Robert Ludlum and the Election of 1988

Recently looking at Robert Ludlum's Trevayne earlier this year I read with a fair bit of interest the introduction to the 1988 edition, in which he remarked the writing of the older book--the product of the Watergate years and the wide public outrage over the revelations of arrogance, criminality and outright contempt for democracy in high places (which, I find it necessary to always repeat, went far beyond the planting of a few bugs to which most people seem to reduce the whole affair).

Of course, that more political Ludlum (whom we see in such books as The Matlock Paper and The Gemini Contenders, and especially Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript) soon gave way to the epic scale international chase-cum-shoot 'em up Ludlum, with The Holcroft Covenant a turning point in that direction, and the old political Ludlum all but vanished from view by the time of the book for which he has been best known for decades, The Bourne Identity (the political premise of which is slight and conventional, an excuse for Jason Bourne to run about getting into fights and shootouts). Afterward Ludlum did sometimes give a political theme more attention (most notably in The Aquitaine Progression), but all the same, his trajectory was set.

Still, in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal the political element was topical again, sufficiently so that it got explicit mention here-- as "a series of events so ludicrous they would have been a barrel of laughs but for their obscenity." The presidential election of 1988 only added to his ire—this, so far as he concerned, the occasion of "two of the most disgraceful, debasing, inept, disingenuous and insulting presidential campaigns that living admirers of our system can recall," serving up "packaged" candidates speaking "'sound bite' zingers" and elevating "image . . . over issues," down to "presidential debates that were neither presidential nor debates but canned Pavlovian 'responses' more often than not having little or nothing to do with the questions."

Ludlum refrains from naming the candidates in question, but anyone familiar with the election of 1988 knows full well that he is talking about George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, the two singularly unexciting candidates their respective parties intended to run in defiance of the mood of growing public dissatisfaction with, and anxiety about, where America stood in the twilight of the Reagan administration, when declinist fears made of Paul Kennedy's academic treatise on the rise and fall of great powers a 34-week New York Times hardcover bestseller--and the two parties, per usual, contemptuously dismissed those worries and the people who held them in favor of offering up more of the same. (Neoliberalism yesterday, neoliberalism today, neoliberalism tomorrow, neoliberalism forever! was and remains their slogan.) Indeed, reading Ludlum's more particular expressions of dislike I suspect that Ludlum was not impressed with the unintentional gag comedy of Michael Dukakis riding around in an Abrams tank, the dog-whistle Willie Horton ads, or the "Big Society"-ish drivel about a "thousand points of light."

I regard that distaste as very much to Ludlum's credit.

But as anyone looking back on all that from 2022 can only think when reading Ludlum's remarks, he hadn't seen anything yet. And I can only wonder what the Ludlum of the '70s would be writing today if he were still around, and still permitted to publish the kind of fiction he did back then by the self-appointed arbiters of American letters on Park Avenue--which, of course, he probably wouldn't be. Instead, were he still alive, and physically and mentally up to the rigors of finishing a novel, what we would probably be getting would be more Jason Bourne sequels cranked out by others under his name—just like we are getting now.

Remembering George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"

In recently turning my attention to Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare I found my thoughts returning to Orwell's counterblast at Tolstoy, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," which ran in Polemic back in 1947.

I remember regarding the piece with distaste because of its biographical-psychological approach--grubbing about in the life of the author, digging up dirt (Orwell does not hesitate to reference Tolstoy's sex life), and using that dirt to dismiss his opinions. In criticizing Orwell for all this I will not go so far as to say that seedy, pathetic motives are never relevant to understanding the work of a writer, even a great one, but in my experience, at least, such motives are less often relevant than some people seem to think, and that we see the approach as much as we do is more often a testament to sheer nastiness rather than its interpretive value--while the nastiness is in this case undeniable. In this particular piece Orwell held that Shakespeare's King Lear (to which Tolstoy devoted most of his attention), far from being so unaffecting as Tolstoy claims the play to be, hit too close to home for Tolstoy, whose later years struck Orwell as being too much like Lear's for that play to be bearable to him, and indeed, excite more than ordinary dislike for its author.

Yet there was another, significant aspect to Orwell's criticism of Lear--namely that Tolstoy was a sort of figure about which Orwell had become exceedingly cynical, namely a person who wanted to change the world for the better. Indeed, one can see in Orwell's sneers a pack of right-wing clichés directed against the type--that the person in question does not want "to work an improvement in earthly life" but "to bring it an end and put something different in its place"; that the alleged opponent of oppression is really a tyrant himself, and, if they are at all serious about their purported abjuring of violence, given to an even more insidious moral manipulation that is more important than anything else they are or aspire to do, with Orwell specifically attacking pacifism and anarchism (to both of which the later Tolstoy subscribed in his idiosyncratic fashion) as ideologies that "encourage this habit of mind." Besides making him cynical about Tolstoy Orwell saw this, too, playing its part in Orwell's hatred of Shakespeare, who was all too this-worldly a figure for such. And if anything all this seemed affirmed for me by the fact that the darker, more pessimistic, more reactionary aspects of Tolstoy's thought, so plainly evident in a work like War and Peace, and distilled so forcefully by a critic like Isaiah Berlin who finds so much common ground between Orwell and that "apostle of darkness" Joseph de Maistre (in his classic, "The Hedgehog and The Fox"), form no part of Orwell's argument with Tolstoy.

Indeed, it all seems very reflective of the fact that Orwell was well into that frame of mind that, in spite of the socialist he had been and which he (is supposed to have) remained, saw him produce a work that the right so easily claimed as, as Isaac Deutscher put it, "an ideological super-weapon of the Cold War," and so identified Orwell not with the struggle for a better world to which a younger Orwell had devoted himself, but the conservative's condemnation of such struggle to the point that Orwell's very name is synonymous with dystopia.

It does not even seem inconceivable that, in a moment when anti-Communism in many minds was conflated with anti-Russian sentiment generally, Tolstoy's nationality itself figured into Orwell's reaction, and Tolstoy's standing suffered with it (in spite of Tolstoy's having been as disdainful of Marx as he was any other major thinker of the nineteenth century, as he made clear in the very essay for which Orwell took him to task).

Certainly that is what happening now in this era of "New" Cold War, which is seeing the cancel-minded set their sights on Tolstoy.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe in China

As China's economy has burgeoned, so have the revenues of its movie theaters. On average the Chinese remain poorer than their American counterparts (with a per capita GDP of $10,000, as against $63,000 for the U.S., in 2020). Still, at $9 billion in 2019 the gross of the Chinese "box office" was not so far behind its $11-$12 billion American counterpart in that last "normal" year for the movies, and amid the pandemic has actually outperformed America's here (in 2021 selling $7 billion worth of tickets, versus the under $5 billion North America managed), making China, for now, the world's biggest film market.

Of course, long before it got to this point the Chinese box office was too big for Hollywood to ignore, and getting a piece of that action has driven a great deal of Hollywood's decision-making, to the point that a number of big-budget Hollywood features would likely not have been made at all without the expectation that they would appeal to Chinese filmgoers (like Pacific Rim: Uprising or Warcraft). A good many more films saw creative choices intended to add to their appeal or interest in that specific market (like the casting of Chinese star Angelababy in Independence Day: Resurgence).

In substantial part because the people who run Hollywood are profoundly ignorant not only of Chinese culture, but even the strengths and weaknesses of their own product, these efforts have often been spectacularly unsuccessful. (Disney, for example, apparently in denial over the extent to which the Star Wars franchise is living off of nostalgia, failed miserably to interest the Chinese public--which has no nostalgia for Star Wars, having been in a very different place way back in 1977--in that franchise. The same company's effort to sell its live-action remake of Mulan was similarly ill-conceived--that movie, like Crazy Rich Asians, made with American audiences and concerns, not Chinese audiences and concerns, in mind, and simple-mindedly thought they would translate automatically and fully.)

Still, if Hollywood's failures in China have been as colossal as they were predictable, it has also had successes. The Fast and Furious franchise has been very big indeed in China. And Marvel has also done very well. So far as I can tell, of the 23 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies released between 2008 and 2019, 21 were released in China (all but Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger back in 2011). Collectively they made $3 billion, most of that in the most recent years as Marvel's earnings, growing along with those of the Chinese box office generally, exploded. In 2019 Avengers: Endgame took in over $600 million by itself (a sum few movies achieve from even their global releases)--while Spider-Man: Far From Home and Captain Marvel took in another $350 million or so, with the result that in that one year alone Marvel sold nearly a billion dollars' worth of tickets, a rough fifth of the $5 billion the three blockbusters took in globally that year.

As all this demonstrates, China was at that point a hugely important market for the brand, and showed every promise of becoming still more lucrative. However, Marvel's winning streak in China ended with "Phase 3" of the MCU. Phase 4, which launched with Black Widow, has consistently struck out, with not a single one of its movies landing a release in that country. To date this comes to five first-rate blockbusters (besides Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and now it seems, also Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) which could have picked up at least another half billion, and perhaps much more. Bad enough for the company ordinarily, it was worse still amid the pandemic, with Hollywood not only needing every penny it could get, but China relatively close to normal because of its comparative success in keeping the spread of the disease in check. And now one might wonder if Marvel is not out of China for a good long time.

Of course, the last few months offer some reassurance that Marvel can get along without China. In spite of not being release there Spider-Man: No Way Home made nearly $2 billion, while Doctor Strange is closing in on the $1 billion mark. Still, the diminution of the films' revenue by possibly hundreds of millions of dollars each is far from trivial, and in its way also ominous. It may be coincidence that Marvel just happened to produce a succession of projects particularly offensive to the sensibilities of Chinese authorities (the "anti-Communist" and "anti-Russian" Black Widow, the evocations of Victorian-Edwardian racism in the Fu Manchu-inspired Shang Chi, the public criticism of the Chinese government by Eternals director Chloe Zhao, etc.), and later projects will not run into such obstacles, and Marvel and China will make up. However, it may also be that the Chinese authorities are raising the bar of political acceptability. (After all, Marvel's Iron Man 3, in spite of its having the Mandarin for a villain--in however modified a form--got not only a wide Chinese release but Chinese financial backing via DMG Entertainment.) Moreover, such a turn on the part of the Chinese authorities may not only be because their ever-bigger market gives them more leverage, or because they want to bolster their own film industry, but because the political winds inside the country are shifting in a more nationalistic direction (certainly to go by what we are seeing of China's own movies, with hits like Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea and The Battle at Lake Changjin). At the same time Hollywood may grow less hopeful of access to the Chinese market, and perhaps, especially in the wake of the success of Top Gun 2, find more nationalistic filmmaking more appealing financially as well in the circumstances. Running all too parallel to the disturbing and frightening course of international politics in recent years, and recent months, it is a reminder that frivolous as box office grosses and the like seem, they are far from being untouched by the hard politics of a very troubled world.

The American Box Office Returns to Normal?

Since the outbreak of the pandemic the box office has just not been the same, with the theaters shut during the period of lockdown, and then after reopening, seeing significantly lower attendance. The clearest indication of that disruption was the absence of the big hits that account so disproportionately for the theaters' income, with such releases being subject to long delays, and then when coming out (sometimes, while simultaneously made available to viewers at home at premium prices) taking in a lot less than they would have made in ordinary times. (Thus did No Time to Die put in the weakest showing for the James Bond series in American theaters since Licence to Kill flopped way back in 1989.)

However, after coming out last December Spider-Man made a record-crushing $800 million, while Batman in March pulled in just under $370 million, that first big movie of the summer season, the Dr. Strange sequel, has exceeded that performance, and Top Gun: Maverick scored $400 million in its first 18 days, with that movie's success followed up by a strong $140 million+ opening weekend for Jurassic World: Dominion.

Still, a glance back at past years dispels any illusion that all is well. Some quick calculations show that in the five years before the pandemic the box office averaged about $13.5 billion when the numbers are adjusted for inflation to equal current, early 2022, dollars.

However, almost halfway into the year, over one month into the critical summer season, the box office has scored just a little over $3 billion. This is a considerable improvement over what we saw in 2020 (when the take was a bit over $2 billion for the whole year) and 2021 (when it was under $5 billion for the annum), but still well under a quarter of the earnings for a normal year. What are we to make of that? I suppose one factor is that much of the public remains leerier of the theater than before on grounds of the never-ending pandemic. (The mainstream media, in line with its prejudices, gives an enormous platform to those outraged over anti-pandemic measures, and scoff at even those purely personal measures like vaccination and masks; but ignores or dismisses the part of the public that wanted a more vigorous public response, and in its absence feels itself sufficiently unsafe that it will make significant sacrifices to protect itself, with all that means for such little luxuries as taking in a movie now and then, such that we likely underestimate it.) Of course, Spider-Man was playing even as new cases of COVID surged toward the 800,000 per day we saw in January, but it seems relevant that the situation was not nearly so bad as that when the movie actually hit theaters, and began a run that was, per usual for Hollywood blockbusters, highly front-loaded (on December 17, 2021, the 7-day average was more like 125,000, not particularly bad by the standard of the prior months). And I dare say that had the infection rate in mid-December been as bad as it was to be a mere month later it would have put a significant dent in the figures.

More generally I would say that that element of caution, likely to spike when the pandemic gets particularly bad, along with the related problems of a diminished habit of going out generally as a result of recent experience; the shuttering of a good many theaters on what may prove a permanent basis and in many areas make a trip to the theater longer and less convenient; and the other troubles people have had since (like the inflation giving us $5 a gallon gas, and doubtless raising the always horrifying price of concession food to new highs), which may well be worsened if inflation combines with recession, as seems all too likely; will at the very least delay a complete recovery. Indeed, if the crunch really drags, with what it means for personal habits, and for the viability of theaters, it is far from implausible that movie going will not completely recover--that we will, for example, see Americans cut back their movie going to the levels long seen in places like Germany and Japan, Americans making one or two trips to the theater on average instead of four or five even in normal times--and in the process slashing ticket sales by two-thirds (turning that $13-$14 billion box office into a $4-5 billion box office, barring higher ticket prices, which would likely mean still fewer trips to the theater).

If that indeed proves to be the case I would suspect that, even more than is already the case, this will mean a raising of the bar in regard to what gets people into the theater--which, given the dynamics of Hollywood, will likely mean that much more emphasis on that handful of giant hits that can be sold as have-to-see-it-now-on-the-big-screen "events" as everything else gets kicked to the small screen.

Top Gun: Maverick--An Update

Extending the success of its spectacular Memorial Day weekend opening Top Gun: Maverick's gross has in the first 18 days of its North American release crossed the $400 million mark. As things stand the film has a good chance of not only reaching the half billion-dollar mark domestically, but even soaring past it, while doing about as well overseas as it is in the U.S. the movie, it has a real shot at becoming a member of the exclusive billion-dollar club--a feat all the more impressive given that this is not a Star Wars/Marvel-type franchise film, but an old-fashioned star-centered movie, and a grounded one at that compared with the giant sci-fi CGI-fests dominating the market, and that it will do all this without a release in the ever-more important China market too.

The political right, is, of course ecstatic about all this, claiming this as some victory of the conservative masses over the woke elites--more, I think, than has been the case with any movie since American Sniper way back in 2013. However, it has to be remembered that this was not some underdog of a movie coming from outside the System that fought its way past better-resourced Establishment competition to the audience, or even a passion project by some "maverick" insider staking all on a personal vision in the face of the Suits' opposition, but an extremely big-budget, high-profile Big Five Hollywood studio (Paramount) release that the backers have been trying to get made for the sake of pure and simple lucre for decades —with the entertainment press solidly in their corner, spreading positive buzz for years that it has now capped off with an extraordinary critical reaction. Where the original Top Gun, as would be expected from a summertime action film described even by the favorably disposed as a 2-hour Navy recruitment ad, was no critics' darling, the critics' rave reviews adding up to a 97 percent score for Top Gun 2 at Rotten Tomatoes, as against the 57 percent score the original has (which arguably says more about how the critics have changed than it does about the superiority of the second film to the original). Indeed, beyond making it clear that they were anything but hostile to the movie, it would be unbelievable if this massive support did not play a significant role in making what could have ended up another failed attempt to milk an old success for more of moviegoers' dollars into a record-breaking blockbuster.

The result is that, rather than some triumph over the woke the movie is a reminder of just what a limited thing wokeness has always been in American life, taking a back seat to a good many other priorities--and generally ending at the border, beyond which Hollywood can, in spite of all the gripes of the culture warriors, generally be counted upon to salute the flag and support the troops in that familiar bipartisan way (mainstream anti-militarism died sometime around Obama's election, neoconservatism firmly in the saddle ever since), with Hollywood looking even more ardent here than before, as the "Chinese angle" makes clear. Not so long ago there was quite the fuss over minor details of the film being altered to please Chinese opinion--specifically the reported removal of Japan and Taiwan patches from "Maverick" Mitchell's jacket. (Indeed, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly condemned the move.) However, the patches were reportedly to be seen in the film, any digital alteration dispensed with, along with the Chinese financial backing it had been enjoying at an earlier phase of the project, and the prospects for a Chinese release.

Does this mean that Hollywood, which has for so long valued the Chinese market, and in various ways successful and unsuccessful, pandered to it, is becoming less concerned with Chinese opinion? It would not be very surprising given how Hollywood has so often proven clumsy in pursuing an audience there--with every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie after Spider-Man: Far From Home getting frozen out by the relevant authorities, and many of those movies that have made it through the system gaining little traction--mainly because Hollywood's pandering came from a place of profound ignorance of the culture which it approached, and even the character of the product it made itself and was so eager to sell (its attempt to sell Star Wars to Chinese moviegoers falling flat, Crazy Rich Asians and Mulan underperforming, etc., etc.)--while others developments can seem still more ominous. Not the least of these is that, with international tensions ever in the ascendant, Hollywood may be less hopeful of political acceptability to the Chinese market, the authorities' stance toward which seems reflected in the way the country's domestic filmmaking seems ever more dominated by blatant jingoism (the Rambo-like Wolf Warrior and Operation Red Sea movies making Chinese film in the '10s seem like Hollywood in the '80s), an impression only reaffirmed by such hits as The Battle at Lake Chang-jin and its sequel, Water Gate Bridge.

All of this may sound innocuous--but the geopolitical shifts underlying such moves are no piece of entertainment industry fluff. Rather they are reflective of the world's life moving in a far more dangerous direction--with implications far more worrisome than a few lost box office dollars.

Francis Urquhart and the Truth About Respect

In the epigram at the start of Michael Dobbs' novel House of Cards the deeply cynical Francis Urquhart contemplates the epitaph "Respected By All Who Knew Him," and sneers at the "monumental whimper" he considers it to be. "Respect," he quips, is nothing next to fear--and indeed the most likely way to get it, for "When a man is afraid you will crush him, utterly destroy him, his respect will always follow."

In that unpleasant thought is an acknowledgment of the too little spoken truth about respect--that what we mean by it is not civility, but deference; and a regard for another's superior conscience, wisdom, judgment (on those rare occasions when people are prepared to acknowledge another as genuinely their superior here on an occasion when this really counts) far less likely to bring about deference than fear of utter destruction.

When we talk of respect, we are, even if we do not fully realize it (as most don't) thinking from inside of a world of force and fear, of domination and submission, of authority and hierarchy, and all the brutality and cowardice and degradation--and inevitably, stupidity--that are associated with them.

Remember that when you next speak of respect--and don't confuse the genuine esteem for a person of worth with this far more common, ugly, destructive stuff.

Netflix's House of Cards

Today the creation of vast amounts of big-budget, high-profile, "prestige" content by and for the premium streaming services is an established, familiar part of the scene, but a decade ago it was all just getting started--with Netflix's remake of the classic 1990 BBC miniseries House of Cards a milestone in that development.

I have to admit that I was one of those skeptical about the project--in part because I had seen and admired the original and am generally dubious about remakes, but also because I knew that this particular remake brought a whole train of problems with it, not least the transfer of the intrigue from one very different political system and political culture to another, while the intended expansion of a four hour miniseries (and at most, its two similarly compact sequels) into a multi-season show that ultimately ran for well over fifty hours seemed highly questionable.

Seeing the first season of the show (which is all I have seen of it to date) confirmed my suspicions. The translation of Francis' intrigues from British parliamentary politics to the American system was predictably awkward, and the extension of the compact original story into a sprawling soap opera was not an improvement. (Quite the contrary--one of the great improvements the miniseries made over Michael Dobbs' novel was to give a rather loose book a center around which to tighten up the material, and this was exactly what was kicked to the curb in reimagining it on this different scale.)

All of this cost the material the great bulk of its charge. Not the least of these was what it derived from the class dynamics of the original. The show was about "politics, not policy," but all the same, in his own person Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart was a perfect manifestation of what "FU" represented, the ultra-reactionary blue bloods who had, far from regarding 1688 as the "end of history," regarded 1688 as already progress gone too far; the kind of modernity and egalitarianism-hating people on whose behalf folks like Evelyn Waugh wrote, and were lauded for writing. (Indeed, as Urquhart boasts in his final confrontation with a monarch he despises in the sequel, To Play the King, "My family came south with James I. We were defenders of the English throne before your family was ever heard of.") Any attempt at a real American equivalent would, again, be flimsy, and the writers wisely went in the exact opposite direction with "Frank" Underwood--a move that had some potential here, but alas, the bitterness of a man born far from privilege clawing his way up to the top never seemed to figure much in Underwood's character, the man rarely ever seeming more than a vulgar opportunist.

The narrative's enlargement did mean more room for policy with the politics--but again this failed to amount to much, with this significantly reflected in the decision to make a vague educational reform the center of that policymaking in the first season. The fight with the teachers' unions felt anachronistic, the whole thing a much less "hot" topic than two decades earlier, while the writers themselves did not seem to understand it very well. Blaming the schools, and those who teach in them, for a lack of "competitiveness" has long been a cynical ploy for those diverting public attention from other more consequential factors in industrial decline (like a government preference for the priorities of the service sector over industrial policy)--as well as a handy cudgel for the "privatize everything" crowd. But the writers did not seem to have any perspective on that, out of their depth on this point as they are on so many others.

It may be that the show's later seasons were stronger in these respects, but if so, I have seen little evidence of it in the reviews I have read, what I had actually seen apparently representative of the longer course. However, others took a far more favorable view, making for a virtually rapturous reception to Netflix's creation--helping bring about the business of streaming as we know it today.

The Decline and Fall of the Arrowverse?

The Arrowverse was, once upon a time, a unique phenomenon in TV land, an extraordinary sprawl of interconnected television series' putting a truly unprecedented amount of DC Comics-based content on the air.

A decade on it is looking rather weary. The flagship show Arrow is gone, of course, while Legends of Tomorrow and Batgirl have been canceled, and most of the rest are in trouble.

Much of the comment about the matter points to specific missteps on the part of the shows' writers--like an underwhelming follow-up to the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" arc, or (alleged) political backlash for some offense or other to this or that part of the audience (too "woke," not "woke" enough, etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam). Yet other factors seem worth mentioning, not least the fact that this whole TV universe has been intensively mined for a decade now--a problem the greater because of the inherent limitations of the format. (I remember watching even earlier seasons of Arrow I found myself thinking of just how many, many, many times we had seen all this done before.)

There is, too, the matter of the general decline of broadcast television, with the margin perhaps especially slight for a relatively junior, relatively youth-oriented network (as against that "old folks"-coddling ratings champion, CBS), and its particularly heavy investment in a form of content with a necessarily finite audience (like a collection of arc-oriented, intricately interconnected superhero shows). The difficulty of holding that audience would seem all the greater with the competition in this very area on the rise, not least in streaming--viewers here now having a superabundance of other small-screen superhero content to enjoy (with the Marvel Cinematic Universe increasingly on TV as well), and from what I can tell, others producing plenty of other DC Comics Universe content that is newer, fresher, more varied, and for those who go for that sort of thing, more "adult" (with the new HBO Max streaming service trumpeting the fact in its promotions).

In short, the Arrowverse made a splash, but the world has since moved on as what was novel became commonplace, and has come to be delivered to the consumer via different, freer media. That being the case it may be that the Arrowverse will be wrapped up, with perhaps certain legacies transferred elsewhere--or reinvented altogether.

Has Prestige TV Worn Out its Welcome?

I have to admit that from the start I have been at best reserved toward prestige TV--here and there giving something a chance (Mad Men, Game of Thrones, etc., etc.) but never finding cause to stick with it much past season three. Rather those experiences persuaded me that the grounds for praise were at best superficial and simplistic, and that the critics, in fact, were looking less and less like shills and more and more like the utterly unhinged.

If always conscious of espousing a minority view I have not always been wholly alone. (Mark Greif, Daniel Mendlesohn, Marc Tracy, produced fairly incisive pieces about the show's limitations.) Still, such were few and far between, and it seems notable that the more critical pieces about the show tended to appear in the show's latter days rather than its earlier ones--with the same going for the prestige TV boom generally. Only a few years ago, for example, did we see critics start to acknowledge that prestige TV mostly consisted of a pack of clichés whose appeal, unlike that of so many other fictional clichés, is doubtful, this stuff basically wrapping up content which is pedestrian or worse in postmodernist grimdarkness and ambiguity and pretension--such that, in Elizabeth Alsop's analysis, its makers "exploit viewers' love" of such pulpy material as "swordplay, zombies and serial killers, while denying them the lurid pleasures therein" in "punitive pulps," in stark contrast with the unashamedly, wholehearted pulp of which they are so derivative (and which actually delivers the promised satisfactions).

Meanwhile prestige TV's novelties--its story arcs, big budgets, movie stars casts and "adult content--have become rather shopworn a quarter of a century after the debut of The Sopranos. In some cases they have even become liabilities, with the sexual aspect of such television seeming a particularly noteworthy case, the more in as those writing for mainstream venues are so inhibited about discussing it. The fact is that the shows present nudity and sex that cannot be put on broadcast TV--but, as might be expected given the general tendency toward the dark and the "punitive," do so in ways that displeases not only those averse to sex on TV as such (whose numbers are possibly growing, and on both sides of the culture war, with the upmarket prestige TV audience by no means exempt to go by what I see in places like The Guardian), but even that audience up for prurient entertainment. Simply put, in their entertainment that portion of the audience are looking less for "sex" than the "sex-y"; what will appeal to their own, personal, sense of erotic fantasy; what, one may not unfairly say, fits in with their preferred flavor of porn; and are very easily put off when they are shown content not of that particular flavor, content of some else's flavor instead, or perhaps, no one's flavor (even in the mainstream press, some acknowledgment existing of the "joylessness" of the sex in such fare). Seeing the latter can very quickly make them stop watching in disinterest, distaste or even disgust--and in this age of intense "status politics," regard not getting what they want, and having what they do not want inflicted on them, as a provocation or an insult from someone pushing an agenda on them, not always unreasonably since so many are loudly proclaiming such an agenda, with the results (and the inevitable accusation that it is really Russian bots and not actual people expressing the objection) splashed across a thousand Internet fora.

In spite of all that the prestige TV bandwagon rolls on--but, as cable grows more squeamish about funding original content, and even streaming king Netflix grows leerier of auteur-type projects, it seems likely to roll a good deal more slowly as crowd-pleasing fare gets the upper hand. Love or hate it, Disney's sheer crassness has paid off very handsomely in commercial terms--and looking at the commercials for the new Obi-Wan series' I feel sure that this, and not shows like House of the Cards, represents the future of streaming.

Amber Heard and Her Ghost Writer

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial is the sort of news story that I generally pay as little attention to as possible--one reason why I was surprised when I found out just how much attention others were paying it, and what significances they were loading it with. Inevitably I picked up a few of the details--one of the more interesting of which was that Heard's op-ed was produced a ghost writer.

More interesting still was how many were shocked by the fact.

When you actually do much writing--perhaps even more, when you teach writing, as I have done for two decades--you learn just what a demanding craft writing is, and how time-consuming the activity can be, enough so as to make the idea of highly public personalities with extremely busy schedules producing lots and lots of writing seem highly suspect. Indeed, it is no secret that what public figures supposedly "write" is commonly produced by another individual for publication under their name. As C. Wright Mills explained in his classic White Collar way back in 1951, with the ever-greater "rationalization" and "commercialization" of publishing that had already taken over book distribution penetrating ever more deeply into book production, editors sought "out prominent names . . . men with such names crave even more prominence" with becoming "authors" one way of getting it, and in the process ghost-writing exploded.

For his part Mills estimated that a "book by a prominent but non-literary man" has at best a "fifty-fifty chance" of being by that public figure rather than having been written by someone else. And I would imagine that the chances are far lower now. After all, amid the hyper-commercialization of publishing of which I have written so many a time there is that much more emphasis on the name on the byline (and the publicity to be done on the book's behalf by the famous individual in question), so much so that it is not only the books by the "non-literary men" but even those by the "literary men" that are not by the ostensible authors, with James Patterson only the most notorious example--because even when the required level of quality is low the publishers want more "product," more "content," than any one human being can actually produce.

At the same time it seems likely, in an ever less literate age, that fewer people have the skills to produce such a work, with this going especially for the kinds of public figure we have today, not least in the entertainment industry from which so many "authors" are drawn these days, and not solely because of the busy schedules. While the lickspittles of the entertainment press would have you believe that every "celebrity" is a superhumanly accomplished Renaissance figure who would have been taking home a passel of Nobel Prizes were they not playing bit roles in sub-mediocre movies, at least in part on the grounds that they are infinitely better-educated than you (Harvard this, Yale that), looking at Hollywood's A-list closely one sees that Ricky Gervais' quip about their having "spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg" is no exaggeration--that so many of them never even finished high school one could mistake it for a requirement. (Incidentally both Heard and Depp fall into this category, both of them high school dropouts. So, stay in school, I guess?) And, I might add, Hollywood has never struck me as a place particularly conducive to people being relentlessly self-educating Martin Edens.

Still, if recent history is any guide the public will not retain the revelation--and go on thinking that the books Park Avenue pushes onto them, and the other content people with quite different purposes push onto them (as seen in this case), are actually by the people whose names are on the covers as they play a game gone far, far beyond what Mills described in his day, perhaps so much so that he could not even have imagined it.

The End of "New" New Hollywood?

During Netflix's period of heady expansion as a generator of original films and shows much was made of its readiness to give artists a relatively free hand in pursuing their vision. (I remember, for example, that Nightcrawler and Roman J. Israel director Dan Gilroy--one of the few filmmakers who was working this past decade who was actually interested in the world and actually making interesting movies about it--talking about his experience of making Velvet Buzzsaw for them, saying that Netflix, unlike the studios, "willing to give us everything we needed, financially, artistically, and in every way, to make the film that we wanted to make.")

There was a whiff of '70s-era "New Hollywood" about that, but I would not go so far as to say that streaming was giving us some latterday edition of that era. After all, where cultural change and political audacity are concerned, the 2010s were a far cry from the 1970s--with, at the cinematic level, all this reinforced by the reality that Netflix was cutting checks to established insiders in a context where opportunities for up-and-comers were few. (The massively budgeted Netflix production The Irishman seems telling here. In the '70s Martin Scorsese was making his name with Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, films at the time regarded as strikingly fresh and contemporary--while in his 2019 gangster epic he looked backward, to the point of digitally deaging longtime Scorsese regulars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.)

Still, with Netlfix doing what it was there did seem a little more scope than before for filmmakers who had some chance of making something, perhaps something worthwhile, that an ever more restrictive studio system would never allow.

It also seemed to me that given how this comparatively easygoing attitude in regard to funding film and TV production seemed bound up with the debt-fueled expansion of the company that appeared implausible outside the rapid expansion of its customer base, and neither the piling up of debt nor the growth in the number of subscribers could go on forever (the more in as competition was growing, with the likes of Disney+ proving formidable indeed). Last year the company was already starting to back away from this approach, while this year's report that the trend in subscriber growth has turned negative has quite predictably led to official declarations of big changes in store (for the sake of reassuring people they hope will want to hold their stock), not least that the company's day as a backer of pricey "auteur" projects is drawing to a close. And while some are gloating over the end of Hollywood's winning streak, even as one not always impressed with its choices or the products to which they led, can see that as sad news for filmmakers and film-lovers alike.

Revisiting the Matter of Independent Film

I am old enough to remember the fuss about independent film back in the '90s.

That makes me also old enough to remember how little it ended up amounting to--a handful of works ranging from marginal to execrable, and the mass-manufacture of pale imitations of these, with the mediocrity, derivativeness, ugliness of Quentin Tarantino's films tellingly the outstanding "success," the model for all the other little edgelords who want the whole world to know how "cool" they think they are following in his footsteps.

Meanwhile there has been the reality that whatever one makes of this side of its content, independent film was never really so "independent" as the label suggested, with David Walsh putting it particularly memorably in a review at the turn of the century: "What does the phrase 'independent filmmaker' signify? It often seems to mean a director whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training."

Walsh's view is certainly confirmed by the frequency with which an "independent" who drew some raves or made some money happily takes up the task of churning out the kind of bland blockbuster against which the "cool rebels" supposedly defined themselves. And it would have become even more the case given what has become of today's film market, with the prospects for funding such a movie and putting it on screens dwindling as they have. (A decade ago Steven Soderbergh was talking about how much worse it had become than when he started out--gone from the challenge of hitting a baseball, to the challenge of hitting a baseball with another, thrown baseball--and it would seem to have become worse still since to go by what Bryan Wizemann has to say about the matter.)

Indeed, the complaint of the sadly departed Ray Liotta seems all too telling--the actors "who are doing the superhero movies are the ones getting the leads in independent movies."

Want to make that small personal film? That real work of art you've been dreaming about realizing for years?

You'd better become a Marvel superstar first.

Speaking of Ozymandias . . . (The Fate of Netflix)

Reading of Netflix's recent woes I have found myself thinking of how much what the company has to offer has changed.

The original idea was that it was a giant video rental that sent you DVDs through the mail. You joined, and then had access to everything, more or less.

It wasn't perfect, of course. The queues, the mailing, were limiting and cumbersome compared to being able to stream anything they had in their collection all day long from anywhere you happen to be. Even before getting into such headaches as discs which were mismailed, or damaged, or how gaps appeared in their offerings that never got filled (as with a TV series where some disc you wanted right in the middle became available), you got only X number of discs at a time, and if there was something in particular you wanted to see now at the top of your queue you could end up waiting quite a while before getting it.

Still, there was that they-have-everything aspect.

Now, at least where streaming is concerned, a service that has everything is not even an idea, the whole media universe ever more fragmented. This is not only a matter of the "exclusive" content so many are creating, and which prestige TV lovers can't get enough of, but simply a matter of seeing even the higher-profile of Hollywood's wide release feature films.

The poptimist-minded entertainment journalism crowd, of course, doesn't acknowledge that anything has been lost that way. But I, for one, think that the idea of signing up for multiple subscription services (and paying their fees) just to see what we were able to get in one place is not very attractive. And all the original content, which even some of the entertainment journalism crowd seem to be starting to acknowledge isn't somehow intrinsically and eternally the magic they made it out to be for so long (the words "Netflix is the New Cable" are fast becoming a cliché), seem poor compensation for the fact.

All the same, I have a hard time picturing Netflix's troubles doing much to bring anything like the old Netflix back, either under the Netflix label or anywhere else.

Reflections on the New York Times #1 Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers of 2021

Not long ago I considered the bestsellers of the past year, focusing on the Publisher's Weekly list. I now turn to the New York Times' list of #1 hardcover fiction bestsellers during the year.

In that particular year there were 53 editions of the list. Some 20 of these were topped by thriller writers who had made their names in the twentieth century (Grisham, Patterson, King, Coben, Sanford, Baldacci, Connelly, Preston, Child, Silva, Evanovich), or only marginally later (as with Thor, whose first book debuted in 2002). Working in different genres but similarly long-established are Quinn, Sparks, Gabaldon, Roberts (who were collectively #1 for 8 weeks), while the same can also be said of Hannah and Picoult (Hannah's The Four Winds having 3 nonconsecutive weeks on the list, while Picoult's Wish You Were Here having one). Of those accounting for the #1 spot in the other 21 weeks most traded on political celebrity, entertainment celebrity or some combination of both (as with Sister Souljah, Stacey Abrams, Quentin Tarantino and Amanda Gorman, whose books of poetry were on the list for 3 weeks), with the Clintons both benefiting from "coauthoring" their book with a bestselling mystery author (Bill with Patterson, Hillary with Louise Penny).

In short, books by people who made their names by being authors and not as something else or in some other way (like, for instance, presenting at a presidential inauguration) in this actual, not-so-young century were very few indeed on the list, those who (unlike Louise Penny, Laura Dave or Lianne Moriarty) made their names after 2010 fewer still (with the notable exceptions E.L. James of Fifty Shades shame, The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins, Amor Towles). Glancing at the biographies of the persons in question I might add that I am struck by how many, especially of the newer, post-2000, authors, had the benefit of prior careers in media and familial or marital connections to the literary and other worlds. I have similarly been struck by the extent to which the bestsellers by anyone were obviously an effect of success elsewhere (with Quinn's The Duke and I enjoying four straight weeks at the top because of the success of Bridgerton, Tarantino's book the print version of his hit film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Gabaldon helped by Outlander being a still ongoing STARZ series).

Considering all this I am reminded of just how closed the publishing business' upper tiers have become to newcomers of any variety--and especially people from outside those circles that have better entree to publishing than blind submission to the few remaining slush piles. I am struck, too, by how where it comes to the newer successes the books tend to be more idiosyncratic, with none seeming to make the kind of steady career with high-volume commercial work such as a Patterson (whose books, while still topping the New York Times' list, seem to have a less prominent place on the Publisher's Weekly lists than they used to do). And both those details seem to me additional confirmation of what I have increasingly suspected, the decline of the old thriller market—the superstars of yesteryear continuing to claim the #1 spot with frequency, but, if PW is anything to go by, still not doing well as they used to do, for their dwindling sales are to an eroding audience they won in an earlier time and are not replenishing, cannot replenish, because, even without younger competition offering fresher product, that younger audience just isn't up for what they have to offer.

Shakespeare, Establishment Poet? Further Thoughts

Recently reconsidering the matter of Shakespeare's standing as an Establishment poet I found myself thinking of how English literature's opinion-makers esteem as the greatest of idols a figure from rather further back in the past than do other European literatures--the French, the German, the Russian. These three derive their literary idols from more recent times (Hugo, Goethe, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy) and I cannot help wondering if the fact that English literature does not do the same does not reflect something particularly conservative and backward-looking in the English tradition--that inclination to see history as having properly stopped in 1688 that Wells satirized a century ago and which can seem hardly less true of the country today.

Considering this I find myself recalling what Upton Sinclair had to say about Percy Bysshe Shelley in his own consideration of literature in Mammonart: that Shelley, not Shakespeare, was "the finest mind the English race produced." Well aware of the "ridicule" this statement "will excite," Sinclair acknowledged that few would compare Shelley's body of work with Shakespeare's--but stressed that Shelley's career and life ended prematurely at thirty, and had Shakespeare's been cut off at the same point his legacy would be very different today. Indeed, hailing Shelley as "among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn back to feudalism, Catholicism or mysticism of any sort," and instead "fixed his eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment"; who, exemplifying that unfaltering, unwavering, forward-looking commitment to humanity and its liberation "attacked class privilege, not merely political, but industrial"; Sinclair predicted that in an England where the working class has been emancipated they would remember him as "one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave up everything in life to bring it nearer," and honor him by "making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of English letters"--Shakespeare dethroned once and for all.

It seems quite relevant that such a suggestion does not seem to be entertained today by anyone remotely of Sinclair's stature. Indeed, coming into contact with the sonnet by which Shelley is best known, "Ozymandias," they are most likely to see it used as an expression of disdain for those mainstream, Establishment-safe opinion has labeled tyrants, generally small-timers as small as Breaking Bad's Walter White--the old element of social rebellion so prominent within Shelley's career utterly gone out of it.