Are We Seeing the Beginning of the End of College as We Know It?

It is difficult to speak frankly and substantively about the "higher learning in America" for many reasons, the one that seems to me to matter the most is the piety that surrounds "education" in this country, and because of the numerous other subjects with which it is linked that are even more taboo--like economic inequality, and social class. Nevertheless, I will try to do that anyway here, starting with the matter of just what college is generally understood to be for--why it is that young people are expected to sacrifice childhood and adolescence to getting "good grades" and other little tokens of academic achievement (or at least, conformity to societal expectations) not merely for admission to a college, but an admission to the so-called "best" college available to them; why they are expected to suffer through the stupidity that is the "college search," pouring enormous energy and passion into making ill-informed and irrational selections from among the available schools, and suffering the cumbersome and expensive and unbearably pretentious application process many, many times over; why they are expected to sell themselves into latterday "debt slavery" to pay for the schooling they undertake at the end of the whole process. This is not a desire for intellectual improvement or cultural enrichment or the making of "well-rounded individuals" or any of the other sorts of things to which college presidents grubbily seeking handouts from big donors speak so pompously in their speeches, but rather the belief that a college degree is the best guarantee that a young person can have of a "middle class" life, permitting them an existence with a measure of security and comfort and respectability that they would not otherwise have.

Of course, as my description of the process suggests, the effort required to get the degree has gone up immensely (a reality Mark Ames, among others, has described well)--but not so the reward, which seems to be declining. Certainly Americans, while loving to toss around the word "middle class," have long been fuzzy about what being middle class actually entails--in part because this is convenient for those looking to promote a politically convenient myth of nearly universal middle classness. However, if one does not lower the bar from what it appeared to be at that mid-century point which has been so formative for contemporary expectations--the ability to support an average-sized family (two adults, two to three children) with a minimum of "pecuniary decency" (e.g. a three-bedroom+ house, two cars, health insurance, college for the kids, retirement for mom and dad, with enough left over to get through rainy days and have some little pleasures) on one income (not two, one), then it may be that less than a tenth of the country is really "middle class," maybe much less, given how much more expensive many of the requirements (housing, health insurance, college, retirement) have become. (The children of truly middle class people finish their schooling--even if that means graduate or professional school--debt free. How many do that these days?)

By contrast some forty percent of adults have at least a bachelor's degree, while over a tenth have graduate or professional degrees.

The obvious conclusion is that only a small minority of those with a B.A. are really middle class; and that even many who have graduate and professional degrees, whom one would expect to do still better, and on average actually do have higher incomes than the B.A.-holders , still fall short of that level.

The result is that, in stark contradiction of the conventional wisdom, a college degree does not equal middle classness, and while some might make arguments about too many people studying the wrong things, and so forth, the fact remains that people looking to get more money and told to get more education got the education--but not the money.

The disconnect between "investment" and "return" here would naturally be expected to change people's behavior, especially if that disconnect becomes as extreme as it has--and indeed many in the press, even before the added disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic bemoaned declining college attendance (with the events of the last three years, of course, deepening the decline). The conventional view of that trend has been that it is "the kids" who are in the wrong here--that they need to be persuaded to see that college is really worth their while and that they should make the required sacrifices of time and money.

But the hard reality that college is not the "path to the middle class" they are told it is may mean that they are only responding rationally to a situation of rising costs and declining benefits--and that it is the generally comfortable older people who lived in another time where the cost-benefit ratio was different who should be rethinking the situation.

Rather than insisting that all young people must plan their whole lives around the prospect of a college education we might be asking about that connection between college and middle classness and whether there might not be other ways of achieving a high-productivity, high-wage economy than the current educational system--and possibly better ways, less brutal for the individual, and more cost-effective for society as a whole.

Personally I am not optimistic that we will see very much such questioning very soon. After all, there is the fact that the mainstream political spectrum is virtually defined by its regarding any deep discussion of society and its problems as illegitimate--regarding people as needing to accommodate themselves to the existing conditions rather than ever wondering if the system might be changed, even where that means doing much more for much less--especially where to speak of anything else would offend a politically weighty interest (this, in the end, is what the term "centrism" really means).

This is all the more the case given who is suffering here, and at the same time, who actually has the power here.

After all, if it is the case that the cost of college is rising, and posing growing obstacles in the process, many welcome the fact, not particularly wanting entry into their corner of the world of work to be easier and cheaper. (As described by one character in George Bernard Shaw's classic The Doctor's Dilemma, every profession is a "conspiracy against the laity," and there is always room for the argument that a good many barriers to admission are first and foremost about keeping outsiders out, the number of practitioners down, the remuneration high for those already in the club, with the high price of college, graduate, professional school contributing to that.)

There is the reality that there is a vast institutional investment in sending everyone to college--extending far beyond those who have jobs in higher education to investors in for-profit schools, the equally for-profit apparatus of testing and testing, the "college placement" industry, the vast financial machinery revolving around the over one trillion dollars in student loans on the books. (They securitize student loans just like they do mortgages, after all.)

And there is the reality that the old generally lack empathy, sympathy and respect for the grievances of the young ("Back in my day . . ." they always say), and that this is especially the case when what the young want seems to them like an easier life than they had at the same age (which they tend to begrudge them). And just as this makes a difference when we discuss a matter like Universal Basic Income (UBI), it makes one when we discuss the cost of schooling.

Still, in spite of the exceedingly formidable obstacle it does seem to me possible that, with young people turning away from college; with colleges increasingly facing a situation where fewer people are paying fees or justifying their claims on government support, when they are already hard-pressed financially (as the changing age structure of the population itself makes for that many fewer attendees); with college graduates wondering at the value of the degrees for which they strove so hard as their debts weigh ever more heavily on them in a positive shambles of a job market that may get much worse than it is even now; we will get to a point where people will look back and realize that college has simply lost its old place the center of young lives, and that "peak college attendance" is well behind us.

Where the Crawdads Sing and the Bestseller List

Not long ago I returned to the depressing activity of perusing recent bestseller lists. I say depressing because of how consistently they confirm every one of my worst suspicions about the state of American publishing--most obviously that an industry which, behind its wearisomely upbeat PR, is in terminal decline in an age in which long-form reading is dying out, and ever more reliant on trafficking in the long superannuated Big Names of the last century, ever more closed to new talent and new ideas, ever more repetitive in its content, ever more blatant in a crassness that has never been better than unbearable, ever more sanctimonious in regard to those outside it and critical of it.

This has certainly seemed to me the case with thrillers after my attempt at a systematic examination of that important corner of publishing, where one finds nothing but the big names and themes of the '90s (legal thrillers by Grisham, forensic thrillers by Cornwell, Patterson's stuff, remained dominant, further down the list "new" Clancy and "new" Cussler novels continue to appear, etc.). And so does it go wherever else I look, with this even proving the case with apparently "new" names offering what may be sui generis work.

Like Delia Owens, whose Where the Crawdads Sing was a bestseller for three years--still on the list as Reese Witherspoon (whose book club, which apparently rivals Oprah's now, did much to promote Owens) produced the film.

Contrary to what some may have thought Owens was not some "first-time" writer catapulted to fame and fortune by her fiction, but, in what is the pattern less touted by the sleazebags of the "You Too Can Become an Author!" industry and the rags-to-riches story-flogging mainstream media but always far more common, an already famous person cashing in on their position with fiction. Already an internationally bestselling author in the 1980s with Cry of the Kalahari, she even enjoyed considerable non-authorial celebrity--as a result of her husband being suspected of murder in Zambia.

Such people can reasonably hope to get a novel into print via trad-publishing with all its resources--not least the ability to command the applause of les claqueurs and make the other "ugly" preparations required for success in the "theater of literature." And when what they offer is, in spite of its superficially non-genre appearance, a murder mystery which in its identity politics and "ecological" sensibility and, above all, its misanthropic outlook, is in line with the zeitgeist as felt by those postmoderns who lead the book-buying audience these days, they can hope not just for success, but grand success--in this case, one of the highest selling books of all time.

By contrast, others can't hope to get their books even looked at--especially if they offer a different point of view from that prevailing among the middle-aged, middlebrows of Park Avenue and the coastal elite to which it never lets us forget it belongs.

Remembering Jay Sherman

The series The Critic was part of that early '90s boom in "not just for kids" American prime time animation that followed the success of The Simpsons. The show did not last long--following its 13-episode first season ABC did not pick it up again, after which it had just a second 10-episode season on FOX. With a mere 23 episodes in the can there was also no chance of much in the way of reruns in syndication, back when such things were more important in establishing a place for a show in pop cultural memory than they are today. Still, it did have its fans, some of whom still remember and laugh at particular bits all these decades later, as I was reminded by the remembrances of a particular gag about the goings-on at Buckingham Palace in "All the Duke's Men" just last month. (Oh yes, they remembered that one.)

As that bit reminds us much of the humor was of that "random" type for which the later Family Guy would be notorious, but much of it was more conventionally rooted in the character of its protagonist as he practiced his profession as television film critic, Jay Sherman, who in light of what I have been writing about in regard to the prevailing attitudes among critics interests me as an embodiment of another era's stereotype of what film critics are like. Sherman, who as he told us on at least one occasion, has a Ph.d in film, is presented as "highbrow," jaded, nearly impossible to please, and especially prone to be scornful of crowd-pleasing material, sequels to past hits, and suchlike. "It stinks!" was his catchphrase--uttered as part of the opening credits sequence (for each of which some parodic bit of some new film was created for him to say it about), while, after the passing of The Critic from the air, he was to be seen in The Simpsons' episode "Hurricane Neddy" as a patient in a mental hospital repeating the phrase over and over and over again.

As the Rotten Tomatoes scores indicate, we seem a long way away from that era, with critics less inclined to say "It stinks" and more inclined to, as Jay's boss constantly pressured him to do, "rate movies from good to excellent" instead.

Why do people not acknowledge this more often in the mainstream? The usual complete absence of historical perspective apart--and the sheer delight that critics take in tearing something apart (often unjustly) on those occasions when they feel free to write a bad review--one factor may be the incessant, shameless, whining of hyper-privileged Hollywood narcissists when they receive anything but the unqualified, fulsome praise that is their demand (during which, of course, they never hesitate to play any "card" they can), and the respect with which the entertainment press subsequently treats their acting out (not least, because those whining about being treated unkindly are often actually flattered outrageously by those people they accuse of not having praised them enough).

I'm sure that, like me, you have no difficulty thinking up examples in this day and age. Consider the comment thread here a safe place to express yourself about the matter, if you are so inclined--the more in as I would be interested to know which such persons other people regard as behaving in such a manner.

Of Star Wars and Culture Wars

Those who have remarked the backlash against the Disney-era Star Wars saga--and certainly its more political component, which has been the object of most of the attention--have noted the irony that the original films were left-wing, and that to a degree far beyond what would be acceptable in a Hollywood blockbuster today, the Star Wars movies included. (One should recall that the Emperor was inspired by the vision of a dictatorial Nixon presiding over an America gone fascist, Alderaan North Vietnam.) But the right enjoyed them anyway, happily embracing the movie, so that when Edward Kennedy criticized the Strategic Defense Initiative as a "Star Wars" fantasy, Richard Perle, then Assistant Defense Secretary for Global Strategic Affairs, reportedly suggested that, like an improv performer following their partner's lead, they "just go with it."

One reason, I suppose, was that the particular leftishness of the movie was not so conspicuous--radical, admittedly, but elusive. By contrast the politics against which so many have reacted in recent years—above, identity politics-minded "representation"--have been in their very nature conspicuous, being "in your face" the whole idea, with predictable results.

But it also seems to me a matter of the public hyper-consciousness of the associated politics that feeds on itself--encouraged by the way the mainstream's political battles have changed, while also encouraging those changes.

In short, the movies changed, but so did the audience--and the latter factor of no small importance.

Of Jean-Luc Godard's Times and Legacy

Back when I was just starting to move beyond the lowbrow in my cinematic tastes I discovered the films of Jean-Luc Godard--largely by way of the Bravo channel, back before it became a sewer of reality television. Films like Contempt (1963) and Weekend (1967) were by no means conventional "entertainments," but they often entertained, and managed to interest even when they were not entertaining.

Still, I have not given much thought to Godard for many years--as I was reminded when reading of his passing last month.

Amid the outpouring of commentary one piece that stuck in my mind was David Walsh's lengthy reflection on Godard's career, and in particular how he summed up that career. Specifically he held that Godard's "evolution and final artistic destination," however "idiosyncratic" they may seem, were in the end a "'welding together' of moods and traits common to a generation or more of once left intellectuals" (emphasis added) of the kind that leftists like Walsh see everywhere and denounce everywhere, not least

disappointment with history and society in general . . . a misanthropic blaming of the population for war, ecological damage and other catastrophes . . . a rejection of a class perspective in favor of identity politics . . . skepticism about the possibility of truthfully representing reality in words or images . . . and hostility toward rational, coherent thought.

Considering this reading of Godard and what he ultimately represented I find myself thinking also of the legacy of "the '60s" that looms so large in the memory of the left, and of others' perceptions of the left, which Godard can also seem to symbolize. Those sympathetic to the associated tendencies recall it as youthful, energetic, idealistic in the most positive sense of the term. But the more I look back at it the more I get a sense of its limitations--the counterculture's elements of bleakness and irrationality, which seem to have won out over everything else and made it a dead end for all those who had entertained such hopes, with Godard's trajectory seeming to embody that too. That makes nostalgia for it more ironic and that much sadder, a reminder of just how bleak its situation was in the conservative decades that followed, and the thin gruel on which leftists were content to subsist in these hard times.

The Mood of the '90s, Again

When I have written about the 1990s I have tended to focus on the post-Cold War triumphalism, the tech boom, and altogether the vision of exploding technological progress and economic growth in a globalizing unipolar order about which the "mainstream" view we get from the media tended to wax "optimistic" (really, "complacent" is a far better descriptor for it) in the manner exemplified by Thomas Friedman--while still others looked beyond even that to something more spectacular in the manner of a Raymond Kurzweil--in a way starkly contrasting with the declinism and self-criticism of which one saw so much just a few years earlier.

However, I vividly remember the other side of the matter, which, jealously gatekept as the mainstream discourse may be, was by no means hard to detect--a sense of exhaustion and breakdown on the part of a culture that, even as it fantasized about transcendence, may well have been descending into madness. One saw it in "shock TV" and the tabloid scandals it treated as world-historical events that had their logical conclusion in the fusion of the tabloid mentality with high politics in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. There was a certain amount of self-awareness regarding that exhaustion and breakdown, which I suspect had a lot to do with the notorious '90s "irony"--an alertness to society's losing what remained of its sanity that it coped with by trying not to take things too seriously, by laughing at itself as it obsessed over the little things in life in that "What is the deal with that?" way because the big things seemed so much a given.

But the self-awareness slipped away as the insanity got worse (was allowed to slip away, perhaps?), and again I find myself thinking of the reality TV obsession as a minor and comparatively trivial but still telling example. In 1999 EdTV was a joke. Not long after it was a default mode for the culture--defended by cultural commentators with as much ardor as stupidity, the critical faculty gone as those who should have fought the trend not only surrendered to it but embraced it.

And so now, even while remembering how profoundly annoying that '90s irony could be I now find myself wondering if it did not then and again at least provide us with some protection against what the world was turning into--in contrast with the world of today, where irony abounds, but seems to be of a far more nihilistic kind, a product of the circumstances rather than a reaction against them at least testifying to the memory of something else, and its different hopes, adding mightily to the toxicity of the culture we now inhabit.

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.