those concerned about these problems hope to get anywhere with regard to men and women learning to get on in a world very different from that of their great-grandparents? The plain and simple answer is that the thunderously promoted marriage of postmodernism and status politics has never been about addressing such problems, but rather distraction from the consideration of life's problems, and for the well-positioned, a tool for cynically getting ahead in the scramble of the petty bourgeois after "success" that defines their lives. Where all that is concerned it has certainly accomplished its end.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
American Gladiators: The Original and the Remake(s): Notes
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, punchy, 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 the show 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.
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, punchy, 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 the show 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.
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 seen again in 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 seen again in 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 episode the Saving Private Ryan of the series. Then, after the Amazons' ultimate victory over their foe, the survivors look 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 episode the Saving Private Ryan of the series. Then, after the Amazons' ultimate victory over their foe, the survivors look 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
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.
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