"The Habit of Invidious Comparison"

One of Thorstein Veblen's more memorable traits as a writer was his constantly coining striking phrases simply by calling things what they are. Indeed, in his classic story of fascism-come-to-America It Can't Happen Here Sinclair Lewis' protagonist Doremus Jessup lamented to himself that the young people of his day were "[g]etting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen" (emphasis added).

One of those phrases of Veblen's that particularly stuck in my memory was the "habit of invidious comparison"--the habit of judging one thing, and especially one person, against one another not merely for the sake of better understanding their qualities or making rationalistic practical choices, but the hierarchy-obsessed establishment of some order of precedence in which one is "better" and the other "worse" that can only leave those below envying those on the top (hence, "invidious"), and this all the time, as a matter of course, because that is just what they do. Raised in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class Veblen identified that habit with said "leisure class"--and in turn, with the barbarian values that this exemplifies, not least their explanation of outcomes (the spoils of the hunt and the raid) in terms of a fuzzy notion of personal prowess rather than in any rationalistic way.

In this day and age, in which people brought up in a country that is officially a republic, which they will tell you has no social classes, and in which all are supposed to have been "created equal," will completely unthinkingly speak of one person as "better" than another because they were born to that supposedly nonexistent privilege and another was not, because they have money and the other does not, it is very clear that the "habit of invidious comparison" is exceedingly pervasive in our time, to the point of being a neurotic compulsion, with all that says about where we are along the spectrum extending from barbarism to civilization.

What Does it Mean to Be Civilized? (A Look at Veblen's View of the Matter)

For most these days I suppose the words "civilization" and "barbarism" have a rather old-fashioned, even pretentious ring. Yet anyone looking very deeply at social science can hardly avoid older work which makes use of such terms, often in ways that I think can still be deemed relevant.

Certainly one sees such usage in the work of Thorstein Veblen, as with his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class, where the usage is all the more notable for not proceeding along the lines they might expect from our everyday speech and writing.

For example, looking at the court of a monarch such as that of England, with its orders of precedence and minute protocol and ostentation, those who understand "civilization" in its everyday sense may think all that the epitome of civilized behavior.

But for Veblen it is the extreme opposite. As he explains the term it is the barbarian who is obsessed with hierarchy and inequality, with some being above and some being below to such a degree that descent from those who were above means much; obsessed with intricate, ostentatious ways of living, and the "conspicuous consumption" they bespeak. By contrast the civilized are egalitarian and matter-of-fact.

This disparity in its turn this reflects other differences between the civilized and the barbaric. The outlook of the barbarian, Veblen explains, is defined by their living by predation--by the aggressive pursuit of dominance over others, over other humans in particular, and the personal prowess to which they attribute their acquisition of such dominance, all the way down to mystical notions of personal force, and advertise such pretensions to superiority with the wastefulness of their consumption. (The palace is absurdly large--and this shows that they can afford absurdly large expenditure, which in turn testifies to the prowess that enables them to get hold of so much, proving they are "more" than others, demigods, even.) By contrast the civilized person lives not by predation on others, but by industriousness--that is to say, productive work on nature, in which work they emphasize less prowess than diligence. That work is oriented to the maximization of the creation of utilities--making for a relatively peaceable and "practical" outlook to which the ruthless violence and wastefulness of the barbarian are anathema. And their work trains them to the explanation of the world in terms of impersonal, highly material cause-and-effect rather than what the rational would think of as mystical nonsense.

In short, think of the barbarian as the "warrior" come to pillage, the civilized as the farmers, artisans and others on whom they would prey as they would the animals they hunt or herd, with, of course, feudalistic aristocrats and monarchs the glamourized, gilt-encrusted version of those pillaging warriors (whose "houses," ultimately, originated in exactly such fashion).

As one might guess from such a conception Veblen had thought that, while the world was far from having wholly gotten over barbarism, the progress of technology, commerce, industry would strengthen the tendencies to civilized attitudes, and weaken the barbarian ones, because of how hard material reality shapes people's minds over time. However, in his critical book The Theory of Business Enterprise (my review of which got a lot of page views from people whom I suspect were looking for something else) he argued that there were forces conducing to the maintenance of old-time barbaric values. Among them was that where those involved with technology were required to think in materialistic, civilized, cause-and-effect terms by their very work, like the engineer and the factory manager, others further removed from it went on thinking in the old ways, the property- and contract-minded businessman or lawyer thought in terms of the old frameworks (with the businessman concerned with acquisition rather than production, the lawyer with "the interpretation of new facts in terms of accredited precedents, rather than a revision of the knowledge drawn from past experience in the matter of fact light of new phenomena," making "facts conform to law").

The result was that the outcome of the contest between these forces was uncertain--while today it seems the barbaric is very much alive, and not merely in latterday monarchism. Ours remains a world where people still identify wealth with individual prowess and mystical personal force, and still justify extreme inequality on the grounds of such a personal "it," saying that some are "better" than others simply because they have money--while showing off that they have "money to burn" whenever they get the chance. The result is that while the techno-industrial system underlying modern life would not have been remotely conceivable without an enormous amount of civilized thinking the conventional wisdom of the day-to-day life making use of it all, in a great many ways that count, remains unalloyed barbarity by Veblen's standard.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Idiocracy

I recall happening across Mike Judge's Idiocracy on cable at about the time of its premiere there. I remember being astonished that a twenty-first century film would so blatantly make a case for dysgenics--specifically the prospect of (presumably) low IQ "poors" out-breeding the (presumably) high IQ upper strata--as a danger to civilization. However, I took it for an edgelordist chase after cheap laughs by the man who brought the world Beavis and Butt-head. (It still seemed possible to take ultra-reactionary material that way back then, with the reception of South Park at the time exemplary of the tendency.) And I probably would not have given the film very much thought afterward were it not for its exceptional persistence in the pop cultural memory, the particular character of which says a lot--only a few critics noticing the more disturbing elements of the premise (which, if anything, seem the more apparent in the wake of Judge's later work, like his six-season prestige TV hit on HBO, Silicon Valley--"Elitist porn," Rick Paulas calls Idiocracy, words equally applicable to Judge's HBO show).

One of those few who has noticed, Adam Johnson, raised an important point when he noted who it was that treated the film as such a reference point in recent years--liberals invoking Idiocracy again and again in the wake of Donald Trump's recent electoral ascent. This seemed to him deeply incongruous--enough so that the title of his piece asked why liberals "love referencing" what was "one of the most elitist and anti-social movies ever." However, the fact may be less incongruous than it seems. If by liberal we mean "left" then this is indeed unfitting--the tendency plausibly reflective of liberals having ceased to be liberals, as many have charged has been the case, with Chris Hedges, for example, announcing the "death" of an American liberal class corrupted and demoralized by its proximity to and the temptations of power, by endless war, by its own hostility to the more fully leftward counterparts against whom it consistently sided with the right, and one might add, by its defeat after defeat after defeat for decades.

However, if by liberal we mean "centrist" then there really is no dissonance. American liberalism, after all, emerged less from adherents of socialism of the Marxist or any other variety, or from movements of labor or the poor, but a more upper-class Progressivism that was afraid of the left rather than influenced by it, and certainly as it developed at mid-century looked more like an update of classical conservatism for the realities of twentieth century America. That package most certainly included an insistence upon society's dependence on an elite--and distaste for the "swinish multitude" it feared would trample everything it valued into the mud under its hooves--such as is all too clear in that film.

The Problem With "Confidence"

These days the language we speak seems filled with usages for trivializing and dismissing the problems of the disadvantaged, above all when the disadvantaged speak up about them--like the accusations of "entitlement," "narcissism" and "self-pity" used to beat down expressions of what may be legitimate grievance on the part of those whom society has treated less well than it may have been obliged to do. In fact, this, rather than genuinely calling out the failing in those who really do have that failing, seems to me the principal use to which the word is put these days.

So does it go with "confidence." All you need to "succeed," they tell you, is "confidence." If you have "confidence" you will do just fine. If you lack "confidence" you will not. If you "succeeded" it was because you had "confidence," and if you "failed" it was because you did not have it.

This thinking, which is simple-minded in the extreme, not only slights hard material fact in favor of nonsense about "personal force"--plain and simple barbarous thinking, as Veblen knew. It threatens to reduce getting through life to a matter of striking stupid poses. And having done so it tells those who may never have a had a chance at all that they failed because they did not strike such poses often enough or correctly enough--rather than, perhaps, because of where they started out in life and how society distributes opportunity with regard to careers, or anything else--so that once again those tearing into them can have the satisfaction of snarling in their faces "You have no one to blame but yourself!" And the even more important satisfaction conformists so often take in deflecting what might have turned into a criticism of the status quo--especially when stinging those "life" has treated less well than they comes as a bonus.

Remembering "Nixon vs. Kennedy"

As I have had many an occasion to remark I found the praise for Mad Men wildly exaggerated--not unlike the Saturday Night Live parody of the critical raves for The Sopranos (for which Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner had previously been a writer). However, this is not to say that the show did not have its points of interest, and I have recently found myself recalling a major scene at the end of the first season (in the episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy") in which the scheming Pete Campbell has discovered the truth about Don Draper's past--that Don, actually born Dick Whitman, was an Army deserter who stole the name, identity, life of an officer named Don Draper--and, after failing to blackmail Don into giving him a promotion with that information, goes to their ad agency's senior partner Bert Cooper with the information.

Bert's response is "Who cares?" Even if true, a thing Bert did not necessarily concede (indeed, he refers to Campbell as having "imagined" the story he tells), the fact would have made no difference to him. Japanophile that he is, he cites the saying that "A man is whatever room he is in"--and as he goes on to say, it is Don Draper who is in the room with them. At any rate, "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here." And that is essentially that.

Dramatically it is rather a damp squib--the plot about Campbell's struggle with Draper simply fizzling anti-climactically, as was so often the case in what I saw of the show. Still, the more I think about the scene the more I find myself liking Bert--not least because of the unflappability, and wisdom, he displayed in the situation.

"Who cares?" indeed.

Alas, today the sensibility seems very different--enough so that it would probably take a good deal of courage to handle the situation the same way in any current production.

Is China's "Lying Flat" Movement the Wave of the Future?

These last couple of years China's "lying flat" movement has been making the news internationally. The phenomenon may recall to mind such phenomena as Japan's hikikomori, or American stereotypes of the country's young men turning into basement-dwelling gamers rather than getting jobs, dating, marrying and starting families. However, in line with the reality that conventional Western opinion is quick to regard forms of nonconformism and dissent that it would condemn in its own country in a foaming-at-the-mouth manner as heroic when they emerge in a place like China (or Russia), the coverage of the Chinese phenomenon differs significantly. Where the tendency has been to conceive of the hikikomori as sufferers of a mental disorder of wholly psychological rather than sociological significance, and Americans dropping out of the job/dating market as lazy, immature or worse (rather than sick, merely unvirtuous), where discussion of the "lying flat" is concerned there is an acknowledgment that there is a social conflict here, with the young rebelling against the "rat race" and what it stands for, a life devoted to the grueling careerism summed up as "996.ICU," and the consumerism that keeps them chained to it--with this a response to the brutality of working life in contemporary China, and one might also speculate, the slowing of material progress for the many as the country's earlier frantic economic growth slows down.

In bluntly discussing those aspects of the matter we find ourselves looking at aspects of contemporary reality the conventional prefer to ignore or dismiss--not least that, contrary to the aspirational rhetoric and the pontification of the Jack Mas of the world, the world of work as many, and likely most, experience it in the modern world, is a truly wretched thing, suffered through solely for the paycheck people need in order to live and for no other reason; that for decades slow growth and stagnant or declining incomes for the many have been a function of people being asked to work harder for less, with no prospect of better, only worse. We also acknowledge another thing commonly ignored or dismissed, namely that young people just entering the job market, often after a more brutal and brutalizing pursuit of educational credentials than their parents experienced (think of just how nuts the Cult of the Good School has gone), get the worst of it while being least resigned to it, being at the bottom of the hierarchy while having fewer of the commitments that make working people afraid to rock the boat. (They are less likely than their elders to have homes, marriages, children, the more in as knowing something of their declining prospects even before hitting the market they have been cautious.)

We also find ourselves facing the fact that all this, far from being unique to China, increasingly the norm the world over, and producing backlash all over the world. (Americans dismiss their basement-dwelling gamers as refusing to grow up. They have a tougher time dismissing the long gainfully employed adults, who so recently helped to hold the world together amid an unprecedented pandemic, driving the country's Great Resignation.) Meanwhile billionaires and government officials who think snarling sanctimoniously at those poorer and younger than they will make them fall into line only make themselves even more ridiculous than they already are with (yet another) display of that kind of self-importance that leaves the parody-minded comedian nowhere to go.

Contemplating all this one may wonder if there might not be a better way may wonder if society could not, at this stage of development, when at least in the richer countries growth has been so weak for so long in comparison with what came before, that even the most Establishment economists toss around words like "secular stagnation"; when it seems that much of the work we do may be of questionable value, while rising consumption may not necessarily be the best way to deliver a better life, and past a certain point may actually be failing altogether in providing that; when at least the hope is emerging that we could perhaps give vastly greater numbers of people a decent life at orders-of-magnitude lower cost and material throughput, all of which seems the more important amid the ecological crisis; a reconsideration of how we live, and expect other people to live their lives, is not grossly overdue. We may, for example, wonder if society should not have a "slow lane" for those for whom frenzied attempts to get ahead that seem increasingly futile are not the essence of a fulfilling life. However, in anything like today's world such a compromise looks like a fantasy at best.

Some Thoughts on Douglas Coupland's Piece on Elon Musk

Some time ago I (rather belatedly) happened upon Douglas Coupland's much talked-about piece about Elon Musk.

I would not have wasted my time clicking on the link had I known who Coupland was, but not knowing better I had a vague idea that he would at least attempt to offer an appraisal of Musk's record as an entrepreneur and in the course of it say something that I had not heard a million times before--perhaps actually succeeding in telling me something I did not know, or making me rethink what I already knew, if only a little.

Instead this piece, which had few facts and less analysis but many, many assertions, was just Coupland trolling--in exceedingly colloquial and vulgar fashion and at very great length--everyone who is not a devoted member of the Cult of Elon Musk, vehement about how the man is superior to you, you personally, repeating it again and again. The item's title is actually "'The Smartest Person in Any Room Anywhere,'" while phrases and words such as "huge IQ" and "Ubermensch" and "measurably, scientifically, clinically and demonstrably the smartest person in any room anywhere" (the title is a quote by Coupland of his own words) are peppered throughout, and not content with celebrating Musk he sneers in his opening paragraphs that anyone who thinks Musk is a [expletive deleted] is "stupid." Interestingly this appears in the course of the following passage: "what's in it for you to dis someone you don’t know, anyway? Being negative is a stupid person's way of trying to appear smart without actually being smart," Coupland apparently oblivious to the fact that "dissing someone you don't know" is exactly what he is doing on a colossal scale.

Or is he oblivious? At this point you might think from the muddle-headed, hyperbolic material ("smartest person in any room anywhere," etc.) that I have quoted that "Coupland's being ironic and we are not supposed to take him seriously"; or even that "Coupland is satirizing billionaire worship generally and worship of this billionaire in particular." But the tone of the rather long piece is less than consistent (it runs over two thousand words, and significant stretches of it betray no sign of self-awareness), while postmodernists like Coupland as a matter of course provide themselves such escape hatches whenever they mouth off (one may think of it as "cowardice masquerading as 'playfulness'"--it is, as I have said again and again over the years, part of what makes reading their material such a waste of time). At any rate, even if Coupland really is playing the satirist that hardly makes his joke a good one, for at least three reasons worth mentioning:

1. A joke your audience doesn't get--a joke your audience doesn't even realize a joke--is by definition an unsuccessful joke. And in looking about the Internet I have yet to see evidence of anyone taking this item as a joke.

2. The audience which, predictably, reacted negatively to the piece is sick and tired of the kind of thing Coupland had to offer. Few these days would sit through a racist or sexist harangue and then let the writer off on the excuse that they "were being ironic." This was the class equivalent, sneering and snarling at the "losers" for over two thousand words that if they had been made to feel small, well, that was because they deserved to be so, because they were inferior to the great Ubermensch; and those irritated or offended at something they took as more than just a waste of their time--as a statement intended to taunt and demean and humiliate those who are not billionaires and dubious about the elevation of this billionaire in particular to something akin to godhood; who in 2022 can only be sick and tired of the sneering and snarling, which in its original version is so extreme and so silly than the satirist, the parodist, has nowhere to go with it--have no obligation to allow the lame dodge. (Indeed, they could fairly take his remarks as a provocation, with the social media reaction testifying to their being far more successful that way than as a piece of socially incisive humor.)

3. The item in question ran in The Guardian, a far from likely place for an extended joke of this nature (again, over two thousand words!) while given the shifting of that newspaper's editorial line in the wake of its Jeremy Corbyn-bashing recent years one would be less sure than before that the publication would not run a piece of economic royalist snarling at "the common man." (Certainly in my glances at the publication I have noticed how it has gone from being a forum for critics of neoliberalism--with such criticism extending to the specific record of New Labour and Tony Blair--to increasing allotment of space to players of the tedious "neoliberalism isn't a thing" and "Tony Blair was more left-wing than he was given credit for" games. Indeed, even now the author of a recent article criticizing "warmed up Thatcherism" couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at Corbyn in which he inaccurately, even incomprehensibly, compared him to Tony Benn--whether one views him positively or negatively, a very different figure with very different stances in a very different time.)

The result is that the plausible explanation is that either

1. Coupland and the Guardian were coming at the audience from the elitist territory of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises (but with even poorer argument and prose colloquial to the point of sub-literacy); or

2. Coupland and the Guardian tried and failed to make a very questionable, Onion-style joke because the joke looks so much like their actually coming at the audience from the elitist territory of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises (but with even poorer argument and prose colloquial to the point of sub-literacy).

Whichever one you go with, it reflects very poorly on both the author and the publication which accorded him the space on its platform.

From Idiocracy to Silicon Valley

It seems rare that anyone mentions Mike Judge's film Idiocracy and his HBO show Silicon Valley together, but it seems to me that the two works are both sides of the same coin. "Elitist porn," Rick Paulas calls the dysgenics-themed Idiocracy with its brutal mockery of the "low IQ," which the film in characteristically conventional fashion equates with the "lower class." However, as it takes up the subject of those that people of conventional mind regard as the "high IQ," equating this as they do with the "upper class" (or at least, those who might be on their way up into that class, not least "startup"-running IT types), the words "Elitist porn" seem to me to be equally applicable to it--if the fact is even less often appreciated than is Idiocracy's elitism. Indeed, so far as I know critic Kevin Reed is alone in identifying and making explicit this aspect of the show in his review of its first two seasons, remarking the show's writers' "admiring . . . the culture they are criticizing," and "never bring[ing] viewers to a point at which this peculiar phenomenon can scarcely be questioned" for utter and total lack of any sort of critical social vision, such that "[o]ne could hardly think of a more conventional and shallow approach to the complexities of life in Silicon Valley." Alas, without such conventionality and shallowness the show would never have been such a darling of the prestige TV-loving critics--and doubtless, Judge not done nearly so well as he must have out of it.

The Bardoclasts' Case: Further Reflections

In considering the "Bardoclasts'" case recently I concerned myself mainly with the charge that seemed easiest to assess--namely that Shakespeare was an "Establishment" poet who was not merely of conservative sympathies, but exceedingly and unremittingly flattering of the Powerful and disdainful of the People. Indeed, it has seemed to me that that charge was virtually irrefutable, so much so that George Orwell, in specifically attacking Lev Tolstoy's essay on Shakespeare in his own piece ("Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"), actually embraced the charge and made it one of the bases of his counterattack rather than trying to refute it (very readily agreeing that Shakespeare "was not a saint or would-be saint," had a "considerable streak of worldliness," "liked to stand with the rich and powerful," etc.).

The aesthetic merits and demerits of Shakespeare's work are a trickier matter. However, it does seem to me safe to say that just as the Bardolators have done Shakespeare a disservice by treating him as something he was not content-wise (a perfect "moral teacher" for all times), they have done him a disservice by making him something he was not where form also was concerned. At least to go by G. Wilson Knight, nineteenth century critics of this stripe, attempting to reconcile their Bardolatry with their era's realist literary standard, the hallmark of which is its centering on characters who think, feel, act in ways so much in accord with what we have (presumably) observed in real life that fiction about them feels to us as if it were an account of real events, or even a real event unfolding before our own eyes, hailed Shakespeare as a supreme realist--claiming for Shakespeare a perfection according to a standard alien from the standpoint of 1600. Indeed, Knight quite plausibly argues that had it not been for this bit of foolishness Tolstoy, reacting to what to that supreme realist was the incomprehensible idolization of Shakespeare as such, would have had no occasion to write his essay.

All this said, we are left with the question of what we can appreciate Shakespeare for, rather than what we cannot. The usual answer Shakespeare's admirers offer is Shakespeare's language itself, the supremacy of which even many a Bardoclast who takes Shakespeare to task for his politics happily grants. Upton Sinclair, for example, was withering in his criticism of Shakespeare's politics, but totally concedes this point, declaring in Mammonart that Shakespeare was "gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared on Earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a moment's notice"--and just as Orwell was to use Shakespeare's being an Establishment poet as a basis for assailing Shakespeare's critics, Sinclair made this a basis for his own charges against them. The fact that those words poured out of him so readily, in Sinclair's view, "saved him the need of thinking," with the result that the ideas that Shakespeare expressed in the golden, glowing, gorgeous words are "commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices of his time and class" (for instance, what "To thine own self be true" really means) and the golden, glowing, gorgeous language "tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking," a temptation for which many have indeed fallen.

Yet this is more open to disputation than the Bardolators appreciate--a fact underlined by their tendency to argue in a priori fashion. Responding to foreign Bardoclasts they argue that a foreigner cannot appreciate the beauties of Shakespeare's poetry. Yet I am not so sure that this really follows. Poetry is not wholly unknown to make an impression even in translation. And being foreign-born does not necessarily mean a complete lack of feel for the English language. (Can anyone deny that, for example, Vladimir Nabokov had a feel for English? Even as one espousing the unpopular opinion that Nabokov is wildly overpraised I certainly do not deny his gifts here.) This point seems especially worth raising in the case of Tolstoy, who tells us that he did read the plays in English (as well as in Russian and German), and because it is the case that anyone who can read the plays in English with even a literal understanding has a far greater competence in that language than the great majority of the native speakers of English. (Thus do high school students read their Shakespeare in "No Fear" editions translating Shakespeare's English into the idiom of the twenty-first century, and think this just as natural as reading Homer in translation.) Would such competence, and experience, not likely impart to someone who acquired it--and still more, a figure with the extraordinary literary gifts of a Tolstoy--some basis for an aesthetic judgment at least as good as that of some native speakers?

Moreover, it seems to me worth acknowledging that not every native English speaker is quite so immediately overwhelmed by Shakespeare's language as such critics would have it (and not just the No Fear edition-reading students). The gorgeous, glowing words that a Sinclair praised can sound purple to a modern ear--while even long before that one could have argued, as William Wordsworth did, for the most satisfying poetry often being that speech which is most natural (as Shakespeare's was not natural).

In fairness, I do not consider the counterargument as necessarily settling the matter. What is important is that the counterargument exists on this point, and is rather better than flimsy, leaving the claims of the Bardolator, and the middlebrow who repeats what they say unthinkingly, very much open to debate.

What Ever Happened to the Romantic Comedy?

A great many have remarked the decline of that old box office stalwart, the big-screen Hollywood romantic comedy, over the years. And many have proffered explanations--some more plausible than others, but all of those with which I am familiar missing important facets of the matter.

What seems to me really important here is that the genre, which originated in the day of Ernst Lubitsch, was fairly well-worn by the '90s, and perhaps too much a hothouse flower for this later period--the genre emerging in an era which, in actual life, was not so different from any other period, our own included, in the critical areas, but where on the screen, at least, a certain delicacy, a certain portrayal of innocence, was plausible; in which the rhythms of filmmaking were different, often slower and gentler. Such a genre, while not necessarily unsophisticated (in the view of some, at its best a good deal more sophisticated than anything we would get later), was a poor fit with '90s irony, and '90s crudity, and '90s cinematic technique, which already well into the age of high concept was characterized by the short takes and close shots that have gone with the music video-izing, or action movie-izing, of all of cinema--hardly the thing for a film about two people discovering and dealing with their feelings for each other. Consistent with all this it seems significant that the most celebrated romantic comedy of that decade was Sleepless in Seattle--a romantic movie actually about romantic movies, at least as much as it was about the lovers at the story's center. (Indeed, Rosie O'Donnell scored the film's most memorable line when her character told the Meg Ryan character "You don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.") And following that hit the follow-up by the film's director and stars was . . . You've Got Mail, a remake of a classic directed by Lubitsch himself--The Shop Around the Corner. I recall writer-director Nora Ephron declaring proudly in some piece of publicity that "We put a computer in it!"--but putting a computer in a romantic comedy, too, had been done before. Long before. By Nora Ephron's OWN PARENTS, Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron. That movie was 1957's Desk Set. (I'm sure someone must have mentioned its existence to her, sometime.)

All of this has escalated greatly since. And as if all that were not enough, the film business was changing dramatically. The ever-onward and upward ascent of the high concept vision of filmmaking, the ever-more intense competition from content on the small screen, meant that there was ever less reason to invest in a production that did not derive some significant benefit from being seen on a large screen, or which at least could not be replicated by makers of content for the small. This was all the more the case in an era of rising budgets, with their inducement of those obliged to mind the books to think about maximizing their revenue streams from all the available sources, not least those the opportunities beckoning in a global age (as the whole ex-Communist world opened up, Asian consumers in particular got more affluent, etc.). The result was that Hollywood studios wanted movies that would travel well, and preferably series' and franchises and even universes of movies that would travel well. They wanted merchandising potential. All this was to the great advantage of the action film whose death had been so greatly exaggerated circa 1990, and the animated family movie that had likewise been so marginal for so long--and the great disadvantage of everything else, the more in as the old institution of the film star, on which they might have counted in the absence of so much else, waned.

The romantic comedy was a natural early casualty. Because it does not generally get much mileage from spectacle. Because it does not travel so well. (Being doable on a low budget, Hollywood has no natural monopoly here, while the subtleties of comedy and romance do not always transcend cultural barriers. Think of how Crazy Rich Asians was hyped as a sure winner in China and the revival of the form in America, and then completely failed to be either of those things.) Because it does not launch sequels and franchises and move lots and lots of merchandise. Meanwhile those actresses who had made careers of them moved on to other pursuits on and off the screen--a good many now concentrating on their "wellness empires."

Still, like so much else not to be seen on the big screen anymore there is plenty of romantic comedy on the small. The Hallmark Channels certainly have done well out of them--arguably helped by the fact that as prestige TV lovers glory in the dark and the "edgy," Hallmark has gone in the opposite direction, serving up cozy fare where, as much as anyone can offer it in the 2020s the requisite delicacy, innocence, rhythms are the order of the day.

The Deglobalization of Cinema?

Much has been written over the years about how Hollywood has taken increasing interest in the Chinese movie market, making or adapting its movies in the hopes of increasing their appeal to the vast audience in that country in particular--and sometimes achieving significant success in the process, with Marvel's three big hits in 2019 taking in almost $1 billion in China alone.

However, in the American press at least, Chinese cinematic efforts have tended to get little attention--save when they put their backing behind essentially American films like Iron Man 3, and The Meg (the John Turletaub-directed, Jason Statham-starring adaptation of Steve Alten's novel by that name). However, as all this was going on China did see its own domestic producers, with their economy and their box office growing, make enough money from Chinese films made for Chinese audiences that they could start thinking of dealing with Hollywood as equals, competing or collaborating in the same kinds of splashy projects internationally. The making and release of the movie The Great Wall (2016, U.S. release 2017) would seem to represent the peak of such aspirations, with Chinese and American production companies (China's China Film Group and Le Vision Pictures, America's Legendary Entertainment and Atlas Entertainment) coming together to finance a $150 million film scripted by American writers (Tony Gilroy, Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro), helmed by a famed Chinese director (Zhang Yimou), and bringing together representatives of both countries' "A-lists" (Matt Damon, Andy Lau).

Of course, the film fell well short of what was hoped for it, in large part it would seem because of particularly weak American earnings. (Had the Matt Damon starrer done as well as even a Jason Bourne movie in non-Chinese territories the movie would have at least broken even--and had it done as well as even the poorer-performing examples of Hollywood's own CGI-filled sci-fi blockbusters it would have been respectably profitable.) And since that time China's domestic production has not quite attempted anything like it, instead seeming to focus on its domestic market with projects unlikely to travel very well--like Wolf Warrior 2 and The Battle of Lake Changjin. Meanwhile it would seem that Hollywood has followed a similar track--after investing considerably in making its movies appealing to the Chinese market, apparently losing interest, with the tendency evident in how recent Marvel films have been made with little regard for Chinese sensibilities (and as a result got shut out of that critical market again and again), and Top Gun 2 saw its Chinese backer (Tencent) exit, while such alterations to the film as the American backers may have made for the sake of a Chinese release were kicked to the curb.

Simply put, just as Chinese producers for now seem less prone to chase after the global market, doing well in China seems to be becoming less of a priority for Hollywood, with producers in both countries ready to fall back on a plain old nationalistic appeal to their huge domestic markets at the price of exportability. The price is bigger in the case of China, which can less easily export a jingoistic film than the U.S. can, but even for the U.S. there are costs. As those crowing over the success of Top Gun: Maverick should note, the movie is selling a lot of tickets overseas, roughly matching its earnings at home--but many a movie rakes in two or even three times its domestic haul abroad, and Top Gun's performance only confirms how much less likely such a film is to do that than a work with a broader international appeal like Avatar or the more successful releases of the Disney-Pixar-Marvel complex. A movie as big as Top Gun 2 has become still leaves the producers with little to complain about, but as a strategy for a Hollywood addicted to the blockbuster model, especially in a time in which American moviegoing is still depressed well below pre-pandemic levels with future prospects uncertain, this does pose an obstacle to its broader, longer-run profitability (especially with the making and marketing of movies not getting any cheaper).

The result is that we may be seeing a "deglobalization" of cinema, with this less a first-choice than a response to rising barriers entirely in line with the trajectory of the world economy and the international order these past several years as trade wars return to the world--and shooting wars between the world's major powers become an ever graver prospect.

How Postmodernism Really Fits into the Picture

In thinking about modern political ideology I have tended to think about it the way philosophers and political scientists seem to me to generally do--to start with its epistemology, and its assumptions about human nature and society, and how society could and should be organized, and the conclusions it draws from these premises.

So have I done with postmodernism. In its misanthropic view of human beings, its disregard for reason as a basis for knowing or ordering the world, its rejection of universalism in favor of a stress on identity, its disdain for progress and projects of human emancipation, it rests squarely within the classical conservative tradition, and indeed its darkest quarters (think de Maistre even more than Burke, with this more than confirmed by intellectual historians alert to its lineage by way of aspiring court philosopher to Hitler Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche et. al.), with all this more than acknowledged by those who actually pay attention to politics (like a few CIA analysts who definitely understand these things a good deal better than a great many academics of whom I am aware).

Alas, as I have personally discovered, you can explain this over and over again until you are out of breath and get only blank stares bespeaking stupidity from most people, to whom all that stuff is quite alien and, they are certain, entirely irrelevant. They are sure that the possibilities of knowledge, the nature of human nature, the character of society, the prospects and perils of guided change, have nothing to do with anything. In an American framework, for example, there is what the folks on FOX News tell people to think, which is "conservatism"; there is what the folks on MSNBC tell people to think, which is "liberalism"; and all this tells them that postmodernism is a "left" thing. Q.E.D.. (What's Q.E.D.? one may ask them. They won't be able to tell you the Latin words it stands for, or what the English equivalent is, they just know that it's something that lets people feel smug after they have made their point--and feeling smug is all they care about.)

Certainly it never occurs to them that even with all this being the case the supposed "left" may be just another flavor of right; that what they are looking at could well be a collision of different right-wing nationalists, rather than the right with anything like the old, universalist, left, from which the postmoderns of today have grown quite far removed, standing for the total opposite as, rather than concerning themselves with the problems of Society, they turn their attention instead to the problems of the Self.

The Word "Dotard" and Walter Scott's Ivanhoe

I recall years ago hearing how the use of the word "dotard" in an official statement of the North Korean government led to a certain amount of confusion and amusement in the American press on account of the word's obscurity to the folks in the news media.

Remembering it I found myself thinking some time ago "I guess they don't read Ivanhoe anymore"--in which classic novel that word appeared frequently. (The villainous Brian de Bois-Guilbert uses it in reference to the Grand Master of the Templars at least a half dozen times.)

Recently thinking of this I checked out the word on Ngram and was surprised to find that the last great spike in the word's popularity was at about the time of the novel's publication (1819). Granted, it had already been bouncing back from its drop from earlier heights (generally rising from 1815 on), but all the same dotard's post-mid-eighteenth century peak was in the years after the book's much-celebrated release, the word having a score of 0.000045% in 1823-1824.

Since then the decline has been pretty consistent, with the '90s seeing the word's usage drop to about 4 percent its 1823 level circa 1991 (with a score of 0.0000016%). It edged upward a little after that point, but in 2016, the year before the word made the headlines, its usage was still at a level scarcely a tenth of its Ivanhoe-period peak (with a 0.0000049% score).

Is it possible that one of Ivanhoe's unexpected consequences was to make the word a little more popular than it was before? And is it possible that the book's falling out of fashion as it has has made the word a little less familiar than it might otherwise have been? I can certainly imagine that being the case.

What Josh Trank's Fantastic Four Got Right About Scientific R & D

With the Marvel Cinematic Universe apparently pressing ahead with another shot at a really successful Fantastic Four series (the more clearly so after Reed Richards' little cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) one may wonder if the third time will not prove to be the charm--and find it an appropriate time to look back at the preceding attempts, not least the last such effort, Josh Trank's 2015 film.

Trank's Fantastic Four, of course, was not a commercial success relative to the resources invested and the hopes set on it. (The $56 million it made domestically, the $167 million it made worldwide, would generally have been regarded as solid indeed for a small film like Trank's prior Chronicle--but a disaster for a would-be summer blockbuster that cost ten times as much, and from which a half billion or more would have been hoped.) Moreover, it is hard to see how it could have been that kind of success. There were, after all, the numerous alterations the film made that could be expected to displease purists (like making the Fantastic Four over into Young Adults), and more general superhero movies audiences (the downbeat, grim-and-gritty tone, the body horror element, the slightness of the action by the standard of such projects)--even before getting into the tangled matter of how well or how poorly all this was done (at least, to go by the results of a reportedly brutal and sloppy editing process).

Still, speaking for myself I did find much of interest in the film (in making this superhero film Trank was going for something unconventional, subversive, critical, and for much of the film accomplished that, even if it wasn't the movie most Fantastic Four fans or most summer moviegoers would want to see), with this extending to what, for a Hollywood production, is an extraordinarily astute handling of scientific R & D. While at the outset there is a bit of garage-tinkering, per Edisonade cliche, really making the big breakthrough means entering the world of Big Science, with its large teams and expensive equipment, all as, rather than some hand-waving after a big "Eureka" moment, what we see is lots and lots of hard work--exhausting, collaborative hard work in which the team has to piece together the jigsaw from puzzle pieces that might be scattered very far and wide, and certifiable geniuses get corrected by their colleagues, and as they keep at their task longer than is good for them they fall asleep at their work stations (all of which can only be shown in montage form, but all the same, it's more than most movies give us). And of course, all of this means submitting to the big organizations that have the big money to pay for all this, which are controlled by people who know and care little about science and scientists, but determinedly pursue agendas not necessarily nicer than those of a Victor Von Doom, in the course of which the scientists eventually realize that where science fiction may present them as gods among men, in the real, practical world their status is that of hired help to those who really have power, who are apt to rather rudely remind them how dispensable they are, unlikely to get the credit they deserve, and likely not even get to finish what they might have been so naïve as to think was "their" project, which can be taken from them at any time, and eventually is.

Of course, these aren't the sorts of things that the typical film critic can be expected to appreciate. Indeed, looking at the film's cynicism about the powerful and their agendas ("We could send our political prisoners there. Waterboarding in the fourth dimension could be very effective") I suspect that at least part of the cause of the critics' opprobrium was their usual hostility to the appearance of a critical standpoint in a movie made for the broader public--the obverse of their happily suspending their critical faculties as they cheerlead for an Iron Man or a Top Gun 2. That is a testament to the failings of the critics, not the movie--which on this score displayed far more intelligence and offered more truth than Hollywood, and science fiction, generally offer about this hugely important side of modern life, with this certainly going for a plenitude of work that they have praised far more highly.

Reflections on Samuel Shem's The House of God

We live in a society where, as sociologists like Charles Derber have argued, the professional classes--their self-interest, their ethos and prejudices--are a hugely powerful force in our life, especially insofar as the professional group in question is itself powerful. Few such groups compare with doctors in that respect, with the result that, even in a society where the glorification and glamorization of professionals to a preposterous degree is the pop cultural default, the propaganda for the image of the doctor as a "god in a white coat" stands out for its sheer relentlessness.

Naturally, when I learned about Samuel Shem's The House of God in an Internet forum discussing the film version of the novel and claiming that the movie's (alleged) suppression was the work of an outraged American Medical Association, I was intrigued. As it happened I found absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this actually happened--but that people would think (even falsely) that the book's content is so offensive to the medical Establishment that it would take such drastic action still interested me, and eventually I found my way to the novel (not the film, which as of the time of this writing I have not seen).

As the blurb on the back of my paperback edition explains, it is about the experience of medical school graduates through their first year of residency training at a thinly veiled version of the Harvard Medical School's teaching hospital in what (as we are reminded time and again by way of the references to current events) the Watergate era. What that basically comes down to is that the narrator-protagonist and his colleagues are thrust into an exceedingly difficult situation without preparation or guidance by seniors who, the wise and humane figure like the Fat Man apart, seem to be either complete idiots, or completely corrupted careerists--with the resulting nightmare threatening their humanity, and even their lives. (Before the tale is over one of their group will take his own life--amid far, far more death, not least due to these residents' own mistakes and worse.)

There is a great deal of reckless and revolting behavior on the part of the residents as they struggle to get through it all--which, wherever one finds a discussion of the book, is the subject of enormous amounts of sanctimonious commentary. As my use of the words "reckless" and "revolting" to characterize their behavior I do not at all approve or defend what they do, but the sanctimoniousness--which, characteristically, seems to focus overwhelmingly on the sexual antics rather than the cynical and often terrifying medical stuff (again, a lot of patients are treated horrendously, and frequently die), as is usual with people whose minds run to such things in such ways--only shows that those readers completely missed the point. This is a story not about a few young folk conducting themselves in a manner unbecoming, but rather the evils of a system that tortures and destroys patient and doctor alike out of venality as well as stupidity. It is the essence of the matter that at this point in the development of the state of the art there are a great many situations in which, for all its pretensions and airs, medicine can do nothing, but does it anyway, painfully and expensively. ("Most of us wouldn't know a cure if we found one in a Cracker Jack box . . . I haven't cured anybody yet and I don't know an intern who has," one says at the end of that year, and it is not flippancy.) This is not least a matter of the profession's keeping people alive as "gomers," preventing their passing but only extending their span of life under conditions in which they are "human beings who, through age and sickness, [have] lost . . . what goes into a human being"--a problem the older generation of doctors did not have to face at that stage of their careers, and completely failed to appreciate. Indeed, never have I seen such a strong case made for "medical nihilism" (against which the taboo in this society is, predictably, overwhelming). Yet at the same time, while one can only be horrified at what awaits patients passing into such hands as these, never has a work of fiction made me feel such empathy for what awaits those who enter the medical profession--especially if, like our hero, they do so with hopes of doing good rather than just doing well.

I have read that there has been some reform of the system of medical training since this book's publication, prompted in part by this book (which many in the medical community found all too true of the experience). However, it remains the case that the health care system is far from what anyone would like it to be, in this respect as in so many others--be it the grueling hours worked, the ever-more grinding testing system, the lack of solidarity and support, all far worse than it has to be, and that a function of that same business-mindedness. The result is that a novel by some newly minted doctor taking an equally frank look at their profession would seem way overdue these days. Alas, it seems likely to remain overdue, publishing a very different thing from what it was when Shem came out with his book, such that I would not hold my breath for the arrival of such a forcefully critical work in print, at least by way of the Park Avenue types who have decided that they and they alone decide what deserves to be read as they slap the names of the superannuated bestselling hacks of yesteryear on as many books as they can for the sake of shaking a few more pennies out of the pockets of what remains of a reading public.