The Politics of Hollywood's Writers

Looking back it seems that Hollywood's writers have, by the standards of its higher-profile personnel, been particularly conspicuous in the history of radicalism in the film industry. The Hollywood Ten were, in the main, writers--and so it seems were the victims of the blacklist.

One may wonder at that. I suppose one reason is that writers are a less privileged group in Hollywood than, for instance, actors and directors, with all that means for questioning the status quo.

It may also matter that a writer, more than an actor or a director (assuming he just directs), is less able to avoid engagement with ideas, which includes socially critical ideas, with all that means for their politics not staying inside the mainstream; and whatever ideas they have are more likely to manifest in their work in an obvious way.

Of course, to go by what we see on the screen the writing that comes out of Hollywood appears deeply conformist, conventional, respectful of mainstream pieties. (In his great book on American film of the 1950s Peter Biskind quipped that in right-wing films self-made millionaires are as common as the masses in the films of the left. Guess which you saw more of when he was writing--and how things have tended since?) Still, what gets put on the screen is only what other, more powerful, individuals are willing to back--individuals who very clearly hold, and help make, those conformist, conventional, mainstream views. Any other impulses would only seem to rarely come out--with, if Succession is all some of its admirers make it out to be, suggestive of hidden depths.

Albeit, very, very well-hidden depths.

The Unappreciated Artist

It is a cliché that artists feel appreciated.

It is not cliché to point out why this is the case--namely that they feel unappreciated because they are, in fact, not appreciated.

They are told every single day in every single way that what they do is unimportant ("Get a real job"), and--especially if they are not rich and famous ("Don't quit your day job"), even more if they are only endeavoring to scratch out a living (they are just "amateurs," just "aspiring artists")--that their efforts are unworthy even by the standard of their unimportant activity. The ones who most need support are least likely to get it, and the people they meet endlessly justify that ("Nobody owes artists anything"), often using arguments so transparently self-serving ("The artist must suffer." "Comfort would only spoil you." "The true artist is only appreciated after their time") that they are an insult to the listener's intelligence, while even where they think they may have a sympathizer they find something quite different. (They will hear someone speaking about how tough artists have it--and then find this is just a set-up for a lecture on the sacredness of intellectual property rights, with artists' problems raised only as an excuse rather than out of any real concern for their plight.)

One may argue over whether society, as presently constituted, may be incapable of treating artists more kindly than it is. But there seems no room to argue about the effect that all this has on artists' well-being--such that one does well to remember this when they seem less than gracious toward a public that ignored and insulted them--and if it ever stopped doing that, did so not because it appreciated them for what they did, but only because they had become rich and famous, and appreciates that rather than anything they may have actually done, such "the bourgeois valuation of a man."

Coining a Term: Dauriat

After Dauriat in the novels of Balzac's Human Comedy (among which he was especially prominent in Lost Illusions): An individual in the culture-media business, and especially publishing, sufficiently prominent to make decisions over what is or is not brought to market who is blatant in his crassness and gleefully brutal toward newcomers he treats with complete contempt.

As anyone who has ever tried to publish anything is aware, we really, really need this word.

"Convenient Social Virtue" and Moralizing Language

As described by John Kenneth Galbraith "convenient social virtue" is what the more powerful members of society expect of its less powerful members when they presume that they will acquiesce in their own exploitation because it is "the right thing to do."

Those who so acquiesce are praised, those who do not are subject to harangue, or worse, for their moral failure.

These days, with our so-called moralists more apt to be moralizers, ever punching downward, it seems that most of the moral disapprobation we hear expressed in the mainstream is of this type. Thus is it ever with, for instance, accusations of "entitlement" and "self-pity," ever directed at those apt to be least guilty of those faults--the charges likely to really mean that these people the moralizer thought unworthy of anything because of their low station committed the crime of caring about themselves when their social superiors do not care about them at all.

Coining a Term: Bounderby

After Josiah Bounderby in Charles Dickens' classic Hard Times: A "successful" individual who downplays the social advantages that enabled him to "succeed" to further glorify his attainments, and as an excuse to trivialize or otherwise be callous toward the sufferings of others.

Given the state of the world today we really, really need this word.

John Gardner's Non-Bond Novels

I took little interest in John Gardner's James Bond novels until I began researching James Bond's Evolution and The Forgotten James Bond, which behooved me to learn more about them.

As it happened the Boysie Oakes novels were a pleasant surprise--much more so than I would have guessed from hazy recollections of a long-ago casual viewing of the adaptation of the first of them (1965's The Liquidator) on TCM--Gardner a parodist who knew his subject, and displayed teeth, gusto and comedic flair in treating it.

Gardner's Moriarty novels (the first two, at any rate), were an even bigger surprise that way, not least in that, while his sense of humor was on display, the books worked well as tales of criminal intrigue, with the feat the more impressive as he managed to make such a strong impression with a very familiar, oft-treated figure.*

And on and on it went, though these books quite sufficed to make clear to me that while Gardner's Bond novels have their moments they are no match for these tales--and a reminder to me that while the Dauriats of the publishing world love work-for-hire arrangements existing mainly to squeeze a few more pennies out of some run-down franchise, they mean that writers of talent are apt to spend a lot less time of their time living up to their potentials, and giving readers of their very best.

* The third Moriarty novel, reportedly held up by intellectual property rights issues, was only published in 2008, after the author's death and more than three decades after the first two, and so perhaps not as representative.

Remembering 2011's Thor

I remember that when I saw Iron Man I did not expect much (and was not surprised there), with Iron Man 2 making an even less favorable impression (though I think that opinion was more widely shared).

I was more optimistic watching Thor, partly because of the involvement of Kenneth Branagh and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski.

The result was that where Iron Man lived down to my expectations, Thor was a disappointment.

In fairness the film worked well enough as CGI-packed action movie spectacle.

The problem arose when it tried to be something else--to tell a story of the Arrogant Prince who Needed to Find a Heart, in which of course a romantic subplot would feature, while we also got a Fish-Out-of-Water comedy about an alien on Earth. Alas, it all fell flat for me, with the Earthbound middle act on the whole being of the same quality as those movies from the Asylum that SyFy would screen on Saturday nights back then. And when the music surged at the close over the shots of the starcrossed lovers--well, it was a reminder of where the term "melodrama" came from, a show that relies on the music to make us feel what the drama was supposed to make us feel (but didn't).

It was a reminder, too, of the perils of action movies trying to interest us in their characters "because that's what storytellers are supposed to do" when the characters really aren't that interesting--and indeed, it seems to me that Hiram Lee was broadly right when he said that "Branagh and his collaborators" took the tale "far too seriously" as they produced a film that, whatever the talents of those involved and the good intentions they may have had, was "so thin, one can almost see through it."

In fact Thor: The Dark World, for all its limitations, struck me as a significant improvement over the original as, if nothing else, mindless entertainment.

The MCU Had the Claqueurs on its Side From the Beginning

There has been a tendency to depict the successes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as the triumph of some underdog over the sneers of critical and industry opinion, but what I remember is that the entertainment press was fully on board with the project as claqueurs from the start, certainly to go by the rapturous response to the first Iron Man back in 2008.* Indeed, Hiram Lee was an extreme rarity in not just calling the film "dreadful and dishonest" but remarking the hyperbolic cheer-leading of his colleagues, naming and quoting several of them (from A.O. Scott to David Ansen to Peter Travers) as testimony not just to the political sensibility of the profession's mainstream, but "the wretched state of so-called film criticism with which we are presently plagued" where its artistic standards are concerned. "It is remarkable to observe a critic praising filmmakers for creating generic and two-dimensional characters," Lee wrote in regard to one of these.

Fifteen summers later nothing has changed there.

* For what it is worth Iron Man's Rotten Tomatoes score is 94 percent, making it clear that Lee's remarks testify quite accurately to the critics' enthusiasm (whether one agrees with Lee's appraisal of the film or not).

The New Yorker On the Marvel Cinematic Universe

This month the New Yorker published a long article by Michael Schulman on the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The item is, for much of its length, a puff piece singing Hollywood Suits as gods ("Let there be Marvel"), while I doubt very much of the gossip, or the commentary, it retails will surprise anyone who has paid much attention to the phenomena. Still, the New Yorker's readers, for the most part, are a different demographic from the fan site readers who would ordinarily be attentive to the gossip--while it is notable that the piece essentially admits that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a triumph of shrewd marketing rather than artistic genius (emphasizing its use of cross-overs to connect one franchise to another, and hints to arouse interest in subsequent films, so as to help lure the audience from one film to another to another).

Indeed, it invites the reader to admire it as such.

When that is the case, can anyone really blame the public for thinking like movie executives when they look at new releases?

"Make it New" or Go Retro? (The Experience of the Bond Continuation Novels)

Working through the history of the James Bond franchise one point of interest for me has been the ways in which that history anticipated the problems of other franchises that likewise just keep going and going and going in the course of its doing just that before many of them had even hit the market.

One of them is the dilemma of whether to forget the past and try to make the new installment in the series as contemporary in tone as possible; or to cleave to the past, evoking it ceaselessly and hewing to the old pattern and giving the audience "more of the same" as much as the need to avoid intolerable repetition or the appearance of being ridiculous or offensive will allow.

If the franchise goes on long enough, as the Bond franchise has, not least in print, one is likely to see the series swing back and forth between these extremes, and maybe stop at every detectable point in between. Indeed, both John Gardner and Raymond Benson displayed the pattern within just their own phases of the continuation books.

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was an attempt at making James Bond over as an entirely contemporary figure, the agent of a thoroughly post-imperial Britain fighting a Carlos the Jackal type against the backdrop of the energy crisis, while the follow-up For Special Services went in the other direction of an attempt at "Ian Fleming for the '80s." Icebreaker ended up in somewhere in the middle, and so did it generally go ever since, if with particular books tacking this way, others that.

Raymond Benson had much less room to attempt anything like For Special Services, but in his first, Zero Minus Ten, it was clear that he wanted to keep something of Fleming (in the long gaming sequence, in the torture scene, etc.), but then went as contemporary as could be with Never Dream of Dying reading like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper.

Some of the results were more entertaining, others less so--but the task was ultimately impossible. There could be no going back to Fleming, really, while there could also be no 100 percent update that would leave anything of Bond intact--with the problem underlined both by the works which tried to take Bond all the way back to his '50s-era point of origin (at its most extreme in Anthony Horowitz's Goldfinger "sequel" Trigger Mortis, and Jeffrey Deaver's giving us a James Bond born in 1979 in Carte Blanche). Still, especially considering the failure of these later efforts to register on the bestseller lists it seems to me that the intent of these books is less to "get it right" than to help keep James Bond in the zeitgeist in the ever-longer spells between the Bond films that are the real backbone of the franchise.

The End of Succession

The series Succession has drawn to a close, and received the tributes commonly offered a piece of prestige TV at its close--though it may be that it is more deserving than others of such tribute, certainly if what James Martin--about as far as critics get from being a claqueur--had to say of it is true (in which case, it is a wonder in itself that the show ever made it to air, especially on so high-profile a network as HBO).

You can read his commemoration of the series here.

Of "Blue-Collar Actors"

When I first heard Chris Pine speak of his family as a "blue collar acting family" he was being interviewed by William Shatner for the latter's documentary, The Captains.

The word choice jarred--so much so that one might suspect a Josiah Bounderby-like downplaying of personal advantages on the part of someone who became about as close as any twenty-first century person does to being a "movie star," while in the process also trivializing the difficulties of a genuinely blue collar existence (to all evidences, a thing quite remote from his experience).

All the same, he called attention to a reality oft-overlooked, namely the reality that while we think of actors as either waiting tables in anticipation of their big break, or huge stars, with little thought given to those who are working, and maybe even making quite a decent living, but not quite so visible or so lavishly rewarded. Actors who, if they land a regular spot on a show may see it canceled after a mere few episodes, and not get anything like it again; and maybe rely on a lot of guest appearances on shows and bit parts in movies; and do not get ten figure paydays and have their own production companies, and may have to go on working in old age for inability to retire financially. They, too, are part of that world, the bigger part of it, just like their counterparts all across the arts--even as they, in relation to the vast number of people whose ultimate choice will be to give up or go on waiting tables until they are retirement age, can seem to constitute the fortunate few who got to have such a career, whatever the terms.

What a Society's Conventional Wisdom Says About It

Some time ago I devoted a post to the concept of the "conventional wisdom." Most of the time people speak of it with respect--but as John Kenneth Galbraith discussed it, when actually coining the phrase, he assumed a critical standpoint. He presented an essentially pragmatic case for the value of a conventional wisdom, specifically saving people the time and trouble of figuring every little thing out for themselves, and arguing over it every time they dealt with another person. But that did not mean that a particular piece of conventional wisdom was sound--and indeed the whole reason for the discussion was that, as he saw it, the conventional wisdom with which he was concerned was simply wrong (as he sought to demonstrate in the relevant book).

Looking back it seems worth acknowledging that the reliance on conventional wisdom is probably unavoidable in social life--because no one has enough time to have a genuinely well-considered opinion on everything. But in a society in a healthy state--where those who take the lead in figuring things out are willing and able to face up to the task, where the "marketplace of ideas" is genuinely operative because of a free flow of information and debate rather dogma--that conventional wisdom is apt to decently, usefully, approximate reality.

In a society in an unhealthy one it is otherwise, perhaps to the point that looking at the conventional wisdom in area after area of life an intelligent person sees little but idiocy.

Few, I think, from any point of the ideological spectrum, would care to insist that the state of things today is healthy.

The Fate of the Unread Writer in the Digital Age

I suppose that down to the '90s the problem of the unread author was little different from that of Jack London's Martin Eden. They toiled at their work, toiled at sending it out--and they collected form rejection letters from people as they went unread.

I imagine that many still follow this routine. But now they have the option of self-publishing. Thus they toil at their work, toil at publishing it themselves--and as the counters indicating page views and downloads and sales fail to tick up, still goes unread.

After all the sound and fury of technological change, the evolution of the Market and the effort to capitalize on it, where it really counted--finding an audience, making a living--the "aspiring" writer of today is no better off than they were before, and maybe even worse off, because collecting form rejection letters was a cheaper activity than producing a publishable book, because the wages for all writers are crashing in a world where PEOPLE DON'T READ, and now, we are told, the chatbots are coming for what little opportunity was left to them, eliminating the hope that they might make it someday because it looks as if there will no someday for anyone.

"Game-Changer"

In contrast with a lot of the words and phrases I discuss here (like the appalling "lifestyle") the term is not inherently annoying to me. I accept that a thing may well be a "game-changer."

My annoyance with the term has to do with how ridiculously low people set the bar for something being "game-changing."

I recall, for instance, a certain science fiction "fan site" that offered its list of twenty "game-changing" science fiction novels of the decade of the '00s.

The books in question did indeed each make a splash when they came out (mostly in the very small pond that is contemporary print science fiction, but some of them in larger pop cultural bodies of water as well).

But were they game-changers? Did they leave us unable to read or write in the ways we had before, the way that, for example, E.E. Smith's space operas or Isaac Asimov's Robot stories were arguably game-changers?

Even before the passage of the years made this even more starkly clear it was clear that they were not. After all, how dynamic would a fairly limited corner of the publishing world have to be for it to see twenty "game-changers" in a mere decade? Especially when the genre in question is, as I have said so many times, fairly old and stagnant by any such standard?

The term's use was just poptimist hype--as is generally the case when we hear words like "game-changer" trotted out.