Reflections on Balzac's Standing in the English-Speaking World

All of us have gaps in our knowledge, and the contents of Balzac's Human Comedy were one of mine until relatively late. It has seemed to me that this was partly because we hear so little of him in the English-speaking world--and indeed it is probably telling that it was not a writer in English who directed me to Balzac as worthwhile, but French author Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he usefully drew on examples of nineteenth century literature to support his arguments about capital, income and wealth.

In considering that slighting of Balzac in the English-speaking world, Balzac's utterly unflinching vision of the stupidity, vulgarity, brutality of the money-ruled modern world clearly emergent in his own time, would seem to be of great importance. After all, brutal as Balzac's vision of life can be it is neither the cheap, mindless misanthropy of the confirmed nihilist, nor the even cheaper "look at how cool I am" edgelordism that is equally celebrated by Midcult-gobbling middlebrow idiots incapable of telling the difference between one and the other, but the genius and courage to see, acknowledge, and convey what others miss, ignore, cut out of the picture.

At the same time in the "Anglosphere" we seem to see a greater insistence than in other places on having Establishment poets in the pantheon and no others--and Balzac, even if pure Establishment in his personal politics (not merely Royalist, but Bourbon-supporting Legitimist!) was as an artist far too much the truth-teller to ever be considered that (with many of his particular truths, perhaps, especially unwelcome in a country where, as James Kenneth Galbraith remarked not too many years ago, the word "market" cannot be used in public without the speaker "bending a knee and making the sign of the cross").

Indeed, even in Balzac's own native land the makers of a recent film version of Lost Illusions could not stomach their own chosen material. While for the most part praising that adaptation as faithful to the original (which is far more than he was able to credit the adaptation of that other masterpiece by Balzac, Cousin Bette, with) David Walsh remarked in his review that the director, by his own admission, "found some of Balzac's writing 'harsh and punitive,'" and that the final film "'softened' the novel’s attitude toward certain figures," not least Madame de Bargeton, "and added a more hopeful conclusion."

Of this Walsh remarks that "[i]t's possible that something has been gained in the process, and perhaps something has been lost"--with the latter striking me as the more likely, and alas, also testimony to what we have been losing for so many decades in terms of the readiness to face certain truths, in culture as in life.

Hollywood Keeps Becoming Ever More a Parody of Itself

Looking at the schedule of Hollywood releases for 2023 I was struck by just how packed it is with sequels, reboots and the rest--perhaps even more so than in recent years. Even the movies that are not summer blockbuster-type action movies (e.g. at least ten live-action Marvel and DC superhero films, along with new editions of Transformers, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Mission: Impossible, etc., etc.) are do-overs or at least trading on old names and ideas, with the horror movie genre exemplary.* In 2023, it seems, we will have more Scream, more Evil Dead, more Insidious, more The Nun, more Saw, more Exorcist (not to be confused with The Pope's Exorcist, also due out in 2023), while even old Count Dracula will be coming back to the screen in the form of Nicholas Cage (in Renfield). This even seems to be the case with the minute share of theatrically-run filmmaking that now passes for "drama," with Creed III on the way.

Of course, point all this out and a certain kind of suck-up Establishment critic will claim that you've got it all wrong, that the theaters are chock full of original and highly diverse content, so much of it that they don't need to be able to give you any examples, they are all around you--and in the process remind you of the adage that you can't win an argument with an idiot. If they prove themselves other than idiots (or at least, other than complete idiots), they will take a different tack and say that Hollywood is merely giving people what they want--that, yes, it is as you say, but very few people are ready to go for the theater for anything else.

I think that the "giving people what they want" claim has its limits--the consumer will not get what business does not offer, and in this case we are talking about a high-capital industry in a financial milieu where it can make more sense to bury a nearly complete $100 million film rather than to release it because the tax write-off is more attractive than the revenue. Still, it is only fair to admit that there is some truth to audience behavior having an effect on what the studios are ready to invest in--insofar as the function of the theater has changed since that era in which a motion picture could be seen only in the movie house. In an age of small screens everywhere, affording greater convenience and control and far lower cost than the trip to the theater, only big-screen spectacle of a kind for which the bar has only just gone on rising, and the sense of the release being an event, will get them to make that trip--for which nothing else substitutes financially as a revenue stream for Hollywood. (Yes, video, TV, merchandising are important, but the studio's cut of the $15 or $20 ticket is critical, and selling a lot of those tickets what paves the way for big money from all the rest.)

All the same, it is a reminder that in Hollywood, just like everywhere else in the business world, there is far more (insufferably pompous) talk about INNOVATION! than there is the actual thing.

* Yes, ten, count them, ten live-action DC and Marvel superhero movies. The live-action Marvel films are: Kraven the Hunter (January); Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (February); Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (May); The Marvels (July); Madame Web (October); and Blade (November). The DC films are Shazaam! Fury of the Gods (March); The Flash (June); Blue Beetle (August); and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (December). The reader should also note that there will be an animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June), while from outside the Marvel-DC domain there will also be an animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (August).

The Summer Box Office 2022: A Commercial Consideration

Labor Day has come and gone, marking the end of summer, and making it possible to appraise the season in full.

Doing so it looks like there were no big surprises since the last post on the subject--the box office is recovering, but not all the way back to normal, with a particularly weak August underlining the fact. In 2022 dollars the average take in that month in 2015-2019 was a little over $1 billion. By contrast the August of 2022 took in less than half that much ($467 million). Added to the preceding months this made for a take of about $3.4 billion for the May-August period--as against $5 billion or so in a typical year after one adjusts the old figures for inflation.

In short, the box office revenue remained at least a third down from the usual for the four month period. (I emphasize "at least" because in so many of those prior years a mega-release in very late April took in as much as hundreds of millions that would have ordinarily been counted as part of May's take--not a factor in 2022.) However, it seems worth reiterating that this seems a reflection of the year's weaker than usual slate--not least in the season's having had a mere four big live-action action-adventure blockbusters rather than the usual eight or more, three of which turned out to be less than the performers some might have hoped for because of their various disadvantages. The two of those four belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe bespoke the decadence of a franchise already heavily mined for more than a decade. (Thus was it with the self-referential Dr. Strange 2--the plot of which may have more bound up with a small-screen annex of the saga than was a good bet for what had to be a general audience entertainment, while as with so many worn-out series' Thor proved self-parodying enough to likewise leave many less than pleased.) Meanwhile the third installment in the second Jurassic Park trilogy ended that once-mighty saga with a whimper rather than a bang.

The small number of films meant that not only was there less of what people expect to see in the summer but that the roll-out had run its course by early July with Thor 4's debut--where in other years it continues down into late July and often early August (one reason why August 2022 was so lackluster compared with its predecessors, not least the August of 2016 that had such a big boost from the early August launch of Suicide Squad). Of course, those films could have benefited from the lack of competition by their individually getting that much more custom than they would have in a more crowded summer--but this likely only really happened for one of them, Top Gun 2, to go by the extraordinary legs that added so powerfully to its take (the movie making $42 million in its third month of theatrical play, which counted toward its mighty $700 million haul by Labor Day, almost four and a half times what it took in over its holiday weekend debut in an extreme rarity these days). Again that movie proved that single films can still be hits on as grand a scale as in the pre-pandemic period, but all the same, there is that gap in the earnings--if plausibly because Hollywood's release schedule, after all the chaos to which production and distribution has been subject, and all the disappointments of 2020 and 2021, has not yet caught up with the readiness to go to the movies (I think, quite understandably).

Still, it seems plausible that the summer of 2023, which looks like it has the first really "normal" summer release slate since 2019 (Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10, Transformers 6, Indiana Jones 5, Mission: Impossible 7, Captain Marvel 2, Meg 2--plus new DC Comics-verse movies about the Blue Beetle and the Flash, not counting animated superhero epics that include a Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel and yet another big-screen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the opposite of the pattern in a live-action version of the animated classic The Little Mermaid, etc., etc., etc.), could, in the absence of further disasters, bring in the kind of overall gross to which the studios and theater chains have grown accustomed.

And of course, coming on top of the other virtually indistinguishable films squeezed into the preceding four months (more Marvel films in Kraven the Hunter and Ant-Man 3, another DC film in Shazaam 2, John Wick 4, yet another attempt to make a hit movie out of Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, another Super Mario Brothers movie three decades after the virtually forgotten first attempt), and the four months to follow (from Marvel Madame Web, a reboot of Blade and a sequel to Aquaman; a Willy Wonka prequel, a sequel to the recent Ghostbusters sequel, a fourth installment in the rebooted Star Trek series, a Star Wars film from Taikia Watiti, etc., etc., etc.), it will give those who are weary of the torrent of sequels and prequels, remakes and spin-offs abundant opportunity for, as Fred Costanza might call it, "the airing of grievances."

Those so inclined of course have my deepest sympathies--and may feel entirely free to do such airing in the comment thread.

The Schoolteacher as Failure: A Perennial Pop Cultural Theme

With a new school year upon us it seems natural that the talk is turning again to the matter of the schools--with that talk lent an additional edge by widely circulated reports of a teacher shortage approaching crisis levels, and the possibility of a mass exodus from the teaching profession as a growing possibility in the near term, or even already in its beginnings.

Whatever one makes of the actual severity of the present situation, and the likelihood of its escalating into a collapse of the educational system, the fact remains that it has meant some renewal of attention to teachers' discontents.

Not the least of them is how little respect teachers, especially primary and secondary school teachers, get in the United States.

There is a lot to talk about here, but one aspect of the matter that has caught my eye as both meriting comment while getting little attention is how pop culture tends to portray teachers as having failed in their lives somehow. Breaking Bad's Walter White is an excellent example--the fact that he is teaching high school chemistry in itself indicative of how far the onetime Sandia Labs scientist and almost near-billionaire has fallen in the world, with his having to wash his students' cars to top off his meager teaching income likewise topping off his indignity.

Others were making the point long before that--and more explicitly--with Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's classic thriller Fail-Safe worth citing. There the political scientist Groteschele, who is haunted by the memory of his onetime surgeon father's having been forced to make his living as a butcher after his immigration to the United States, in a moment in which he has become fearful for his career, speculates about the "academic equivalent of his father's butcher-shop job" and concludes that it would be "grade-school teacher to a bunch of idiot children."

One even sees the attitude presented in rather lighter fare, with a notable example the Dan Schneider sitcom Victorious episode "Tori Tortures Teacher," in which former actor and high school drama teacher Erwin Sikowitz's students take him to a play for his tenth-year anniversary as a teacher--and the play turns out to be about a man miserable in his life because instead of realizing his dreams he has been a high school teacher for ten years, right after which Sikowitz displays fairly extreme signs of distress.

Unlike White, and (probably) even more unlike Groteschele had worse come to worst, Sikowitz tells a now anxious and guilt-ridden Tori (truthfully) that he is very happy being a teacher, that he actually loved the play and that his distress was actually caused by something else (his girlfriend breaking up with him by text during the play, which, as it is Sikowitz, left him saddened for reasons other than what would normally be expected). But all the same the idea that a teacher is "just" a teacher is there, and even in this age of supposed hypersensitivity to every social concern and alleged hand-wringing over every offense to some group or other it seems likely, and telling, that no one thought anything of putting it into a show (at least ostensibly) made for children who will be dealing with teachers every day for many years to come.

Of course, if all this depicts disrespect do I think the writers were being disrespectful? Quite frankly, no. They were simply, realistically, I think, acknowledging the disrespect society at large feels toward the profession--which, in its various manifestations (including the very material manifestation of low pay compared with other jobs in which people put similar education to use), makes it a "last resort" for far more people than acknowledge the fact in a culture which deflects any talk of the hard facts of work, its conditions and the monetary compensation without which people cannot live with smarmy talk of "Do it for the children!"-type idealism and service that they would never dare to pull on medical doctors.

Ray Kurzweil's Predictions About Education

A generation on Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines still stands as perhaps the most influential single book to come out of the '90s-era boom in transhumanist, posthumanist and Singularitarian thought. This is partly a function of its author's having had a particularly high mainstream profile compared with his peers (it is one of the ironies of life as a public intellectual that only those who are already receiving attention have their remarks noticed, never mind treated with any respect--the media just like the man looking for his lost car keys under the light), but also a testament to the book's relative breadth and comprehensiveness, which included explicit forecasts for 2009, 2019 and later dates that were much talked about at the time, and remembered as sufficiently interesting to be revisited since.

In considering those forecasts one must acknowledge that the apparent thought put into them varied greatly. Kurzweil's predictions regarding concrete technological developments only a short way removed from his field of specialty in computing tended to be solidly grounded, even when they were not correct--Kurzweil premising them on neural nets enabling increasingly high-quality pattern recognition--such that they still have some interest years later. (The apparent explosion of progress in artificial intelligence in the '10s, after all, was largely a function of this—a belated consequence of researchers getting faster computers and easy access to vast content via broadband Internet, but still a validation of his case for the potential of neural nets to achieve the ends he described.) He was less impressive when making predictions in the social realm on which he seems less expert, and frankly rather conventional, such that his work is more interesting as a relic of the '90s than anything else. (Thus does it go with his forecasts regarding the international political system and war, Kurzweil having rather complacently predicted interstate conflict finished in a world of enduring U.S. hegemony, with armed conflict reduced to computer security and drone wars against terrorist groups in the next decade, and only continuing to wither after that.)

Other predictions fell in between those two extremes, like Kurzweil's discussion of education in that book, which given the issue's higher than usual profile right now seems more than usually timely.

Revisiting the predictions in Spiritual Machines I find that, in line with his other anticipations, Kurzweil predicted that electronic displays--generally of the tablet type--would be well on their way to supplanting paper documents of all kind, and speaking the primary mode of text creation; software increasingly handling the actual teaching (imparting information, explaining what has not been understood, testing and reinforcing learning); and human instructors "attend[ing] primarily to issues of motivation, psychological well-being, and socialization" by 2009. Ten years on in 2019 direct-eye displays would have replaced the tablets in a situation where paper would have become all but residual, while human teachers would be "monitors and counselors" instead of "sources of learning and knowledge."

Of course, as in so many other ways, our actual 2019 proved to be far behind Kurzweil's 2009. The tablet did not become commercialized for many years after that--and by the way proved a flop, the cell phone remaining the standard computational device for the student, it seems, which has been all the more reason why paper has remained so important. Meanwhile, the incorporation of educational software has yet to go anywhere near so far, especially at the higher levels of instruction, in part because of its limited capacity for really individualized response. As a result the primary job of the instructor is not acting as a monitor or counselor, but still actually teaching.

Indeed, underlining the distance between Kurzweil's predictions and our reality has been his treatment of the matter of remote learning, which he takes quite as increasingly the norm over this time frame. Instead in early 2020 we all discovered how little had been done in this area as in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic much of the world switched its school systems over to this mode--with results that have been undeniably awkward and deeply controversial, and a large body of opinion demanding a "return to normal" regardless of the dangers possibly entailed for children, school staff and society at large.

One aspect of what one might flatteringly call the "discourse," not often foregrounded, was the situation's bearing out the more cynical view of what schools do--rather than impart education, keep children from getting into trouble while their parents are at work. If they don't do the job someone else has to sit and watch them, a task in an age of atomized nuclear families and single parent households apt to fall on mom or dad--with all that means for an adult work force that, to the displeasure of employers, to a significant degree switched over to remote work and has been resistant to the move back to the old norm bosses so clearly want to make happen. The result is that even were remote learning as good as, even better than, the old way in its purely academic results, it would still fail to be an adequate "babysitter"--and it can seem all too telling that Kurzweil failed to consider that.

The World of Publishing in Balzac's Lost Illusions

Not long ago I had occasion to discuss Jack London's classic novel Martin Eden here, and in particular its brilliant conveyance of what it is actually like to try and make a living as a writer. I could not help but think of that aspect of the book as I read my way through Honore de Balzac's classic three-decker novel Lost Illusions (1837-1843), one of the narrative threads of which is Lucien Chardon's attempt to make a career for himself as a poet and novelist in the Bourbon Restoration era.

Of course, important differences exist between the works. Where London captured the experience of being a writer, Balzac, if affording some memorable bits regarding that end of things (not least the reaction of a callow young author to the discovery that publishers say they read their work when they haven't even looked at it), offered a broader and fuller vision of that business of which Martin was never in a position to see very much. In this it helps that Lucien is, in the relevant portion of the story, physically present at the heart of the French publishing world in Paris, and dealing with the leading figures in that world face to face on many an occasion, so that unlike Martin Lucien never need wonder if those to whom he would submit his manuscripts are actual people rather than some form rejection-letter generating piece of machinery. The result is an unequaled treatment of "the realities of the craft, the practical difficulties of the trade," as effective as it is because of its attentiveness to the "social machinery at work" "behind the scenes in the theatre of literature," which the newcomer to this world has to "learn to see by bumping against the wheels and bruising [himself] against the shafts, and chains" of that machinery.

As Lucien learns from the publishers' own mouths publishers are not in the business for "amusement," and certainly no "stepping-stone to future fame" for aspiring authors like Lucien, but "speculators in literature" who are out "to make money"--"the monument reared with your life-blood . . . simply a good or a bad speculation for a publisher" that is only "so much capital to risk." And due to the necessities of "bring[ing] out a name and . . . induc[ing] the public to take up an author and his book" the mediocrity, or worse than mediocrity, who nonetheless has a "reputation" that can be "bought ready-made," however expensively, is a better risk than even an obviously brilliant unknown asking for a pittance, "[t]he manuscripts for which [such] give a hundred thousand francs pay[ing] better than work by an unknown author who asks six hundred." (After all, as increasingly becomes apparent to Lucien and those who follow him on his journey, the broad public sees "success," but not what alone permits it to happen--"the preparations, ugly as they always are," like "the claqueurs hired to applaud"--the good review, the favorable "buzz," all up for sale, and their purchase an ugly necessity.)

Even early on Lucien can only ask one of these men "how could a man publish his first book at all?" when that is the case--to which the man lecturing him sneers that "That is not my affair." The answer is that one has to depend on chance, which has the most depressing of implications for those in whose lives "chance plays no part," which is no random thing, for "there are no chances except for men with a very wide circle of acquaintance; chances of success of every kind increase with the number of your connections; and, therefore, in this sense also the chances are in favor of the big battalions"--those who know the rich and powerful and highly placed because they are themselves rich and powerful and highly placed; those who already have "distinguished names" who can make names for themselves, those who already have money who can hope to make (more) money in this line; so that the author who is not of the elite, who hopes to make a name and a living as an author on the basis of only their talent and work--and certainly to get rich and famous by being an author rather than becoming an author by being rich and famous--faces a pretty bleak prospect.

Moreover, the intelligent reader cannot take comfort in the thought that the system will at least permit "cream to rise" if it can get past these (gigantic, for most virtually invincible) barriers, for the author "of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads," and only comes to be appreciated with time, too long for the speculators, "dealers in printed paper" who "do do not care to take real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly," and "would sooner take the rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a masterpiece which requires time to sell." (Indeed, lest one imagine that the unsalability of poetry is a latterday phenomenon, young Lucien personally hears the fact declared by one of those publishers himself: anyone who comes into his establishment and says that they bring him a work of poetry one to be "show[n] . . . the door at once," for "Verses mean reverses in the booktrade.")

If Balzac could seem hard on publishers Balzac is just as hard on authors--"the most brutal bookseller in the trade . . . not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day," terrified as they are of a "possible rival," no, no help likely to come from this direction either. Nor, even, can one hope for much solace from their nearest and dearest, for just as "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success," it is the case that"[i]n the home circle, as in the world without, success is a necessity"--family, by whom "[a] man with a career before him is never understood," and indeed second to none in the severity of their judgment on a lack of "success," looking at their relation who has not "made it" as not merely someone who perhaps did not get their chance, but as one who had been weighed and measured and found wanting, the world right in its assessment and their dear one wrong, a failure who deserved to be so. Amid all that it is far less likely that the caterpillar will become a butterfly, so to speak, than that the "life is crushed out of the grubs before they reach the butterfly stage"--their efforts wasted, their potentials unrealized, and very likely their souls damaged or even destroyed, even if they do happen to make it. ("Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," Lucien realizes in a moment of clarity.) Indeed, Lucien's aspirations to a career as a poet are crushed out so forcefully so early on that he opts to makes his career as part of the "machinery" instead. ("Unconsciously he gave up the idea of winning fame in literature, for it seemed easier to gain success" as a hack journalist--and alas discovered the way here, too, so treacherous that he ended up sitting before his sister defeated, setting the stage for even worse to come. Much, much worse.)

Of course, it is a truism today that publishing is a business--but most who say this do so in brushing off some other person's painful experience, excusing the brutality with which they have been treated and so participating in it, worsening it, and all that usually without understanding what it means for publishing to actually be a business. By contrast it would be a very stupid reader indeed who came away from having read all of Lost Illusions without "getting it" (that publishing is a capitalist enterprise to publishers and only that, regardless of what they, their spokespersons and their sycophants in the media say; that publishers have no interest in cultivating new authors; that for an "ordinary" person however talented the way in is nearly impossible, critical acclaim another commodity to be purchased, and not even their loved ones likely to support them in what is almost certain to be a futile struggle, etc., etc., etc.). For the book gives us so much truth so plainly and forcefully that if those who ordinarily give the public their information about such things ever cracked open a book rather than just talking about them they would denounce it in a rage exceeded only by their stupidity, just as they denounce anyone who would speak any of this book's truths in public today, the same way the conventional denounce anyone who challenges the propaganda for the world as one great big meritocracy where talent and hard work pay off and those who have not done well have no one to blame but themselves. Which, I suppose, makes it not such a bad thing that the self-important but actually ever less important opinion-makers of such type never do crack open a book, let alone any book that is really worth reading.

Keir Starmer, Centrist

Robin McAlpine recently penned an interesting piece on the politics of current United Kingdom Labour Party leader Keir Starmer.

Not so long ago I addressed those politics on the basis of two of Starmer's major statements to the public (his February 2020 leadership contest pledges, and his February 2021 "New Chapter for Britain" speech). Here McAlpine offers a broader assessment with the benefit of greater hindsight (if, alas, not too much in the way of specifics).

McAlpine writes that Starmer, who has apparently endeavored to make himself known as "Mr. Rules," "views society as a transaction undertaken between an elite ruling class and a vast class of plebs and the job of a politician as to keep well out of that relationship except in the case of emergency," with that defined not as "starving children," but rather "enough starving children to risk the stability of the system in a way which might cause a breakdown in the relationship between the elite and the plebs," which is to say that "[h]e is there to protect the powerful, which means once in a while they might need to be protected from themselves, briefly."

This transactional view, with the politician as rule-minded mediator among contending interests, and whose highest priority must be maintaining stability via minimalistic adjustments that, at their most feather-ruffling, may occasionally entail compromise the elite may not love, rather than any vision for the country (of making it more just, etc.), is the very essence of "civil," "pluralist," centrist politics--which, of course, are fundamentally and deeply conservative in the political philosophy sense of the term, whatever those who get their information about what words like "conservative" mean from cable news may think.

McAlpine's rather concise summation of that centrism (even if, admittedly, he never uses the word) is, appropriately, rounded out by what centrism has come to in this era, with Britain since Tony Blair no exception, namely a "supply-side" mentality in which said politician "should be facilitating the elite as the way to get 'the best deal' for the plebs" (or at least, that's what they tell everyone), and one might add, his observation that commentators for a publication like the Guardian demand exactly that when they use punditocrat weasel words like "credibility."

Others, however--McAlpine among them--find this kind of credibility not very credible at all, especially in these crisis-ridden times in which centrism, for all its highly touted pragmatism and knack for forging compromises, looks more rigidly ideological than ever before.

Why it's So Hard to Make Sense of the Reports of a Mass Exodus From the Teaching Profession

As a new school year begins the education system is again in the headlines, with much talk of fed-up teachers leaving the profession on such a scale as to warrant the term "crisis"--and the press doing its usual lousy job of explaining the topic. Various pieces have given us various numbers to support their assessment of the situation, but per usual little or none of the context that would clarify their meaning. We are told again and again that x numbers of teachers' quit, that there are so many thousand vacant positions in this or that state. But we could only really know if that signals a crisis if we have something to compare those numbers to--numbers that would tell us what the situation is like in "normal" times.

Indeed, I had to spend a lot of time trudging through a lot of the coverage before I came across Derek Thompson's piece in The Atlantic baldly asserting that "[c]omprehensive national data on teacher-turnover rates (the share of teachers who quit each year) . . . are simply not available, or don't go back far enough to tell us whether this year is different."

In other words, Thompson reports that the statistics that would give us the standard just don't exist because no one has bothered to collect the data, or at least, compute the relevant information.

However, I think the key word there is "comprehensive." While a rigorously constructed time series for the country as a whole would be ideal I have found it easy to locate patchier data covering particular years that may or may not be representative, and particular localities, which suggest a rate of perhaps 8 percent a year. As there are some 3.5 million primary and secondary school teachers in the U.S., that would work out to something in the range of 250,000-300,000 teachers leaving the profession in a normal year. This pattern would seem confirmed in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection that some 270,000 primary and secondary-school teachers would be leaving the profession annually in 2016-2026.

If we go by those estimates then one would expect the standard for a post-pandemic elevation of the rate to mean 300,000+ departing each year, and perhaps many more.

For what it is worth, the Wall Street Journal reports a departure of a mere 300,000 public school staff of all kinds (and therefore, not all of them teachers) in the entire February 2020 to May 2022 period.

It is possible that there are other, different estimates--but so far I have not seen any other statistics purportedly addressing the matter as delineated in precisely that way (departures from K-12 teaching over the whole time frame).

In their absence taking that claim at face value it would seem that quits have actually been few in number relative to a normal period.

I have to admit that I find what may actually be a decline in departures from the profession on the part of teachers deeply counterintuitive, given the elevation of quit rates in general that has given rise to talk of a Great Resignation; given the reality that even before the pandemic there was considerable discontent with conditions in the teaching profession; and that the stresses of the pandemic must have had some negative effect on the willingness of those in the job to stay in it.

However, it may be the case that other factors are offsetting all that.

One may be what has been said by some analysts of the Great Resignation--that much of it is about people leaving a job they don't like to take another, more attractive, job, in the same line of work. Teachers who quit a job at one school and take up a job at another school they think will be more congenial would not count as leaving the profession--even as their departures create difficulties for the schools they left, with the less attractive places to work plausibly suffering disproportionately (and indeed, we are told that poorer school districts, and rural and urban districts, are suffering relative to affluent suburban districts offering better pay and conditions).

Another factor may be that, as their relatively high unionization, and perhaps rising militancy, suggest, many teachers have some inclination to try and bargain collectively for a better deal rather than take their individual chances with the market (certainly as against private-sector computer programmers).

Moreover, one should remember--even if not every writer of such articles seems to do so--that the sense of the situation being one of crisis is as much a matter of what people have been told might happen as what actually has happened. If there has as yet been no "mass exodus" from the profession, some, pointing to an abundance of polling data in which teachers report that they are seriously thinking about quitting, that these accumulating stresses will come to a head in exactly that fashion. The significance of the data is difficult to ascertain, as it is far from clear how many can or will act on such thoughts--but it seems safe to say the entry into this more speculative territory has permitted that much more room for the play of fear and prejudice about the matter, with results all too predictable across the ideological spectrum.

Top Gun 2's Box Office Run: Further Thoughts

With the second week of August already upon us it seems fair to say that Top Gun: Maverick has taken the box office crown for the season (and perhaps, the year). Not only did it have an extraordinary opening weekend exceeding even the high expectations for it, taking in over $160 million over the 4-day period. Its legs have been extraordinary, especially late in its run, the film's grosses eroding only very slightly from week to week. The result is that where its merely doubling its opening weekend would have been respectable, it has already grossed four times that sum, with its take still climbing--according to Box Office Mojo, some $662 million in the bank as of last Sunday, after an $7 million gross in that eleventh weekend in theaters (a mere 17 percent down from the $8.4 million of the prior tenth weekend). The result is that where even fairly late into its run I had expected it to top out at a (spectacular) $550 million, that late-stage resilience makes it now appear quite capable of finishing north of the (even more spectacular) $700 million mark.

Just why has this film so totally proven an outlier? Certainly it has helped that the media has been very much on its side. Nevertheless, the public had to be responsive to the push--and it was rather more so than I expected given what seemed to me the film's many liabilities in the present market (the sheer passage of time since the first Top Gun, the exhaustion of '80s nostalgia after so many years of its exploitation, the habituation of the public to more fantastical and CGI-driven blockbusters, etc.). Where this is concerned some have made much of the fact that Paramount eschewed the recent practice announcing a streaming date for the film, discouraging a critical part of the audience from just waiting and catching their film at home a few weeks later, increasing theatrical attendance. Perhaps. However, it seems to me that there is at least one obviously important factor generally getting overlooked, namely the weakness of the competition this summer. Instead of the usual eight-plus big action movies we typically saw through 2019 the summer of 2022 had just four, with the other three less than stellar performers by summer champion standards--helping clear the way for Top Gun 2 to do as well as it did by encouraging repeat business that would probably not have happened had there been more choices for fans of big-screen action.

The Summer 2022 Box Office: A Hopefully Not-Too-Early Assessment

With August upon us the summer film season is fast drawing to a close--the more in as the last really big release, Thor: Love and Thunder, is already a month behind us, making it not too early to make some assessment of how the season has gone that will look better than premature and wildly off the mark come the "official" end of summer on Labor Day Weekend.

A bit of simple math indicates that in the months of May, June and July the North American box office took in some $2.9 billion. How does that stack up against prior years? Simply adjusting the Box Office Mojo numbers for inflation as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics one gets an average of about $4.2 billion for the May-July period in 2015-2019--with the figure arguably conservative because of how simply bumping the first summer release back into early April, as an ever more aggressive Disney-Marvel did with Avengers 3 and 4 in 2018 and 2019, takes a big chunk out of the summer's earnings. (Avengers: Endgame picked up $427 million in the last five days of April 2019, which if added to the year's total would have raised it by about an eighth--from $3.35 to $3.8 billion before the adjustment for today's higher ticket prices--and of course 2022 saw nothing of the kind.)

The result is that this year the box office did about two-thirds as well as the average for those years. It might be added that July did a better than that--its $1.13 billion take about three-quarters of the July average for 2015-2019 (of $1.46 billion). That is far superior to how it did back in 2021, when you had MCU movies, F9 and the rest making at best half their expected earnings (and the whole three month period barely equaled the July earnings, with just under $1.2 billion in current dollars). But to claim that the situation has returned to the pre-pandemic norm would still be exaggerating things a good deal.

Of course, in considering that fact one has to admit that the release slate was not quite the same as in those prior years. Where 2015-2019, on average, had eight really big, brand name, live-action action-adventure films playing in theaters in the relevant period (DC/Marvel superhero stuff, spy-fi stuff of the Mission: Impossible/Jason Bourne/Fast and Furious franchises, etc.), 2022 had only four by my count (Dr. Strange 2, Top Gun 2, Jurassic World: Dominion, Thor 4), and of these only Top Gun 2 went "above and beyond" expectations (while Dr. Strange was merely respectable, Jurassic World 3 the weakest earner in the trilogy, and Thor arguably an underperformer). And it seems to me that there is at least an argument to be made that the comparative weakness of the summer slate reflects justifiable caution on the part of the studios as much as it does a cause of the summer's lackluster grosses by pre-pandemic standards.

Has Top Gun 2 Really "Saved the Movies?"

In Indiewire Tom Brueggemann made the case that Top Gun 2 has "saved the movies." His argument goes that in a Hollywood which has thrown over stars for franchises, and these overwhelmingly of the CGI-loaded "media" sci-fi type (comic book superheroes, Star Wars, etc.), Top Gun: Maverick has scored far and away the summer's and the year's biggest success with an old-fashioned star-driven vehicle without the superhero and other trappings--suggesting there is still room for other kinds of content.

It is an interesting idea. But I couldn't help noticing that where those other films Mr. Brueggemann talked about as having previously achieved the feat--Easy Rider, Jaws, Star Wars, etc.--generally brought something new to the screen, Top Gun 2 was pointedly old-fashioned --and, I think, hardly proved that its old-fashioned success was replicable. It seems telling that we are talking about a movie not with some newly minted star (there aren't any, and it's far from clear that there can be) but a star of the '80s who has sustained his career in part through franchise films (the Mission: Impossible sequels keeping his name on the marquee through thick and thin, while in 2017 he got involved with Marvel's Dark universe via the remake of the remake of The Mummy), without which he might not still be a star. It also seems telling that the film is still an action movie sequel milking '80s nostalgia, not so different on that level from, for instance, many of Michael Bay's Transformers movies--what is old here less completely a throwback than it may seem at first glance.

Indeed, I suspect that rather than bringing back the old-style star-driven film the movie will be remembered as a last hurrah for that type of film, not least because I do not see the studios rushing back to the old star-driven model, put off by its comparative unpredictability, as well as for lack of prospects as promising as a Tom Cruise-starring sequel to Top Gun. (As we have seen time and again, putting other '80s stars into follow-ups to their hits of that era—Stallone in a new Rambo, Schwarzenegger in a new Terminator--does not get the studios very far, and nor will putting Cruise in Rain Man Revisited or Jerry Maguire II.) In fact, its principal legacy that way will probably be to induce Paramount to convert Top Gun into yet another franchise while it is still hot—with what result, I cannot say.

Is the MCU Finally Wearing Out its Welcome?

Reading the criticisms of Thor: Love and Thunder--in particular the remarks about its tonal incoherence, and its shift into self-parody--I find myself recognizing complaints fairly standard about series' that have run too long. (I find myself thinking of, for example, the more oft-criticized Bond films of the Roger Moore era--The Man With the Golden Gun, Moonraker, A View to a Kill.) And it must be admitted that this seems unsurprising at this stage in the history of the franchise--Love and Thunder the fourth Thor movie, while also the eighth major film appearance for the (rather thin and one-note) character, and the twenty-ninth Marvel Cinematic Universe film overall in its fifteen year run. And considering the fact I can't help noting that if the film is no flop in the ordinary sense of the term, it is the case that it has fallen well short of the expectations some market-watchers had for it--and a reminder that if the Marvel Cinematic Universe can still score very, very big (with Spider-Man: No Way Home a near $2 billion hit, and Dr. Strange pulling in a respectable near-billion dollars after coming out a mere two months earlier), the most formidable franchise in film history is showing all too predictable signs of tiring out--with the pandemic and the culture wars and the actual wars "deglobalizing" the film market (with Russia and China, long good for $100 million+ and sometimes much more per Marvel movie, closing their doors to Hollywood) have played their part, filmgoers' enthusiasm for Marvel specifically, simply as entertainment, may be suffering.

In spite of that the Marvel machine will persist, however--Disney far too invested to back off, the more in as it has already floundered with the Star Wars universe that it tried so hard but ultimately failed to make a second Marvel-like success.

Reflections on Jack London's Martin Eden

When I first picked up Jack London's Martin Eden my first thought was of its being an inversion of his earlier The Sea-Wolf. Where that novel saw a cultured bourgeois plunged into the world of rough sailors and forced to survive in it, Martin Eden had a rough sailor plunged into the world of the cultured bourgeoisie and trying to survive in that. And certainly the novel is describable in such terms--and successful in such terms. Indeed, as a portrait of a working-class man coming into contact with "culture" the treatment of the eponymous character in Martin Eden is far, far more convincing and powerful than E.M. Forster's handling of Leonard Bast in Howard's End--the Bloomsbury crowd of which Foster was a part existing in a milieu so genteel that a persuasive image of a lower-class person was beyond the power of these "great" writers.

However, the novel is also much more than that, with perhaps its biggest surprise its being far and away the most realistic, and truthful, treatment of what it actually is to be a writer—of what it is like to write professionally, and of how society treats those who make the attempt, when they have not become "successful," and when they have become "successful"--that I have ever encountered in literature, period; infinitely more truthful than the utter garbage with which hacks as ignorant as they are insincere, talentless and unskilled, but who got all the breaks in spite of that, fill up our books and screens (where being a writer consists of wearing a smug expression on one's face as they autograph copies of their latest for starstruck fans), and the quite stupid lies with which the whole industries built around exploiting the dreams of authorship that pay far better than authorship ever did ceaselessly ply the public (summed up in five of the most insidious words in the English language, "You can do it too!").

That truthfulness is in large part a matter of the fact that where those writers tend to be at their most stupid, cowardly and dishonest when dealing with the matter of publishing--with these usually what we see is a writer finishing a manuscript, or maybe just beginning it, and BAM!, there they are in that bookshop signing those copies--Jack London, who unlike those people who are not even relevant now is genuinely relevant over a century later because he was not stupid or cowardly or dishonest, faces up to the reality fully. He forthrightly acknowledges that it is one thing to write, another to get published, still another to actually make a living from getting published--with the second challenge, and still more the third, so immense as to make the problem of merely producing a piece of writing, even high quality writing, appear trivial by comparison, especially for those who approach that world as most do, from outside, as outsiders who do "not know any editors or writers," or even "anybody who had ever attempted to write." Indeed, where even the few who admit the existence of obstacles tend to pass over the struggle to surmount them in a few words here it is lengthily dramatized as the heart, meat, core of the days of Eden's life during the period of the story, and treated not as the low comedy so many would make of it, but with the utmost--indeed, tragic--seriousness.

When Martin starts out, the very image of the neophyte, not only was there "nobody to tell him, to hint to him, to give him the least word of advice" about the rules. (Martin actually has to figure out for himself that he must type out the work rather than send it written in longhand--just one little reminder that, contrary to what certain Establishment idiots say, there is no "apprenticeship" to speak of in this process.) It was also the case that, submitting his work over and over and over again Martin "began to doubt that editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it was, a machine . . . a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps." Thus Martin

poured his soul into stories . . . [and] poems, and intrusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put the proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mail-box. It travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.

It was just "like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum," with "the rejection slips . . . complet[ing] the horrible machinelikeness of the process . . . slips printed in stereotyped forms . . . he had received hundreds of them--as many as a dozen or more on each of his earlier manuscripts." It is so dispiriting that he thinks to himself that "[i]f he had received one line, one personal line, along with one rejection of all his rejections, he would have been cheered," but he never saw such a line, "not one editor . . . giv[ing] that proof of existence," so that Martin "could conclude only that there were no warm human men at the other end, only mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the machine."

London shows us, too, the obscene amount of time taken up by that process of merely "feeding the machine" rather than actually writing, and the way that those supposedly small expenses of submission like postage add up, sufficiently so in his case to mean genuine hardship, with absolutely nothing to show for it--just one of many reasons why while he is at the effort there never seems to be time enough in the day, every other interest and pleasure getting crowded out. He shows us the confusion and frustration and sense of injustice the writer feels at seeing so much mediocrity and outright drivel in print, while work no worse and maybe much better gets only the cold contempt of those rejection slips. He shows us what happens when that writer turns their hand to nonfiction, and equally "pour[s] their soul" into it, regardless of what they can offer, the fact that they are a "nobody" rather than a "well-known specialist" retailing the conventionalities of their field makes what they have to say meaningless in any editor's eyes--nothing that he does ever seeming to make any difference whatsoever, offer any escape from "the process" and its horrible and invariably disappointing "machinelikeness."

Meanwhile, in the extreme opposite of those speeches in which tearful award-winners fulsomely give thanks to every person they have ever met in their entire lives for their unremitting support as they clutch their little statuettes, through it all no one supports Martin, no one believes in him, no one is interested. Those who at least attempt to be polite, like his sister, do not understand his work, let alone why he does it--what it means to him, why he cannot fit the square peg that is himself into the round holes society offers the vast majority of its members, why he cannot just reconcile himself to a workaday existence as his lot in life--just telling him to "get a job" (in spite of the fact that he is in no way living off of any of them, in no way a burden to them). Where in a more romanticized recounting of such a story the woman he loves would have been his sole support, here the woman he loves is like all the rest, and indeed more emphatic than all the rest in offering only disinterest and discouragement, endlessly trying to persuade him to give all this up and just "get a job." ("Their highest concept of right conduct . . . was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job!" The reader with any sympathy or empathy for Martin quickly gets as sick as he does of hearing others say it to him--while his experience in the resort laundry underlines just how foolish and glib is so much of the talk about day jobs and writing in one's "spare time.")

No matter how hard he worked at his writing it did not matter, he was "lazy"; and no matter what he produced it did not matter if there was no sale, their respect for the judgments of editors total--and their respect for him the extreme opposite. The editors who may not have existed at all, the editors with their soul-crushing "cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped" rejection slips--they must be right, no one trying to see things his way, no one taking his side any more than they share his enthusiasm, endlessly justifying the shabby and cruel way in which he is being treated.

The indifference of the world, the absolute failure of effort to improve his own lot, the disrespect with which his toil is treated, makes a cruel mockery of the middle-class verities about delayed gratification, hard work, and the rest--and while I suspect that few indeed get past the experience of the first half of the book, in which Martin has sold absolutely nothing, there is no less truth in the second half, in which Martin starts to make sales. There is how it may be a long time between that positive reply and actually getting the money promised--perhaps so long a time as "never." There is the way that first little success or two, rather than a watershed, so frequently proves to be nothing of the kind, followed up by nothing else for a long time--and in that time that writer clings desperately to that tiny success too small to improve their situation in any way. If more checks come, eventually, the "old-time thrill at receiving" a check would be gone, for it would no longer be "pregnant with promise of great things to come," just a bit of money that might let them pay a bill so that they can continue grinding along in poverty.

And there is in that a hint of how the long train of disappointments, the brutalization of it all, far from making the victory sweeter in the manner of the "uplifting," aspirational garbage which Martin himself sees through early on, deprives later success of any sweetness it may have. Indeed, while stories of artists, fiction and nonfiction, always seem to me to become unreal when they tell of how they become "successful"--the grit and the texture of the early part of the story falling by the wayside as they seem to lose touch with reality, because in a sense they have (their head turned by what has happened to them, their self-awareness failing them), there was for me palpable truth in that last act in which Martin genuinely does find success--when the material that had so often been insulted in the past inexplicably, suddenly, brings him large paydays. Where most in such a situation, in life as in fiction, think "At last my hard work and perseverance have paid off! At last my genius has been recognized!"

Martin, being a deeper thinker and more feeling human being, has a different reaction. The profound disconnect between the effort he put in and the quality of his work, and the way the world treats him, has swung from one extreme to the other, plays its part in destroying him. Thus does Martin think again and again in that last act about how when he was doing that celebrated work, when he had even finished that work, he received only contempt, now that he had riches and fame everyone sought after him, everyone honored him, because it was riches and fame they sought after and honored, not his work--this the "bourgeois valuation of a man" that has the bourgeoisie showering dinner invitations upon him. (Back when "he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine . . . no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners . . . dinners were thrust upon him right and left.") Indeed, the very Morses who had disdained his earlier, honorable courtship of their daughter, contrived against it and compelled her to break it off peremptorily at the first opportunity, were, now that he was a man of fortune, ready to pimp her to him (her brother Norman escorting her to Martin's hotel, where she goes up to his room and lies about having defied her family to see him, offering him "free love" if that is all he will accept) in the ultimate commentary on what thinkers like London thought of the highly touted "bourgeois morality" in sex.

It all disgusts and demoralizes him. Everything he had believed in, his values and goals and accomplishments, are deprived of meaning--the admiration he felt for those who lived in what at the start seemed to him that higher, more beautiful world of not just material comfort but culture, the faith he had in his work and the possibility that others might value it as he did, the love he had for Ruth, or thought he had (Martin realizes in that shabby last meeting that he had loved "an idealized Ruth . . . an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems," and never "[t]he real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind") in the earlier part of the tale when in relation to all these things he seemed eons younger and more naive. The end of all that is the end of his capacity to create, which leaves him at an end, literally. "What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own life?" Martin asked earlier in the narrative--but that is exactly the course he ends up following.

Indeed, thinking again of The Sea-Wolf I cannot help thinking of how in that book Humphrey Van Weyden, thrust into horrible circumstances aboard the ship the Ghost, managed to not just survive but triumph heroically. By contrast, Martin Eden (whom it would seem from the hints of his recollections of such episodes as his voyage on the John Rogers had himself survived horrors to compare with it), thrust into "bourgeois civilization," failed to do so. Of course, this was most fundamentally a matter of London's world-view, and especially his stance toward Nietzschean would-be superman-type individualism. It was not Humphrey who held such views, but the Ghost's captain Wolf Larsen, who extraordinary a man as he was in mind, body and will, was utterly destroyed in the end by the falsity of the ideology by which he endeavored to live--as Martin Eden was to be, that would-be superman, even in excellent physical health under conditions of life that could only be called luxurious, unable to endure in a world deprived of all meaning for him. Yet it also seems to me a suggestion that, horrific as life aboard the Ghost was, it was in at least some critical way less vile than that world in which Martin made his way, his triumph in which proved his undoing.

And thinking of that I find myself remembering the other book I mentioned at the outset of this review, Forster's Howard's End. Where Howard's End remains so esteemed that it is a byword for higher culture even for those who have never come within a million miles of actually reading Forster, most, in London's own country, at least, seem to remember London mainly as a teller of animal stories--and it seems that this has more than a little to do with London's truths being of a kind the opinion-making Establishment critics have not been prepared to accept, and indeed become less able to accept over time. This seems to me to validate EVERY SINGLE WORD London had to say about them in this book. Indeed, considering that fact it seems all the more fitting that one of Martin Eden's themes is how little intellect is actually to be found among society's designated intellectuals, how little culture among the designated cultured--and how much more of both these things can sometimes be found in working-class ghettoes than in the snobbish salons of the ever-middlebrow haute bourgeoisie.

Canceling Batgirl

I have long since stopped paying much attention to what is said about movies that has not been long since completed and so close to a proper, firm, reasonably unmovable release date as to be virtually immovable--in part because since the outbreak of the pandemic things have gone according to plan that much less often, making early claims about them (a good many of which are stupidities and outright lies anyway) much less meaningful.

Still, the news about Batgirl caught me by surprise. This film, which has a budget I have seen reported as variously in the $70 million to $100 million range was actually in post-production when Warner Brothers Discovery (the parent company of the backer, Warner Brothers) decided it was not going to come out. At all. Even on streaming.

Why has this been the case? Apparently the film, which cost as much as it did because of pandemic-related disruption and delay, is, according to the logic now prevailing with a recently changed company management at WBD, "neither big enough to feel worthy of a major theatrical release nor small enough to make economic sense in an increasingly cutthroat streaming landscape." Basically, the company is walking back from the idea of Warner Brothers making expensive content for streaming, instead reemphasizing theatrical release--where this relatively modest production (next to the "tentpoles" that cost several times as much to make) is a weak prospect, such that the additional cost of finishing post-production, marketing, distributing it (easily equaling or exceeding what has already been expended), would likely mean a much worse bottom line than if it had simply cut its losses and taken the tax write-off.

All of this seems to me plausible enough. As we have seen since the pandemic streaming, in any form (e.g. $30 surcharges), is no substitute for theatrical revenues--while the streaming market is indeed saturated. (Remember how Netflix has been taking that beating?) Meanwhile that theatrical release market has been ever more dominated by the really big blockbusters, meaning a comparatively "small" superhero film, in another saturated market, would have a tough time scoring back even that "small" budget. After all, if what is said about the numbers so far is accurate the movie, which may run the studio $200 million when marketing and distribution costs are all counted in, might need to make as much as a half billion to break even on its theatrical run--which would be a long shot even in good times, which these are not. The American box office remains well short of its normal dynamism, and the global box office too (with the Chinese government less likely than before to let Hollywood into its colossal and increasingly critical market).

And just as the prospects are poorer, so is the studio's capacity to take the hit in light of the financial beating that Warner Brothers, like every other studio these days (I dare say, like just about every other company these days), has been taking for over two years as a result of the neverending troubles of the not-so-roaring 2020s (reflected in $3 billion in debt across its divisions, while interest rates head up in a way unseen in decades). Taken altogether this would seem to rather predictably compel a more than usually ruthless attitude on the part of management, perhaps especially in relation to a DC universe that may still look like their best bet for real profitability over the short, medium and even long-term.

So the decision seems to have run: show that the company's new management is serious about its announced strategy, take the tax write-off, and avoid adding yet another black mark to the WB's track record with DC.

Still, if I entirely get the business logic it still seems to me mind-boggling that a near-$100 million movie will get buried like this--the fact that between the commercial logic of the blockbuster, the pandemic and the other factors discussed here the business has come to this pass bespeaking a depressing decadence about the way movies get financed and made these days. The one movie discussed here may or may not represent any great loss to world cinema, but the fact that this is how the game is being played can only make things harder on those trying to actually make movies--and they were more than crushingly, heart-breakingly hard already.

Elizabeth Bennett and the Ideal of the "Accomplished Young Lady"

It is a commonplace to praise Jane Austen for her insight into the "manners" of the society of her time. I have to admit that, as is so often the case with the received wisdom about literary figures of that standing, I found myself a skeptic. Certainly I recognized that Austen has been a font of information about the life of provincial English gentry (I think, for example, of how Thomas Piketty made good use of Sense and Sensibility to explain matters of income, wealth and inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), but her outlook generally struck me as extremely conventional--as tends to be the case with those writers who get to be so exalted, perhaps in the Anglosphere more than elsewhere. (More than the great continental traditions of which I know, for example, those writers occupying the highest pedestals in the English-speaking world tend to be "Establishment poets," with the esteem for Austen in particular oft-noted as a matter of the nostalgia many of the hyper-privileged have for a genteel hierarchical society in which the lower orders are scarcely seen, still less often heard, and even less often mentioned, at least so far as the never very observant elite notices.)

Still, the dialogue about the idea of the "accomplished young lady" in Pride and Prejudice made me rethink that posiiton. Said dialogue began with Mr. Bingley's remarking with characteristic credulousness how it is beyond him that "young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are," for he is "sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished." Of course, his sister and Mr. Darcy proceed to correct his misapprehension, setting a clear standard for what they think ought to merit recognition as "accomplishment," according to which the truly accomplished young lady "must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages," while improving her mind continuously "by extensive reading," and besides this "possess[ing] a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions."

The point made Darcy remarks that he has only met six women in his life who meet this standard of accomplishment--at which declaration Elizabeth Bennett expresses surprise that, with the bar set so high, he can actually ever have met any, for she "never saw such a woman . . . such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united" in a single person.

Predictably Elizabeth's remark did not go over well with that stuffed-shirt Darcy, and a little unpleasantness later the conversation is at an end. Still, as I said, it resonated with me--because of what this "accomplishment" signifies, namely the attainment of a certain leisure-class ideal of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, testifying to great wealth at the disposal of oneself or one's family. After all, where was one to get the time, the money, to become so accomplished, especially without any sort of practical use for all the skills and knowledge acquired so laboriously and expensively in mind? Only a very, very few had all that--such that they were a way of advertising how privileged one was, and gulling the simple into feeling deeply inferior. Moreover, because even the few who have the time and money are not necessarily going to find the actual business of acquiring all the elements of "accomplishment" to their taste, one was unlikely to meet anyone who had it "all," or even came close--while easily encountering a great many pretenders looking to impress simpletons.

That admiration for "accomplishment" of this kind, accomplishment which screams upper-class privilege not in spite of but because of its lack of usefulness; and the belief that such people are in some deep way going far beyond life's wildly unequal distribution of opportunity "superior"; remains very much with us. As much as ever I am struck by how Hollywood hacks, ever the raging conformists no matter how much culture warriors condemn their alleged "liberalism," strive to impress on us the idea that some character--because they are wealthy and of "the elite"--is superior to us in the audience, and to do it in the exact same ways that Bingley and Darcy talked about, like advertising implausible musical or linguistic skills (they always play the piano beautifully, they are always polyglots), or past reading (able to recite literary classics from their invariably photographic memories). Meanwhile, any number of people lie about those things--like their musical knowledge, the number of languages they speak, the reading they have done.

Alas, I suspect very few recognize the soundness of Austen's instincts when she expresses irony toward this fantasy of "accomplished" gentility--and fewer still have the benefit of equally sound instincts as they look at the drivel splashed across the screen today.