Oppenheimer: A Few Thoughts

As the situation stands we know very little about Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Oppenheimer, while what we are told is confusing. It is supposed to be a period piece about the actual Robert Oppenheimer--but apparently a thriller as well that will somehow benefit from being presented on colossal I-MAX screens.

One can't but suspect some stretching of historical fact here.

I also have to admit that, in taking up this highly complex and political subject I suspect Christopher Nolan is "in over his head." After all, watching the Batman films, watching Inception, it was clear Nolan loved psycho-babble, and while sometimes his playing with it fell flat (as in Inception), there were times when it worked well (The Dark Knight seeming to me at its most compelling when the Batman-Joker duel was a Jungian psychodrama).

However, when he was trying to "say something" about society and its current problems I found myself not taking the results seriously--until the absolutely appalling The Dark Knight Rises left me with no choice. Subsequently Dunkirk was, especially coming in a moment when Britain's relationship to the world was so contentious, a historical, political film "without history or politics"--the fall of France was just an occasion for giant-screen spectacle held together by postmodernist blatherings.

But of course the claqueurs of the media, who loved that movie the same way they love everything Nolan does (arguably because of its weaknesses rather than in spite of them, with all that says about them), are clapping already for Oppenheimer, and saying the word "Oscar."

It's always possible that Nolan might surprise us--to use an admittedly tired phrase, "subvert our expectations" by actually "making it good." But I see no reason to expect that from someone who has enjoyed such fulsome praise so consistently for so long, and over the past two decades shown not the slightest indication of a capacity for seriously assessing his own work, let alone questioning anything outside of that--such that my expectations are not high for this one.

Why is the Silicon Valley Elite So Terrified By AI?

Douglas Rushkoff has long struck me as an interesting, if limited, social critic--at the least, willing and able to point out things that few others with even his level of access to the mainstream do. Thus has it gone with his remarks about the dread of artificial intelligence expressed by so many of the Silicon Valley elite about "AI" becoming independent and powerful and hostile. Where the mainstream media has, in line with its normal mode of operation , tended to do little but provide members of the elite and their favored spokespersons a colossal megaphone for their view, especially insofar as that view is sensationalist (rather than attempting to represent a genuine range of views), he at least seems to be on the right track when he quips that the powerful are afraid that, where they have for so long fancied themselves the demi-god masters of the universe, they are anxious that "the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us."

"The Dog-stealers"

I recall years ago reading of the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition and how on its "special shilling days" when admission was discounted so that it was made affordable to the broader public the big Sommerophone organ was silent.

I also read Benjamin Disraeli's remark in a piece of private correspondence that he thought this a shame because of the "humanising effect" it might have "on the dog-stealers, cabmen and coalheavers" who came in.

While I do not want to diminish the complexity of Disraeli's political history it seems to me impossible to not take from this statement an extreme disdain for the "lower orders"--and indeed the term "dog-stealers," which I encountered here for the first time, struck me as a monument to the Victorian upper class' view of those whose toil in the conditions a Charles Dickens described so well made possible their luxury. ("'Dog-stealers?' Is that how they think of them?")

This did not change when I discovered that dog stealing (specifically, targeting the exotic and expensive status symbol-type pet dogs of the rich) for such purposes as ransom seems to have been a not insignificant species of Victorian-era crime--the more in as Disraeli so casually lumped in honest toilers as cabmen and coal heavers with criminals.

All the same, horrid as the Victorians were in such ways others have been no better--and the essential attitude remained the same even as the language changed (and I dare say, grew so much coarser that "dog-stealer" can seem genteel by comparison).

Why Have American Moviegoers Become Such Tough Sells on Period Pieces?

Not long ago here I remarked how popular historical period pieces were at the movies in the '50s and '60s (and even after), and how that has changed since.

What happened?

It seems to me that the popularity of the period piece then was largely a matter of the popularity of a few very particular genres--the Western, the old Biblical-Roman epic, the World War II movie, the lavishly costumed musical that was so often set in the Old West or World War II (like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or White Christmas, or South Pacific).

Those genres were all in decline by the late '60s, and in spite of brief efflorescences later (like the early '90s revival of the Western with Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, or the World War II movie with Saving Private Ryan), never wholly recovered, while never being replaced by some new period fascination.

Instead the action movie replaced dance routines and historical pageantry as the favored form of spectacle key to them; while those who had always enjoyed scenes of gunplay and stuff blowing up previously and got it from period pieces of various kinds, like Westerns and war movies, got those satisfactions from adventures set in the contemporary world from the James Bond movies forward; or later, more blatant science fiction (this, not the genre's cerebral uses, what made it a popular success).

It seems telling that where science fiction was concerned the genre material tended to be handled in a particular fashion. While Star Wars led the way, space operas, if now and then shooting to the top of the box office, have not been the big staple they might seem--successful examples of the type rather fewer in number than sci-fi tales set on contemporary Earth. Exemplary of this has been the superhero films, whose great virtue commercially has been their bringing sci-fi action-adventure down to Earth from the heavens. This may not suffice to make them very successful as absorbing personal dramas, but that this keeps the Brechtian "alienation effects" to a minimum--that the audience doesn't have to cope with a complex different world or process lots of other information, just come to terms with the now very, very familiar "concept' of super-powered people flying about and smashing things--still helps them get into the spectacle much more easily than they would a story set in some exotic galactic empire, which may be even less daunting for them than another historical period. (If you think otherwise, trying teaching college students about a piece of nineteenth century literature sometime.)

Has the Word "Sorry" Lost All Meaning?

Has the word "Sorry" lost all meaning?

In asking the question I do not suggest that the concept of apology has lost all meaning--just that the word we most associate with the act of apologizing may have ceased to actually convey any sense of an actual apology because of its association with expressions of attitudes that are quite the opposite of apologetic.

Often the usage of the term indicates, rather than genuine contrition, an awareness that others are bothered by what they are doing, but their also having no intention of doing anything whatsoever about it, the utterance all they are going to offer. ("Sorry, but I'm going to persist in my obnoxious behavior and you will just have to deal with that, and consider yourself lucky that I've even said the word.") Sometimes the use of the word is an expression of their feeling that they have nothing to be "sorry" for. ("I'm sorry you feel that way.") Sometimes the utterance of "Sorry" is even a taunt. ("Sorry/Not sorry.")

Indeed, it may be that in situations where we might expect an apology we probably hear "Sorry" used in these ways much, much more often than for the purposes of actually apologizing--so much so that the word's use is enough to set on edge the teeth of a person actually sensitive to words and their meanings (some of whom must still exist).

This seems to me another instance of the corruption of the language--and what has often underlain that, the brutalization of daily life in a society less and less functional (when life expectancy is officially going down, you have pretty inarguable evidence that things are getting worse for people on the whole), and plain and simple illiteracy (with language so little understood, and treated with so little respect).

"What can we do?" some people say faced with such things. As is the case with most of the Big Problems, the answer is "If you mean 'What can we do individually about this large societal problem?' the answer is 'Not much.'" But it may help a little bit if we took some care to use words properly. If we tried to only say "Sorry" when we actually felt "Sorry."

Why Are the Things That "Go Viral" Usually So Stupid?

I have in the past stressed that very little in the way of online content has ever truly gone viral--much, much less than commonly supposed; and that the odds of anything doing so have shrunk with the evolution of our Internet use (and in particular our increasing tendency to seal ourselves up into cozy social media spaces rather than wander the Web).

Still, we are constantly told that things do go viral.

It happens that the vast majority of such things are extremely stupid. Indeed, I refrain from giving specific examples precisely because the garbage I have in mind deserves to be as little seen and as quickly forgotten as possible, and I will not slow down their deserved descent into oblivion by a single second if I can help it.

And I wonder why this is so consistently the case. The easy, lazy, answer, especially to those whose thoughts derive from the media mainstream, is that the stupidity of what goes viral is simply indicative of the stupidity of the swinish multitude. However, I suggest the reality is a bit more complicated. People are generally online for more than is good for their physical and mental health simply because of the demands of their jobs, and their seeing to other necessities. (This is how they access essential goods and services, for example, as a review of the most searched-for keywords indicates.)

When they are not doing what they must they are apt to be tired--and frivolous--and unfocused--and susceptible to "clickbaiting." The garbage-generators baiting the web's users for those clicks take full advantage of the fact, and when they do so successfully the media dutifully tells us that the click-baiter's content has "gone viral," which contributes to the effect in the manner that telling us a book is a bestseller helps it to actually become so by bringing it to the attention of the public, such that this may help in intriguing some members of that public sufficiently to make them buy copies. Indeed, it does not seem unreasonable to suspect that, apart from simply misreading what is widely seen as something necessarily having "gone viral," some of what is supposedly going viral is the beneficiary of pre-arranged clicking.

Is there a lesson in all this?

I think there are at least two.

The first is that if someone tells you to look at something on the grounds that it has gone viral it is probably best not to bother. What has gone viral probably shouldn't have, and you don't want to help the people who put the garbage up there rack up the click count.

The second is that if you are failing to follow the first piece of advice you are, again like most of us, probably online too much, and should stop looking at a screen. Stare at something else. And if you want to read something, try something printed on paper. It would be a mistake to disregard the advantages of electronic media, but I have found again and again that paper is easier on the eyes--and reading something on paper balm for a mind shredded by an excess of screen time.

Will James Mangold's Star Wars Film Survive Indiana Jones' Reception?

I recently discussed Disney's pattern of hiring fashionable directors to make Star Wars movies, and then discarding them when they stopped being fashionable--as with a Josh Trank, or a Patty Jenkins. After James Mangold's stock rose on the basis of a favorable response to his X-Men film Logan, and he was enlisted to helm Indiana Jones 5, Disney also announced that he would be directing a Star Wars film. However, following the decay of expectations regarding the film's reception (a Solo-like flop looks increasingly probable) I suspect that a James Mangold Star Wars film will also be a casualty--the Dawn of the Jedi project be either abandoned, or handed over to someone else who in their turn may or may not finish it as Disney-Lucasfilm goes about its business of not making Star Wars movies (at which it has succeeded brilliantly).

What Might the Reported Production Delays Mean for the MCU?

Before we go any further let us acknowledge that, whatever else anyone can say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still just about the biggest moneymaker around in Hollywood these days, creating plenty of reason for "Marvel envy" among the other major studios.

Still, the franchise's best days appear to be behind it, with Phase Four less than the sum of its often underperforming parts, and Phase Five not off to the start hoped for (with Ant-Man 3 a flop; Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if doing better, lagging its predecessors; and Captain Marvel 2 bumped from July to November to uncertain results).

Now, as if that were not enough, the movies of the next summer, and after, have been subject to delay--with Captain America 4 bumped from the first-weekend-in-May traditionally launching Marvel's more prestigious releases (like the original The Avengers) to an almost-in-the-dump-month-of-August late July date, as that weekend instead goes to the second-stringer Deadpool 3, with the subsequent releases correspondingly bumped down the road.

Moreover, all of this seems tentative given its apparent connection with the ongoing Writer's Guild of America strike that is not over yet--and whose disruptive effect may not yet be fully appreciated, especially given the film industry's already much-shaken condition (amid pandemic, inflationary and interest shocks, and now decreasing access to the hugely important Chinese market).

Granted, all this is unlikely to be fatal, of course. Still, a franchise on a downward trajectory and already facing plenty of headwinds may nonetheless suffer for it as the Marvel hit machine slows down.

The "Aspiring Author"

The phrase "aspiring author" is much used--and like a great many much-used phrases, unhelpfully vague.

Putting it bluntly, at what point does the "aspiring" author come to be recognized as a just plain "author?"

Admittedly there are professional organizations that have criteria for membership that imply a particular bar of achievement for no longer being seen as "aspiring," but often these are debatable, precisely because they emerged in another time--like back when people could eke out a marginal living selling short stories. Today, for all practical purposes, a very successful short story writer--even a novelist--would still be only aspiring from the standpoint of trying to make a living at what they do.

On "Falsehoods"

Few things are more alien to the mentality of those who staff the upper tiers of the mainstream of our media as equality, few things more ingrained than deference to elites.

The use of the word "falsehood" has long seemed to me emblematic of that.

An "ordinary" person's false statement would be flatly called a lie. It might even be called a "[expletive deleted] lie." And as a speaker of such they would be regarded as a "liar."

However, a person in a position of power is considered by them to have spoken a "falsehood," not a "lie," and to be no more than a person who uttered such, rather than anything so low as a "liar."

It is a truly pathetic display of servility indeed.

Of "Armchair Movie Executives": Further Thoughts

Recently taking up the topic of the "armchair movie executive" my focus was on the ways in which, apart from the relevant information having become much more widely available, the way movies are made and promoted ceaselessly encourages those with any such inclinations to think about that information in a quasi-movie executive-like way. (Indeed, I was struck by how the New Yorker's recent epic-length recounting of the Marvel Cinematic Universe basically asked us to be in awe of what was in the end a marketing achievement rather than an artistic one.)

However, it also seems to me that this is partly motivated by the way that those interested in the subject may not be entirely satisfied with the ways that the "pros" to whom those whining about the "armchair executives" would like to see the job left. The fact that the entertainment press is basically a pack of claqueurs (and the ways in which Hollywood has so consistently disappointed or annoyed the public) means that there is plenty of room for other views--which they express themselves, and which find an audience.

Is the Reason Streaming Shows Don't Make it into the "Zeitgeist" That Nothing Does?

Quentin Tarantino recently remarked that streaming content fails to make it into the "zeitgeist."

I don't think he's wrong about that.

But that still leaves the question of why that is the case.

My first thought was that it is because there are so many streaming services dividing up the market between them. But some streaming services really are used by really large proportions of the country. We are told that 62 percent of American households subscribe to Netflix. A significant majority of the country, that is a bigger subscriber base than HBO has--which has so often seen its shows acquire "zeitgeist" status, as revealed not just by older hits like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones.

But then the newest of those shows, Thrones, made its debut over a decade ago--even before Netflix got heavily into the production of original content, whereas more recent shows have had less traction that way. We are endlessly told by entertainment writers euphoric over Euphoria the way they sang The Sopranos that it draws massive audiences--but does it really have that kind of zeitgeist status? They say that it does, but it seems to me that whereas I remember getting positively sick of hearing about HBO hits of the past wherever I turned it seems that, apart from the entertainment press' ravings about these things, I can forget that it exists at all in a way that seemed impossible with talk about THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS blaring at us from every direction all day.

That being the case the issue seems something else--not that streaming services are chopping up the market so that very few people are watching any one thing, but that even when a lot of them are watching something the rest of us are able to ignore the fact as we go about our lives, pop culture too crowded and fragmented for any really recent thing, even when successful, to impose itself on our attention in the same way.

At least, when we get older and stop pretending that we care about following this stuff along anymore so that we no longer need go very far out of our way.

Quentin Tarantino's Recent Deadline Interview

The Hollywood news site Deadline recently published a two-part interview with Quentin Tarantino--dealing with, among much else, his experience with attempting to film a version of Casino Royale back in the '90s, his thoughts on the age of streaming, and his plans for his next, tenth and (he has long declared) last, film, The Movie Critic.

I will have more to say about this in upcoming posts--but perhaps what was most striking was, arguably, how Tarantino, who in many ways epitomized and represented the '90s indie film scene that was supposed to be the "cool new thing," bringing a measure of vibrancy to the recorporatized, stultified and stultifying post-New Hollywood Hollywood, sixty years old now, is now the old man longingly looking backward as the world changes and giving the impression that it has passed him by as he talks about the theatrical experience, and the ephemeral, never-making-it-into-the-zeitgeist character of streaming content.

Gladiator 2? Seriously?

The original Gladiator was a visual marvel, while being absolutely silly stuff from the standpoint of history. (Its plot was more like alternate history, and clumsily wrought alternate history at that, while it made Roman politics look like the spectacles of the WWE so in vogue about the time of the film's making.)

The result is that despite gestures in the direction of Anthony Mann-like historical epic it worked mainly as an action movie, and at that an '80s-style "You killed my favorite second cousin" action movie (betrayed super-soldier goes for revenge) with the novelty of a period setting--and its story wrapped up tidily at the end.

Especially as other such films having comparable success seems a long shot (thus did the attempts at imitation peter out fairly quickly in the early '00s), there seems no good reason to revisit it--especially a quarter of a century on when enthusiasm for any such idea must have declined, as the American public grew only more reserved toward period pieces.

But revisit it is what they are doing--the movie not only greenlit but actually in production.

My expectation is that extending an already silly narrative will produce something sillier still--all as few of the public show up, and the Hollywood Suits whose courtiers in the press ceaselessly talk them up to the general public as the "smartest guys in the room" will put another gaping hole in their studio's books.

The Flow of Time on TV (The Supposed "Realism" of Friday Night Lights)

It is a truism that the characters we see on TV tend to be far more affluent than the overall audience--the "First World," "middle-class" viewers of the shows only able to fantasize about having such homes and clothes and disposable income as those they see on the screen.

Those characters also tend to have much more disposable time on their hands.

Of course, this can seem a narrative convenience. People who don't have so much time are less likely to be able to have a wacky adventure or piece of melodrama every week.

Still, it can get ridiculous, with one case that has always seemed to me especially glaring Friday Night Lights--what I saw of it in reruns, anyway. This was in part because the "sell" here was so strongly based on its "realism," which such devices as the "shaky cam" were supposed to consider.

Think, for a moment, about the football players. In real life an intelligent, dedicated and energetic high school student has their hands quite full just keeping up decent grades while putting the hours into their sport. But we were constantly given the impression that this "realistic" show's football players were all, or if they weren't could be if they cared to be, honors students and state champions, all while putting in long hours on part-time jobs, and coping with levels of family melodrama that drive adults to nervous breakdown, while having immense amounts of time for hobbies, girlfriends, and "hanging with their buds" for endless hours in a bar (guess they don't "card" in this time), all without anyone ever apparently suffering from exhaustion.

Yet no one has ever remarked all this in the slightest.

Some grasp of reality, that, on the part of those who called it "realistic."