The Cult of Intelligence and "Success"

As Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success."

As such a success in this time and place nothing equals wealth and position. Thus do the idiots of the commentariat rush to call any billionaire a "genius," fall all over themselves repeating the acclaim, and fall all over themselves again attacking anyone who disagrees. (Thus did they say so of Jeffrey Epstein, sure that anyone who had some knowledge of math and was on Wall Street and had what seemed like a lot of money was not only a "genius," but sure that his fortune must be the product of his "genius"--and while this stupid view has been called into doubt in Epstein's case the general tendency of the commentariat here remains completely unaltered.)

The other side of the coin here (especially, I suppose, in a society that ignores or denies the realities of social class, and insists that the allotment of life's rewards is entirely meritocratic) is that a person who lacks wealth and position is assumed to not be a "genius," to be ordinary or less than ordinary, in a society that has a very low estimate of what is ordinary--regular folks extras from Idiocracy. The result is that an actual genius without the trappings of success--a common enough thing, one supposes, and probably the lot of most of those who could be called geniuses on this Earth--is assumed to not be a genius, to be an idiot, and get treated as an idiot, their knowledge, reasoning, judgment not only accorded no respect but treated with blatant disrespect, even by their supposed nearest and dearest, and all of it all the more painful for their simultaneously having to watch genuine idiots be hailed as geniuses because of their coming into money and power, at and to society's great cost.

The result is that to be a working class person of intelligence is to spend one's whole life being insulted in this way, as in so many others.

Don't Worry Darling and the Critics

Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, and the Internet Movie Data Base, and everywhere else that provides a forum for the broad film audience to offer an opinion about the movies, one is made painfully aware of the culture wars and their effect on people's responses--with, in a reversal of the once normal pattern of critics being less generous in their appraisals than the general audience, the critics often praising very highly films that the broader audience is less enthusiastic about, and some dislike intensely, with the praise and dispraise both bound up with the perceived cultural politics of the film (i.e. its "wokeness"). All this is so much the case that we hear incessantly of "review bombing," and attempts to manage it, with Rotten Tomatoes making it policy to present two scores from the general audience for theatrically released films, one from people who had their ticket purchases confirmed (apparently, by buying them from Fandango) against the wider audience which did not provide such proof--with the "Verified Audience" score out in front, and the user of the site who wants to see the less filtered "All Audience" score having to deliberately seek that out. (First you click to get the pop-up with the fuller range of options, then you have to click on the appropriate button.)

Consider some of the films of recent years where the disparity has been so striking.

The Last Jedi's critics' score was 91 percent--but the general audience gave the movie a mere 42 percent, an astonishing 49 percent gap.

Ocean's 8 got a 68 percent score from the critics--and a 45 percent score from audiences.

Jordan Peele's Us got a 93 percent score from the critics--and a 60 percent score from audiences.

Captain Marvel's critics' score was 79 percent--as against a general audience score of 45 percent.

Wonder Woman 1984 (a complex case for many reasons) got a 58 percent score from the critics (and 71 percent from the "Top Critics") as against the 40 percent All Audience score.

Turning Red's score was an excellent 95 percent among the critics--as against a general audience score of 71 percent.

And so forth.

Interestingly Don't Worry Darling was the opposite case--a "woke" film that critics trashed while the audience treated it much more favorably--the critics generally giving it a 38 percent score, the Top Critics a worse 24 percent score, against a 75 percent Verified Audience and a 69 percent All Audience score.

Why has Don't Worry Darling been such an exception? One possible explanation is that, as many of the less kind reviews suggest, those who hoped for a bitingly critical film came away feeling they were not given what they promised. Another is that, in light of the poor buzz (some of it very stupid indeed, as with the Seinfeld episode-come-to-life that is "Spitgate") the critics had some leeway to be critical--the more in as there had been so many movies recently that they regarded themselves as obliged to praise, leaving the critics eager to indulge what (allegedly) remains of their (ever feebler) critical faculties.

How Attentive Are Audiences to the Stories of Superhero Films, Really?

Reading Alan Moore's comments about the politics of the superhero film, and what he thinks may be behind the genre's box office popularity, I thought again of a comment by another figure who pointedly satirized the superhero film--Alejandro Inarritu in an interview he gave after making Birdman. He remarked that as both director and father to two daughters he has noticed how they, as representatives of the younger generation, "watch films," and his conclusion about the matter has been that younger viewers especially, but perhaps viewers generally to the extent that they have been taught to experience film in this way, "don't care what it's about. And when you ask them what it's about two weeks later, they don't know. They don't care. It's just about the visuals, the spectacle."

Of course, that is what high concept filmmaking has been all about since its advent a half century ago (evident already in the '60s-era James Bond films, increasingly dominant within Hollywood film from the mid-'70s on), and it seems to me useful to think of superheroes in terms of that. I have generally seen the success of superheroes in recent decades as primarily a cinematic phenomenon, with superhero films as prominent as they are because they fit the demands of commercial film-making so well--their being exceptionally convenient material for spectacular yet accessible sci-fi action spectacle-based franchises--rather than their narratives, whose actual effect on or relevance for most of the public may be slighter than many cultural commentators seem to appreciate. Still, it does not seem unreasonable to acknowledge that those narratives have, at the least, not been a barrier to such success, that they can and do echo other tendencies in the culture--and maybe some effect on a viewer even as they experience the movie as little more than the bombardment of their nervous system by light and sound for two-and-a-half hours, however unconscious.

What Does Alan Moore Mean When He Associates Superheroes With Fascism?

In his recent interview with the Guardian Alan Moore reiterated his discomfort with the way contemporary culture has received the idea of the superhero, with this including what he saw as the political implications of the development, namely that their popularity (or at least, what he thinks is behind their popularity, an "urge toward simpler times, simpler realities") can seem to him a "precursor to fascism."

Of course, "fascism" is a highly controversial term. Recently taking up just the more substantive of common usage in a working paper I actually found it worthwhile to differentiate between how the left, center and right all use it--while along with the differences in its usage across the ideological spectrum I find myself thinking about a different distinction between what one could call the more "materialist" and the more "idealist" understandings of the term. The more materialist observers understand fascism in terms of economics, class and state power, while the more idealist often emphasize fascism's aesthetic element, and especially its tendency toward certain kinds of narrative. One thing they often discuss is fascism's propensity for myth--in the sense of simple stories that presumably tell us how things have always been and always will be--and how its simplicities compare with, for instance, a more complex understanding of the world derived from history and social science (or simply more modern forms of fictional storytelling). For example, they point to how fascist movements often offer a narrative of a golden age now lost due to corruption due to corruption by evil outsiders, but which will be brought back through some act of redemption.

This seems to me to be what Moore has in mind, though one could speak--and others have spoken--of other aspects of the genre as fascist, or at least "fascistic," just as easily. There is, in line with those myths, the worship of demi-god heroes, and the reduction of the rest of the public to passive objects, easily identifiable with fascistic leader-cults in totalitarian societies. There is the reality that superhero fiction is overwhelmingly action/adventure fiction--which, especially when set in this world, easily looks fascistic in both its story structures (centered as it is on self-selected warrior elites and their martial-type values, and extra-legal violent action against enemies of a status quo as its appointed guardians falter, it does not take too much imagination to detect the whiff of the Freikorps here) and its aesthetic (which can seem taken right out of Filippo Marinetti's old Futurist Manifesto: "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness . . . the beauty of speed . . . glorify war").

Of course, for all that superhero stories have at times been more complex in their content--going back all the way to the genre's beginnings, with Moore acknowledging that in his early days Superman was a "New Deal American," and a populist figure rather than an elitist, anti-popular demi-god image. Even if one can argue for the elements that so easily lend superhero hero stories to fascistic narrative having also been there from the start I would also argue that our being so much more attentive to those elements and their implications reflects society's present moment, in which what was harmless fun not so long ago has become a matter of playing with fire.

Pseudo-Mature and Infantilizing? Alan Moore Again

Alan Moore's much-publicized recent interview had me thinking again of other critical statements he has made about the legacy of superheroes on popular culture and culture generally, in particular a 2020 interview in Indiewire, where he stressed that they are '30s-era children's entertainment, still "perfectly good" as such, though "if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque."

Ironically I remember that this point, which isn't made all that often (indeed, gets made less often than I think it should be), was made rather memorably in an episode of Teen Titans Go! ("The Return of Slade"). Here Cyborg and Beast Boy, who have happy childhood memories of party clowns, hire a clown for a party the Titans are having--and then when the clown doesn't prove as entertaining as they thought he would be (forgetting that they were children at the time when they enjoyed such performers) they decide to make him "cool" and "edgy," after which things go very badly indeed (just as Raven, in one of her turns as the voice of reason, warned they would).

Of course, it's very clear that the folks at Warner Bros. did not take their own lesson, the dark-and-gritty-loving artistes of our era doing with the "party clowns" of childhood exactly what Cyborg and Beast Boy did--as their claqueurs, ever faithful to their clients, similarly not taking this lesson, or any other, shower them with applause.

The Professional Critics and the Moviegoers: Clashing Scores on Rotten Tomatoes

I remember that not so long ago we generally expected critics to be tougher on movies than the general audience, and that there seemed abundant reason for this. One was that professional critics were people who had, formally or informally, spent a lot of time studying film (often had been doing so before they took up their reviewing job), giving them a bigger frame of cinematic reference and making them alert to a lot of things to which the general audience is often oblivious, so that less would strike them as very fresh and new and surprising and impressive, in contrast with a public that had simply seen less films, and none at all of certain kinds of films, and watched the films it had seen with less attention, and less of the benefits of instruction in the medium. Another was that, again as professional critics, they were given to reflection on their reactions, to actually explaining and defending their opinions, in contrast with an audience not much given to such reflection. And still another was the fact that, where the general audience picks and chooses the films it is most expectant of enjoying critics see a great many movies they expect to dislike (often correctly), and then having to actually write about them. All of this could be expected to make them less easily satisfied--in fact, leave them a jaded, grumpy, demanding bunch--and going by their reviews, and their endless griping about their jobs in the interviews they gave, this did indeed seem to me to be the case. It also seemed the case that big, splashy, high-concept blockbusters did especially poorly with them because, by the standard of traditional storytelling, in its cinematic or any other form, an action movie is simply not likely to be very good because of what it must do as an action movie. Thus would even a rather better-than-average action film typically rate two stars out of four by the old reckoning, or maybe two-and-a-half--a score of 50-60 on a 100 point scale, often for films that the general audience would rate much more highly.

Now it seems a 60 is about average on Rotten Tomatoes--a considerable jump from what the average had been in the '00s--even as the kinds of movies critics typically rate poorly became more common rather than less, and that without getting better (and perhaps worse). Indeed, even when big action movies are at issue the critics' rating now often approximates that of a general audience that may be growing less, not more, discriminating--and even exceeds it.

Consider, for example, the four big action movies of this past summer--Top Gun 2, Dr. Strange 2, Thor 4, and Jurassic Park 3 (or 6, depending on how you count them).

The critics gave Top Gun 2 a near-perfect 96 percent score, nearly 40 points higher than their predecessors gave the original Top Gun (which, consistent with the earlier tendency to the 50-60 percent range, landed just a 58 percent score, in spite of its having been pretty much the same thing, and also done it first); while this is almost as good a score as the 98 percent score the general audience gave the movie (and the 99 percent score from the "verified" audience whose ticket purchases were electronically confirmed).

Dr. Strange 2 got a less exuberant but still very solid 74 percent score from the critics, not far behind the 77 percent score the general audience offered (and even the 85 percent score of the verified audience).

Thor 4 got a 64 percent score from critics, actually higher than the general audience gave it (63 percent, with even the verified audience's 77 percent not much better).

Only with Jurassic Park 3/6 did we see the old pattern, with critics giving the movie a really below-average 29 percent (a good old-fashioned one-star rating), in contrast with the general audience's 69 percent (and the verified audience's 77 percent).

Of course, one may in considering all this note that the so-called "Top Critics" (who get their own score) are often less enthusiastic than the critics generally about most films. Still, the differential is usually just a few points--and in the case of Top Gun 2 they were actually more enthusiastic than the broader group (giving the movie a score not of 96 percent, but 99 percent, as good as what the verified audience accorded it).

The result is that, however one explains the fact, there is plenty of quantitative evidence indicating that the bar has been lowered considerably--not equally for every project (the media was basically a cheerleader for Top Gun 2, and eats up anything Marvel, contributing to the success of all those films), but certainly on the whole, so much so that on the rare occasions when they seem to think it "safe" to give a movie a bad review they can seem the more ready to do it simply to shore up their credibility.

Did Comics Become Mature in the '80s--or Just Pseudomature?

A long time ago I decided to try and make way through the history of superhero comics in the systematic way I went through the history of prose science fiction--familiarizing myself with as many of the classics as I could, reading the history and other associated works, getting a picture of how it developed, and what was going on in it now. I did not stick with the endeavor as long as I did my readings in science fiction. Still, I did get to see a lot of the terrain, and that included the works of Alan Moore, in which I found, and still find, much to admire--enough so that I read with interest the recent interview he gave the Guardian (which seems to have been reported on in other outlets, including Entertainment Weekly and Variety).

For me what was most worthwhile about it was his discussion of the idea that comics "grew up" in the '80s, with which his work had much to do. His answer to that was "no, comics hadn't grown up . . . it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way."

Moore admitted to the existence of honorable exceptions--a "few titles that were more adult than people were used to," and I think the best of his work counts among that. Recalling Watchmen I still respect the technical sophistication, the cultural and historical literacy, the "sociological imagination," the critical perspective that went into it as he asked and answered the question of what superheroes would have been like if they had existed in a world like the one we know, and in turn, how the world would have been different for their existence.

But looking back at that comic I also find myself thinking that this is the kind of question that one can explore profitably for only so long--because it is so much a subversion of the genre rather than a plausible foundation for some new phase of it, and too demanding for any but the most serious and skilled practitioners of the medium to bother with usefully. (And that the actual appearance of such work, however brilliant it may be, likely a sign that a genre is becoming inward-looking and decadent, unlikely to produce much that is really new.) The unsurprising result is that while I think one can call Watchmen an "adult" comic, a mature work, the rest of what we have had since that time has generally been pseudo-adult, pseudo-mature posturing and edginess that for all the "darkness" and the blood and the rest takes us nowhere and shows us nothing. Indeed, Moore himself seemed to be satirizing this turn a quarter of a century ago in his later comics, like his less well-known Judgment Day (1997), where a young Marcus Langston, coming into possession of a magical book with the power to alter reality, "rewrote" the story of his life--and as he got older, kept rewriting, with the result that the world passed "from a golden age to a silver age, and finally a dark age" that was a "bad action movie of meaningless mayhem" dominated by heroes who have degenerated into psychopaths, simply to gratify his own darker impulses.

And thus has it been in the films made from the comics too with the more recent iterations of Batman, with Marvel's allegedly socially relevant films, with that monument to tiresomely pseudo-mature, smugly edgelord superhero filmmaking, Deadpool, with the retrograde results Moore described even where the films were not blatantly political. The ever-worthwhile Peter Biskind, looking at the last of these, thought him "so far beyond the pale that it would be fair to say that he’s the first alt-right superhero." In 2022 that seems no trivial thing.

James Bond and the Culture Wars

While it remains a commonplace to picture the 1950s as an era of consensus and conformity that was, among other things, a time Before Feminism (a stereotype that endures in such films as Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling) the reality is that contemporary-seeming arguments over gender, and its depiction in popular culture, were very much a part of the scene--and it worth remembering that James Bond, years before the first film was even shot, was not exempt from those controversies. Indeed, Bond's creator Ian Fleming was so conscious of being called out for his treatment of the matter that he wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian answering his detractors in 1959--timing I suspect was not unrelated to how that very year's novel Goldfinger dealt with the matter in especially explicit fashion, most obviously in the sexuality of Tilly Masterson and Pussy Galore, though Fleming's narration had something to say of Bond's view of the matter. This was "that Tilly . . . was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up," and that he thought it "a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality,'" fifty years of which "emancipation" produced a situation in which

feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males . . . The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits--barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.

I bring all this up as a reminder that the culture wars did not begin with Patrick Buchanan's declaration, or for that matter "the '60s" that liberals lionize and conservatives lament, but seem to have been with us for at least as long as anyone likely to be reading this has been alive--and, again, that James Bond was never outside those culture wars. Still, there is no denying that the time allotted to those wars has grown immensely, and looking back it seems to me that we can register a difference not merely between the treatment of Bond today and Bond in Fleming's time, but even Bond in 2021 and Bond in 2006.

I distinctly remember that when the reboot of the series first appeared in the form of Casino Royale it was divisive--such that researching The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I went through page after page after page of reviews on the Internet Movie Data Base which allotted the movie either eight stars-plus, or merely a single star, viewers loving it--or hating it. One of the undeniable aspects of the overhaul was how, noticeable in spite of the series already having decades of concessions to feminism behind it, that movie's treatment of gender, and especially its having gone from indulging the "male gaze" to attacking it with a movie where the women stayed covered up, while Bond wasn't, with this particularly conspicuous in the gender-switching of Honey Rider's famous emerging-from-the-sea sequence in Dr. No, and then the prolonged torture scene. While their views were generally not given any time in a media hugely enthusiastic about the reboot, and this aspect of it in particular, many disliked it intensely. Many of them saw politics playing its part in that. But I am not sure I ever got a sense of that dislike as consciously political in the way that, for example, so much of the chatter seen in the run-up to the debut of No Time to Die was--this kind of reaction yet to become so conscious and so intense as it now is in a period in which it seems that the release of just about every movie is a battle in the culture war.

Are Film Critics Just Giving Away Good Reviews?

If you read this blog regularly (there may be somebody who does--I hope) you probably remember me citing that first episode of The Critic in which network president Duke Phillips complaint to Jay Sherman that a critic's job is to rate movies from good to excellent.

Even then it seemed that many a critic was overly generous--and those who suspect this of being the case have only had more cause to think so in the age of Rotten Tomatoes, with a statistical analysis a few years back providing empirical evidence of the "average" review of a film becoming more favorable with time. (In 1998-2009 the average score for a film with a 1000 theater+ release was 44 percent. In 2016-2019 it was 56 percent, and still rising--59 percent for the first nine months of 2019.)

Just what has been going on here?

One possible explanation is that critics these days risk more flak for a bad review, in part because of the manner in which every film release these days looks like an engagement in the culture wars. It is not hard to imagine a mainstream critic who, for example, did not care for The Woman King, be hesitant about being too negative about it--or for that matter, Top Gun 2, which seems a particularly interesting case. Where the original Top Gun had only a 57 percent average score on Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel, which is basically the same thing, landed a 96 percent average score, a staggering 40 percent difference.

That yawning gap suggests another explanation, namely that critics have become more generous to commercial films of kinds they used to slight--like big action movies. The fear of offending some important segment of opinion (to say nothing of the studios) apart, there may be a generational difference at work here. In contrast with an older generation of critics that (if you will pardon the reference to Mike Judge's Idiocracy watched movies "that had stories, so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting," younger critics--anyone not a senior citizen--grew up in age in which that kind of film was less of a presence, where high concept was king, and action movie-style filmmaking was taken in stride. (Remember--Dr. No is sixty years old this month, Star Wars forty-five years old this past summer, meaning that all but the elderly got a big dose of this stuff in their formative years.) And less and less of anything else has been on offer to a really wide audience for a really long time. (If you don't believe me just go and check Box Office Mojo for yourself and tell me how big a percentage actual dramas with actual stories not involving CGI animation and spectacle are to be found among the top ten, the top twenty, the top fifty releases of the year.)

Still another factor is the broader media environment--the hyper-crowded market with its ever more-brutal attention economy that may be corroding all nuance past the point of recognition. Contemplating it I now find myself thinking of Henry James' remark in 1915 that World War I had already "used up words," so that "they [had] weakened . . . deteriorated like motor car tires . . . been overstrained and knocked about and voided of . . . happy semblance," confronting the world "with a depreciation of all our terms," leaving them so limp as to deprive us of our ability to express ourselves.

So it goes in the vicious war-of-all-against all for the consumer's attention today. I get the impression that critics still love playing the bully and brutally bashing films they find unworthy when they get the chance, the more in as they so often have to play it safe for the aforementioned reason--but when they praise, as well as dispraise, they are commensurately hyperbolic, the sheer idiot gushing with which they greeted The Sopranos increasingly become their default operating mode.

The Quiet 60th Anniversary of the James Bond Film Series

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No.

As one might guess--the more in as the James Bond film series is now the property of Amazon--the fact is being publicized.

But it is a quiet thing next to the 50th anniversary celebration, which it seemed was being marked in unmissable ways all year long (for instance, in exhibitions at major film festivals the world over).

All this has been rather less conspicuous this year.

One reason, I imagine, is that a 60th anniversary does not have quite the same cachet as the 50th.

Another is that there is no synergy between such commemorations and a much-hyped film release--of which Skyfall took such great advantage, so successfully (parlaying it into the series' only billion-dollar gross to date).

Had No Time to Die come out as planned (without changes of director and concept, without Daniel Craig's injury during filming, etc.) the movie would likely have come out before the COVID-19 pandemic, and left plenty of time for the next Bond movie to be out in 2022. But the delays happened, making for a new release date right as the pandemic was getting going, and the movie ended up being bumped a year and a half--to late 2021. Especially as EON was unlikely to start shooting the next Bond film without seeing how that went (the more in as the film market was still so uncertain, audience interest was uncertain after six years since the last Bond film, the next movie would entail yet another reboot and new choice of lead, etc.) another Bond film before late 2023 was implausible, so that any prospect of a Bond movie coinciding with the anniversary was ruled out years ago.

Still, I can't help wondering if there hasn't also been a significant decrease of interest, into which the low output of films (only two over a period of at least twelve years--a record low for the franchise--and the lukewarm reception of the last two, would seem to have figured), with one possibility I have acknowledged that the series, if still earning respectably, these days falls well short of the biggest blockbusters. (Again, there was only one billion dollar gross to date, with No Time to Die not even breaking $800 million. Spider-Man: No Way Home made more than twice that much.) So it has been for a long time--but the Bond films these days cost as much as those higher-earning movies (the production budgets for Spectre and No Time to Die were both reportedly in the $250-$300 million range), it is hard to have it any other way and aim for even that much, and the producers have to be thinking about how they could reinforce the series' popularity, especially if they take seriously the suggestion that the Bond movies are getting by on the interest of old loyalists rather than renewing their fan base. Whether they manage to do that, I suspect, will decide what the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the series will look like.

Disney and Star Wars, Again

These days it seems Hollywood is generally reaffirming its commitment to the big screen--to theatrical release, and its $15 and $20 movie tickets, which streaming revenues have simply not matched (even with the help of simultaneous release surcharges). In fairness I had wondered if it would be otherwise given how, after the fizzling of the grandiosely Marvel-like plans for barraging the audience with Star Wars movies post-Solo, Disney barraged audiences with small screen Star Wars instead, many of its ideas for movies instead apparently manifest as TV shows, live-action as well as animated (as with Boba Fett, who got his own series this year, as have Obi-Wan, and even Andor, while the third season of The Mandalorian is coming our way, and much, much more besides). Still, the studio never quite seemed to have written off the hope of more big-screen Star Wars, with reports of one project following after another, and if none have come to much so far more Star Wars possibly headed to theaters as soon as late 2023 if what we hear about Taika Waititi's movie pans out.

James Bond in the Age of the Mega-Franchise

Recently I had occasion to write about the James Bond film series and how EON Productions seems to have been very slow about the task of developing the next installment in the series. This seems understandable given the extreme shock to the global cinematic market that COVID-19 caused, to say nothing of associated economic and political turmoil (rising interest rates, uncertainty about the Chinese market, etc.)--and the less than confident feeling the response to the last film must leave them with. (Even if COVID was principally at fault for the weaker gross, the fact remains that the earnings were down, while there was worry about declining interest among younger filmgoers.) And, let us be frank, there is the difficulty of reinventing the wheel yet again that not just the Bond series, but the whole action-adventure film genre faces. (For almost a half century now the Bond series has stayed in business by "borrowing" ideas from other hit movies--and now there don't really seem to be any.)

Still, it makes quite the contrast with the sheer aggressiveness of Disney as it continues to barrage the public with more Marvel and more Star Wars, or even Warner Brothers as, even after the failure of the Justice League to become a second Avengers, it remains committed to DC.

Why is that the case? I suppose it is because the Bond films have only a protagonist rather than a whole world to offer, let alone a world where single aspects can be a basis for a billion dollar hit. DC, if admittedly having the advantage of controversy, managed to make a billion dollar hit out of the Joker's origin story (a pastiche of a Scorsese movie that, ironically, became bigger than any Scorsese movie ever was at the box office).

By contrast I have yet to hear of anyone who, after watching Spectre, was eager for a prequel movie about Ernst Stavro Blofeld's back story.

Why Do College Students Find Composition Classes Such a Pain?

No one will ever admit it at a meeting of composition faculty, but it is no secret that students commonly find taking a composition course a painful experience. Moreover, this is not some recent development which cranky old people can chalk up to "these lazy kids today," but rather seems to have been the case for as long as composition classes have been around. Thus did William H. Whyte quip off-handedly in his 1955 classic of sociology The Organization Man that "As anyone who has ever tried to teach composition knows, the student who has yet to master it would give anything to be done with the chore."

It seems to me worth discussing just why that is. For the time being let us aside the familiar problem of the teacher who gets underprepared, lazy students cynical toward schooling in general; and the student who gets an undertrained or unmotivated teacher working with a questionable textbook and questionable teaching strategies. These situations are, of course, ever present. But even more fundamental is the essence of how composition classes work, what they demand of students, how students experience them, when they are taught at their best to receptive students as well as when they are taught badly to the underprepared and unwilling. As it happens, even here one does not have to search very far for factors that can make even a reasonably willing and able student to feel ready to "give anything to be done with the chore."

Five strike me as particularly noteworthy.

Reason #1: Composition Classes are Mandatory.
First and foremost, composition tends to be mandatory. This may not seem terribly unusual. After all, the core curriculum in colleges tends to feature many different requirements. However, in fulfilling a math, science or humanities requirement students usually have a range of options. In practice, at least, these tend to include options which are easier than others, giving those students unenthusiastic about course work in a subject area a relatively simple way of meeting the requirement, and then moving on with their college career. (Not a math person? You can take "Finite Math." Or maybe even just a computer course.)

By contrast, it is likely to be the case that everyone has to take the same "composition 101" course, and often a "composition 102" afterward, no wriggle room available in their situation. This means that a great many students who would not choose to take composition--because they do not see it as relevant to their later studies and personal career plans, or simply because they do not like it--are forced to do so, and for not one but two semesters.

All by itself, this is enough to fill composition classes with students dubious about it. The fact that many find the class more difficult than they were led to believe it would be does not help.

Reason #2: Composition Classes are Skills-Centered.
Composition is not a subject where one amasses facts, and gradually learns to process them, the way they might in a science or history course, for example. A well-taught science class would teach them, alongside some of the basic facts of the field, something about thinking scientifically (give them a firmer grasp of the scientific method, for example), while a well-taught history class would teach them something about how to think like a historian (as by teaching them to evaluate sources and use the information they get from them to reconstruct what happened in the past, how, why). However, the base of facts would at the more basic stages be primary, the subtler skill secondary.

By contrast it is the extreme opposite in composition, the mental skill almost everything. This means that the emphasis is on brain-work that, while demanding and essential, proceeds in a slower, fuzzier fashion than the memorization of facts.

For example, a student cannot learn to write a good thesis on demand just by memorizing a textbook definition of a thesis (which tends to be badly written anyway). Instead they have to assimilate that knowledge, typically by coming to a deep understanding of how thesis statements work through close reading of many of them, and then practicing the writing of thesis statements over time. Some will learn to write more quickly and master writing more thoroughly than others, but the principle holds for everyone.

Making matters more complicated, writing skills are not separable from other skills like reading and critical thinking. A student who is not an able reader and critical thinker is unlikely to improve their writing without also acquiring those skills, and unfortunately K-12 education show less specific attention to those other skills than they do writing. Indeed, a student's first serious encounter with the terms "close reading," "critical reading" and "critical thinking" is likely to be in that composition classroom. Naturally, having their grade depend on their ability to do these unfamiliar things in which they have not previously been trained (rather than repeat what they have been told on demand) is likely to come as something of a rude shock.

Reason #3: Composition Classes Require Students to Be Intellectuals.
In a composition class a student may be presented with a text such as, for instance, a brief article about the marketing of American food brands in Europe in the 1990s, and told to read it closely and critically, discuss it, write about it.

The situation may seem odd. What does the marketing of food brands have to do with composition?

Strictly speaking, nothing whatsoever. But one must have something on which to exercise, to practice, the reading, thinking, writing skills the class is intended to teach, and an article on the marketing of food brands is not necessarily worse than any other for the purpose--the intellectual activity involved in engaging with the material the real point of the activity.

In that stress on reading, thinking, writing for the sake of reading, thinking, writing, students are asked to "be intellectuals"--to take an interest in subjects that may not have immediate practical use to them--for the purposes of mastering the skills a composition class sets out to teach.

This seems reasonable enough to college instructors, but it is something relatively new to many college students. Once again, their prior academic experience required more listening and note-taking, more memorization and recall on homework assignments and tests where there is a clear, correct answer (even when they may have had to give essay answers), than this more exploratory and less obviously utilitarian activity. Additionally, besides being different from their prior experience, having to read, think, write like this can also be experienced as more demanding, and less certain; more is asked of them, while they are less sure of what is wanted. And that, frequently, makes students dislike it the more, especially if they are inclined to see the demands made on them in school as essentially annoyances on the way to getting the diploma that would enable them to get a "good job." The reality that anti-intellectualism is a very significant force in contemporary culture also encourages cynicism toward this kind of course work, to which classes in the arts and humanities (like composition) are particularly vulnerable.

Reason #4: Grading in Composition Classes is Not "Subjective"--But Can Look That Way.
As might be guessed, perceptions of the grading of their work in such courses hurt rather than help matters. Students commonly think of English, and especially its writing component, as an area where the grading criteria are subjective, because there is often no single answer to an essay assignment, and because quantifying the assessment of writing seems such an uneven process.

Yet, this is not at all the case. Anyone will concede that such matters as spelling, grammar and the conventions of citation are not subjective. Whether one uses the spelling "sale" or "sail" in a piece of writing is not a matter of personal preference--and the objective element in the assessment of a piece of writing does not stop there. Even aspects of prose style can be judged objectively. For example, there is unlikely to be any doubt about whether a sentence (for example, "The door was opened") is written in passive voice or active voice, and whether the use of passive voice instead of the preferred use of active voice was justified by any practical advantage in communication. And of course, contrary to what some may think, even the more "intellectual" aspect of the work can be assessed in a fairly objective way—as with the matter of whether a paper has a thesis in it, or whether a thesis is being supported by evidence rather than merely being asserted.

In fact, composition can be rather like those famously "objective" subjects, science and math. A student writing an argumentative paper has to consider a possible position about the world, examine the evidence for and against it, and draw a conclusion--just as in the scientific method, where one forms a hypothesis, tests it, and evaluates the result of the test. They have to explain their reasoning to their reader--"showing their work," like a science student writing up a lab report, or a math student demonstrating how they arrived at the solution to a problem. And in organizing what they have to say they are likely to rely on clear-cut and rigorous thought-structures like the three-pronged thesis statement, the five-paragraph essay, or the "comparison and contrast" pattern of development--in a word, formulas.

The fact that composition is skills-centered and places a high stress on rigorous reasoning, rigorously assessed, would by itself be enough to make it an unpopular subject--just as math so frequently is. However, there is an added complication here, namely that while students find the class difficult because it is rigorous in these ways, they do not recognize it as being so.

Despite what students are supposed to be learning in these courses they are likely to persist in the view that composition, English and the humanities in general are "soft" subjects, in which grades are handed out arbitrarily, or close to it. This is partly because of the manner in which students are assessed, and grades handed out. In a math class the teacher's choice and wording of test questions, or their readiness to award credit for partial work or grade on a curve, are as much a matter of individual judgment as anything an English teacher does in their class. However, the apparently right-or-wrong nature of the answers on the test, and the quantitative scoring, do much to diminish the sense of arbitrariness--a 65 on a math test (superficially) harder to argue with than a "D" on a term paper.

Reason #5: Composition Classes Require Students to Revise Papers.
It is bad enough to get a grade one does not agree with. It is still worse to get a detailed, critical examination of their work--and be forced to acknowledge that examination by having to go back and modify the paper in substantive ways.

That may not sound like a big problem to those who don't write, but really, it is. The truth is that even professional writers with lengthy experience of being edited and published often find revision a painful, even wrenching experience (often, much more so than producing a piece of writing in a new piece of writing to replace the old entirely), to the point of resisting it when possible. It is therefore not really surprising to find that first-year college students are unenthusiastic about it, and likewise resisting it. Asked to revise their paper they will limit themselves to the most actionable adjustments the instructor ordered. If told their paper lacks organization, for example, that its thesis is less clear than it might be, presents its supporting arguments in no particular order, and contains much that is irrelevant to anything they might be saying, they will often ignore all that and just fix the indicated comma splices--thinking of the instructor as their editor, not their grader. (Indeed, they often get angry if fixing the comma splices does not get them an "A," which they insist that every teacher they ever had gave them.) Meanwhile even those who make an honest, serious effort, may still fall short of the grade they hope for. This makes them still more frustrated with and resentful of the process. And in the end, an instructor is likely to find that no aspect of their interaction with their students is more rancorous than this one.

So there you have it, five major reasons--the mandatory, skills-centered, "intellectual" nature of the class, with its supposed "subjective" grading and burden of revision--that make students dislike it as much as they do. Having said all this it would seem that this is where the persons who has offered such comment is expected, to quote another celebrated '50s-era sociologist, set about "softening the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," not least by offering some solutions to the problem they have raised--preferably solutions that they can apply all by themselves without help or support from anyone else to miraculous result. Alas, not only is the demand reflective of a desire to avoid facts rather than face them, but the expectation of solutions of that type is often unreasonable, with this case no exception, especially when we are discussing those problems that are most "built into" this kind of class.

Still, that is not to say that we could not be doing better. The most important thing we could do to make such classes more useful would be cultivating a societal attitude more respectful of verbal skills--recognizing that reading, thinking and writing go together, that these are skills to be assimilated rather than injunctions to be memorized, that performance here is not "subjective," that what looks at a glance like "useless intellectualism" can be a valuable training tool--not least as part of better equipping students for this training through an improvement of teaching in grades K-12. Of course, such a change can hardly be produced overnight, even if people who have a real say in these matters care about them, which they do not. (At least in the mainstream of our media and our political life all the pious chatter about "education" is almost invariably about a plethora of other agendas, not actually securing better learning outcomes, even as a means to an end.) However, it does seem to me that clarity on the reality--the instructor understanding what they are asking of students who may not have been properly prepared for all this and may quite understandably be doubtful about the value of the class, and being frank with their students about it--can go some way to bridging the gap between them, and make a better result possible.

Why Have We Heard So Little About Bond 26?

The shooting of the last Bond film, No Time to Die, wrapped up back in 2019, and the film itself came out in late 2021. This makes it almost three years after the completion of a film known to be the last for the Daniel Craig cycle, and a year after that film's release.

One might have expected by this point to hear something about the plans for the next iteration of the franchise--indeed, to have heard much about it (however much of it may have been rumored, tentative, outdated or simply the usual PR drivel). However, just about every story we hear about the project basically tells us that nothing has been decided, and the next Bond film remains far away (a June piece in Variety telling us that no new actor is in the running for the lead of a film whose filming is two years away, implying a by no means hard release date in 2025).

Just why has so little been said--and if we are to believe what is said, decided--after all this time?

There actually seems no shortage of factors. Some two-and-a-half years into the COVID-19 pandemic the box office is recovering, but not by any means recovered, which fact has been plenty to make decision makers in the industry drag their feet on big decisions. Given that amid that chaos No Time to Die was, at best, an acceptable performer rather than a really stellar one--and given that it was a highly publicized exit for a crop of Bond films that, the official line went, had been rapturously received, underwhelming--one would think them particularly sensitive to that mood. That it was suggested that young people in particular were losing interest (seemingly confirmed by how just the weekend before No Time to Die came out they flocked to the debut of Venom 2, and then a scarce two months later came out for Spiderman in record-breaking numbers) must have been particular cause for anxiety. There are the question marks over the international market that seem likely to remain even after the pandemic fades, like the receptivity of the hugely important China market, while those spinning plots for the series may be ultra-cautious about any Russian element in the story for that reason, and others. (Will even Western audiences embrace a story about a "new Cold War," or be repulsed by it?) Moreover, all of this is happening as interest rates resurge, with all it means for the costs of shooting a big movie with an uncertain schedule.

Still, that far from exhausts it, with one factor much on my mind the franchise's long-time survival strategy, to which the current environment has not been conducive. After the '60s, during which the Bond films had been setting the trend in pop culture in numerous ways (pioneering the high concept movie generally and the action-adventure film specifically, feeding "spymania," etc.) the makers of the Bond films have kept up public interest by shamelessly seizing on whatever trends came along.

In the 1970s there always seemed to be something out there they could use (blaxploitation, kung fu, underwater and outer space adventure, etc.), and on the whole it worked. However, like so much else this practice offered diminishing returns on effort, as the trend-chasing of the '80s in particular showed--the attempts to follow in the footsteps of contemporaneous Hollywood action movies yielding particularly weak grosses at that commercial low point for the series (epitomized by the response to Licence to Kill). The '90s, which was a decade pop culturally more devoted to recycling the '60s and '70s than to any new ideas, left even the Bond films' trend-chasing looking like a recycling of earlier efforts (with the Asian/martial arts elements of Tomorrow Never Dies, like the essential bait-and-bleed plot of the film, a reworking of material from those '70s-era Bond films, in that case The Man with the Golden Gun).

Moreover, the twenty-first century has been less fertile still. In its early years it offered the approach for which Batman Begins is a model--and the makers of the Daniel Craig films made full use of it, taking what Ian Fleming himself called a "cardboard booby" with utmost seriousness--frankly, pretentiousness—in concocting an origin story-telling prequel grounded in its action, and darker and more downbeat in tone, with said tone the more conspicuous as running times got way longer. Some didn't care for this (myself included), but the claqueurs who review movies at the least put on a good show of being enthusiastic, and whether this was because of the turn or in spite of it, the resulting movies did sell a lot of tickets.

Now looking at the latest iteration of the Batman franchise in this very year's The Batman and it seems we still have . . . seriousness and pretentiousness in the making of a dark, downbeat, origin story-telling prequel about a "cardboard booby" that goes on and on and on for three hours. Two decades later, and we are still in the same place, more or less, with regard to the whole approach to storytelling, while even those more superficial elements the storytellers can use to stoke up wide audience interest have not changed much. Superheroes and zombies were the two big ideas circa 2002, and so they remain in 2022--and while I don't think the makers of the next Bond film feel quite desperate enough to make Bond wear a cape, or have him fight zombies (yet). The result is that any reboot of the series made with the prevailing trends in mind is likely to look a lot like the last reboot of the series, the same thing we have had for two decades. And I think that what all that means for those trying to repackage Bond as interesting and contemporary and relevant should not be underestimated by those wondering about the protraction of the process. Putting it bluntly, this time it isn't just the makers of the Bond movies who are out of ideas, it's everyone else, too, leaving them with nothing to "borrow" for their purposes, and that much more reason to go on dithering for the time being.

The Institution of the Claqueur

Those who read Honore de Balzac's Lost Illusions might be surprised to encounter in it the employment of the claqueur--the professional clapper, hired to applaud. Having invested heavily in a play it was the logical business decision for the producer to buy some insurance for its success--to not trust the material to win a standing ovation from the audience but to have plants among it whose uproarious applause will hopefully prove infectious, get the rest clapping, and convince them that after all it was a great play and they should see it again and tell everyone else to do so also—and these were the people who did the job.

As it went in theaters so did it go elsewhere in the media of the time, as with publishing, Balzac making it clear that in the "theatre of literature," in which the public "sees unexpected or well-deserved success, and applauds," the audience and the world at large are oblivious to the setting of the stage for that success--which include its own "claqueurs hired to applaud."

In this as in so much else the writers of that earlier day, the great Balzac by no means list, were infinitely more honest than those of our own, who never breathe a word about the seamier side of their business as it takes "claquing" to heights scarcely dreamed of by the sleazy publishers we see in Balzac's Human Comedy, with places on the bestseller list all but up for sale.

Indeed, the importance of the claqueur in our time is underlined by what has happened in book publishing since the technological rush of the late '00s democratized its most fundamental element, namely the mechanism for commercial production and distribution of a work of fiction. Thanks to services like Amazon's it became the case that anyone could take a digital copy of their manuscript and, at no cost, convert it into the template of a print and e-book within days available at retail outlets all around the world. And a great many people did just that.

But the idea that this kind of self-publishing would really revolutionize the publishing business never really worked out, because even if the apparatus for physically producing copies of a book, and distributing them, was opened to all, production and distribution is only part of what a publisher provides an author in practice.

There is also the matter of getting the reader to look at what is now offered to them.

But was that not also democratized? What about the Internet? Book bloggers? Social media?

Alas, anyone who thought that could compete with the budgets that buy ad space in the New York Times and commercials on TV and fund book tours, and land reviews and interviews in high-profile publications and other forums, learned otherwise. (And of course the going got rougher, not easier, as, in the name of defending the public from "fake news," Big Tech favored "authoritative sources" at the expense of the less authoritative, and suppressed efforts at self-promotion for anyone who did not buy an ad, to the disadvantage of the self-published writer with zero dollars to spare on such.)

The more astute learned, too, about what else the publishers can command that the self-published generally cannot--respectful consideration from opinion-makers. Those with a big publisher behind them, even if they were not a Somebody before, are a Somebody now by virtue of having the patronage of one of the Big Five, and their book treated as a book by a Somebody--which is a far different thing from a book by a Nobody, which, regardless of what it may contain, gets treated as a book by a Nobody. Innumerable stupid and easily manipulated prejudices play their part--but along with them so do the quid pro quos that, even when they have not personally received payoff in "quid" form, reduce the critic to claqueur. After all, Jay Sherman may have been a knowledgeable and tough-minded critic of the cinema--but he had to answer to network chief Duke Phillips, who regarded it as a critic's duty to "rate movies from good to excellent," and, you may also remember, squeezed out of him an obscenely overgenerous two-and-a-half star rating for the atrocity against film that was his remake of The Dirty Dozen. (By contrast a self-published book worthy of five stars would be very lucky indeed to get the two-and-a-half.)

In short, even as the means of publication were opened to vastly more people than had ever enjoyed access to them in history, the means of publicity were ever more the purview of "the big battalions," who made the most of their advantage--which was quite enough to head off any prospect of self-published writers elbowing the Establishment folks aside to become the new rulers of the domain.