Recently I remarked 1989 as the year when all the "armchair executive" stuff in the press began to impinge on my personal consciousness.
That in itself would make it seem a significant year for me. But I do think that year saw particular developments that, more clearly visible in hindsight though perhaps not insignificant even at the time, indicated the shape that the blockbuster would increasingly assume in our time, with two hits of that year in particular indicative of the pattern.
One was the year's biggest hit, Tim Burton's Batman. After all, a decade earlier Richard Donner's Superman was a colossal hit--but the franchise fizzled out pretty quickly, and was not followed up by much else in the way of superhero films.
By contrast 1989's Batman established not just that franchise, but started a fashion, which if looking slight in the '90s (the first-string DC and Marvel superheroes stayed in the comics through these years), helped pave the way for the twenty-first century boom in such figures we so take for granted, and in a broader way, the brand name sci-fi/fantasy action franchises that have displaced those '80s-style "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" movies that then dominated the action genre.
Indeed, it seems worth noting that Spider-Man apart, Batman has provided the most consistent basis for successful superhero films (certainly to go by Christopher Nolan's trilogy, and last year's The Batman). It also seems significant that Burton went with a darker tone before Nolan did, such as has since characterized treatment of the character, and the genre (for better or worse).
The other hit that seems of particular importance is the original, animated The Little Mermaid--because while animated features had been a staple of the theatrical experience for a half century by this point this was the movie that brought it back as a commercial head-liner, paving the way for how Disney and Pixar, and since then Dreamworks (the Shrek franchise) and Illumination too (the Despicable Me, Secret Life of Pets and Sing franchises, and now The Super Mario Bros. Movie as well) would be the only competition the new-style action films had for the top of the box office.
Indeed, through this century, look at the top-grossing movies of the year and sci-fi action, especially superhero action, and splashy family animation, especially where the tilt is toward music and comedy, are what you are apt to see. (In 2016-2019, going by calendar grosses at least five of the top ten movies each year were either superhero films or other closely related action movies, or animated movies of this type and their live-action derivatives, their domination of the top of the box office is almost complete, accounting for every one of the top ten in 2016, nine of the top ten in 2018, eight of ten movies in 2017 and 2019.)
Meanwhile it seems that even the failures were suggestive of things to come. James Cameron's The Abyss, which was not the financial success its backers obviously hoped for, can, in its sci-fi adventure, friendly aliens, aquatic theme and ground-breaking visual effects, seem to be a strong indicator of how Cameron's career would go, anticipating hits like Titanic and the Avatar films (while, it would seem, the film's doing poorly at the box office after eschewing the kind of gunplay Cameron helped make a movie staple drove him to include plenty of that in his next two movies, Terminator 2 and True Lies).
In lesser degree, other underperformers were also suggestive of the trend of the market. The underperformance of Ghostbusters II was a reminder of just how extravagant and unrealistic studio expectations could be, such that a then impressive-seeming $100 million gross was deemed a disappointment, and put that franchise on hold for a whole generation. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier marked that franchise's slippage from the top tier of blockbusters its four predecessors had safely occupied--while, like The Abyss, probably encouraging the filmmakers to stress action movie mechanics over more cerebral elements in the next installments, a lesson they took to heart in the five subsequent Star Trek films prior to an even more thoroughly action-oriented reboot. The commercial low point for the James Bond series that was Licence to Kill, itself indicative of how the '80s-style action movies of which it was so imitative were on their way out, signaled that franchise's being overhauled yet again in a way that was to happen with increasing frequency, with the Pierce Brosnan eras seeing a mere four movies in seven years before a reboot that, after a mere five films, has been rebooted itself. (It seems notable, too, that Licence to Kill was the last Bond film that EON put out into the ever-more brutal summer season, preferring the vibrant but less action-oriented late autumn-winter period for that series' releases ever since.)
Of course, one can look at other points in film history for other anticipations, as with 1993 (when Jurassic Park showed how CGI-dominated the blockbuster would be), 1999 (with the return of Star Wars, the upping of the CGI ante, the routinization of prequels and of grumbling about them), and 2000 and 2002 (when the X-Men, and then Spider-Man, kicked the superhero boom into higher gear). Still, it seems to me fair to say that 1989 was exceptionally rich in indications of the "shape of things to come."
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Might it Be Comforting to Disbelieve in the Bestseller List?
I have written at some length about the failings of the bestseller lists as an index of the book market--the ambiguities of their signaling (all they really tell us is that, of the few fastest-selling books they mention at all, these are selling faster than those this particular week), the roundabout and incomplete collection (the publishers don't supply the information), and the "black boxed" nature of the premises on which they collect and classify the data (making it impossible to judge its value for ourselves). And that is all without getting into their constant, quite deliberate, manipulation (as politicians' political action committees, for example, contrive to get the ghostwritten memoirs of those they patronize onto the bestseller list).
Of course, those trying to make sense of that market (myself included) use them anyway for lack of anything better with regard to "the big picture" (as I have when writing about, for example, spy fiction or military techno-thrillers).
Still, as I have also remarked time and again, the content of even the most prestigious list has long been appalling, especially these days, whether one is looking at fiction or nonfiction. As if the often execrable nature of the work is not enough, its particular form of execrable (much of the time, the snivelings and Big Thinks of celebrities who have had cushy lives, and no evidence of anything to think with) is a reminder that now, just as in Balzac's day, the publishers are Dauriat-like vulgarians trafficking in printed paper bearing "famous names" as they pay the claqueurs to applaud the trash they foist on the public.
Naturally it would be pleasant to think that these lists, poorly founded and manipulated as they are, said nothing about the actual tastes of the reading public--but even now I fear they approximate the real pattern of book consumption well enough to make any such thinking desperate escapism.
Of course, those trying to make sense of that market (myself included) use them anyway for lack of anything better with regard to "the big picture" (as I have when writing about, for example, spy fiction or military techno-thrillers).
Still, as I have also remarked time and again, the content of even the most prestigious list has long been appalling, especially these days, whether one is looking at fiction or nonfiction. As if the often execrable nature of the work is not enough, its particular form of execrable (much of the time, the snivelings and Big Thinks of celebrities who have had cushy lives, and no evidence of anything to think with) is a reminder that now, just as in Balzac's day, the publishers are Dauriat-like vulgarians trafficking in printed paper bearing "famous names" as they pay the claqueurs to applaud the trash they foist on the public.
Naturally it would be pleasant to think that these lists, poorly founded and manipulated as they are, said nothing about the actual tastes of the reading public--but even now I fear they approximate the real pattern of book consumption well enough to make any such thinking desperate escapism.
Remembering the Summer Movie Season of 1989
Looking back the summer of 1989 is probably when I first noticed all the talk about the box office--partly because there was so much of it.
At the time the press was buzzing with excitement about Hollywood's "first $2 billion summer," which was to play such a part in the later excitement about its "first $5 billion year."
Of course, in making so much of the number there was the familiar combination of fixation on the passing of some arbitrary threshold, complete lack of historical memory, disregard for the inflation of the dollar and ticket prices with it (all that math!), and breathless-hype-as-default-tone, exacerbated perhaps by the disappointments of the year before. (Consider how 1988 saw the big action movies underperform--as with Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, the fifth Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool, and especially Sylvester Stallone's Rambo III--while even Die Hard failed to break the $100 million barrier, all of which doubtless made the grosses of Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Batman the year after look the more impressive.*)
Still, it did have its share of hits, and whatever one makes of it it did convey a sense that this was an exciting time for movies--commercially, at least.
Artistically was a different matter.
So has it tended to remain even when Hollywood has a good summer, and a good year--the entertainment press apparently more inclined to think like "armchair executives" than "cinematic connoisseurs," and I suppose, encouraging the audience to do the same.
* The original Die Hard's domestic gross was actually just $83 million--on a $40 million budget--a far cry from what the second Rambo film or the Beverly Hills Cop action-comedies made, and for that matter, the return on investment achieved by films like Commando and Lethal Weapon.
At the time the press was buzzing with excitement about Hollywood's "first $2 billion summer," which was to play such a part in the later excitement about its "first $5 billion year."
Of course, in making so much of the number there was the familiar combination of fixation on the passing of some arbitrary threshold, complete lack of historical memory, disregard for the inflation of the dollar and ticket prices with it (all that math!), and breathless-hype-as-default-tone, exacerbated perhaps by the disappointments of the year before. (Consider how 1988 saw the big action movies underperform--as with Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, the fifth Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool, and especially Sylvester Stallone's Rambo III--while even Die Hard failed to break the $100 million barrier, all of which doubtless made the grosses of Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Batman the year after look the more impressive.*)
Still, it did have its share of hits, and whatever one makes of it it did convey a sense that this was an exciting time for movies--commercially, at least.
Artistically was a different matter.
So has it tended to remain even when Hollywood has a good summer, and a good year--the entertainment press apparently more inclined to think like "armchair executives" than "cinematic connoisseurs," and I suppose, encouraging the audience to do the same.
* The original Die Hard's domestic gross was actually just $83 million--on a $40 million budget--a far cry from what the second Rambo film or the Beverly Hills Cop action-comedies made, and for that matter, the return on investment achieved by films like Commando and Lethal Weapon.
Was You Only Live Twice a Natural Stopping Place for the Bond Film Series?
The post's titular question may sound odd. However, consider the reality of the series. In You Only Live Twice the plots, budgets and spectacle had hit the limits afforded by the premise. The Secret Service actually faked Bond's death because, as M told him, "This is the big one, 007," and it was--such that later Bond films that went all-out (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Tomorrow Never Dies) did little but repeat its essentials (the global destructiveness of the villain's plans, the outer space/weapons of mass destruction element, the villain's fortress) rather than go beyond it; and such, too, that the ingenuity of the films in regard to that spectacle trailed off afterward. (The only thing that had yet to be added to the basics were the ski scenes that came with the next, now rather anomalous-looking, production, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.) One can add that in this, the fourth film devoted to Bond's battle with SPECTRE, Bond finally met Ernst Stavro Blofeld face to face--and in the book (for what it is worth) finished him off, a narrative course that would have befit what stands as the biggest, craziest Bond adventure. And of course, Sean Connery was done with it all.
But up to this point each movie had made more money than the last--and if You Only Live Twice disappointed that way it still brought in over $100 million on a $10 million production budget, an extraordinary level of profitability before one even thinks of the other revenue streams associated with it. The result was that art may have suggested the film as a logical conclusion to the saga--but commerce was in the driver's seat, which was why the series let Blofeld live to fight another day, and remains with us over a half century later (even if "Bond 26" is very, very slow indeed to get going).
But up to this point each movie had made more money than the last--and if You Only Live Twice disappointed that way it still brought in over $100 million on a $10 million production budget, an extraordinary level of profitability before one even thinks of the other revenue streams associated with it. The result was that art may have suggested the film as a logical conclusion to the saga--but commerce was in the driver's seat, which was why the series let Blofeld live to fight another day, and remains with us over a half century later (even if "Bond 26" is very, very slow indeed to get going).
Elon Musk and the Dark Singularity: Is the Fear of AI Running Out of Control Principally a Fear of the Ultra-Privileged?
Time and again I have been struck by the amount of attention given to what seem to me the sillier fears about the problems that progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence may raise, particularly the idea of "AI" emerging as a distinct, malevolent Other, and in particular AI, with its opaque, possibly alien natures and thought processes and agendas, somehow wresting power from "humans."
I have been struck, too, by (at least to hear Ezra Klein tell the story) how many of those involved in AI at its cutting edge themselves publicly espouse such fears, as seen in how heads of major tech companies are themselves calling for a "slowdown" in such research, and appearing on cable news shows to go from merely warning of the possibility of a Dark Singularity they tell us could be coming a lot sooner than even Ray Kurzweil thinks, to telling Tucker Carlson that we need quasi-military contingency plans for preemptively shutting down that none-too-far-off Singularity (!).
In that I see the influence of an abundance of bad sci-fi (such as Isaac Asimov was already inveighing against a century ago, apparently to no effect on the conventional wisdom whatsoever), and shameless, sensationalist attention-grabbing that feeds off of itself. However, there also seems to me an obliviousness to, or desire to ignore, the very real conflicts among humans of vastly unequal power, with all it implies. For all such talk about "humanity" being in control the vast, vast majority of the people on this planet have very little power over their lives, either individually or collectively, and are quite conscious of being subject to other "intelligences" that seem opaque, possibly alien in their natures and thought processes and agendas, which may be hostile to them and a threat to their survival, from dictators to oligarchs to the "faceless" functionaries within the "artificial men" and "corporate persons" that in a very meaningful sense already give us a world crawling with inhuman super-intelligences as scary as any out-of-control computer.
But for a tech billionaire in a culture which, to borrow from Hegel, regards the "successful" entrepreneur, and above all the "successful" Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as "God on Earth," and that precisely because those corporate persons, and even the artificial men, do their bidding, the thought of something replacing them as God on Earth has a different, more threatening, quality, so much so that silly scenarios of robot revolt that may be even less likely than ye olde zombie apocalypse have a powerful purchase on what serves them in place of an imagination.
I have been struck, too, by (at least to hear Ezra Klein tell the story) how many of those involved in AI at its cutting edge themselves publicly espouse such fears, as seen in how heads of major tech companies are themselves calling for a "slowdown" in such research, and appearing on cable news shows to go from merely warning of the possibility of a Dark Singularity they tell us could be coming a lot sooner than even Ray Kurzweil thinks, to telling Tucker Carlson that we need quasi-military contingency plans for preemptively shutting down that none-too-far-off Singularity (!).
In that I see the influence of an abundance of bad sci-fi (such as Isaac Asimov was already inveighing against a century ago, apparently to no effect on the conventional wisdom whatsoever), and shameless, sensationalist attention-grabbing that feeds off of itself. However, there also seems to me an obliviousness to, or desire to ignore, the very real conflicts among humans of vastly unequal power, with all it implies. For all such talk about "humanity" being in control the vast, vast majority of the people on this planet have very little power over their lives, either individually or collectively, and are quite conscious of being subject to other "intelligences" that seem opaque, possibly alien in their natures and thought processes and agendas, which may be hostile to them and a threat to their survival, from dictators to oligarchs to the "faceless" functionaries within the "artificial men" and "corporate persons" that in a very meaningful sense already give us a world crawling with inhuman super-intelligences as scary as any out-of-control computer.
But for a tech billionaire in a culture which, to borrow from Hegel, regards the "successful" entrepreneur, and above all the "successful" Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as "God on Earth," and that precisely because those corporate persons, and even the artificial men, do their bidding, the thought of something replacing them as God on Earth has a different, more threatening, quality, so much so that silly scenarios of robot revolt that may be even less likely than ye olde zombie apocalypse have a powerful purchase on what serves them in place of an imagination.
Are Those Who Keep Banging on About The Terminator in Our Discussions About AI Missing the Point of That Movie?
It is a tiresome cliché of discussion about artificial intelligence that people keep referencing an Arnold Schwarzenegger B movie from 1984. (We all know which one.)
The idea, in line with the Frankenstein complex that Isaac Asimov had already had occasion to criticize a half century before (to no effect, apparently), is that we will create a powerful artificial intelligence, and it will kill us all.
They pay very little attention to how it did so in the movie--specifically initiating a nuclear exchange. The fact would seem the more significant given that the movie was made in, and came out during, the "Second Cold War" and the associated "Euromissile crisis" when the danger of nuclear war, and the protest movement against war and against nuclear weaponry, was particularly strong--the years of the miniseries The Day After, and movies like WarGames, and novels like David Brin's The Postman and Stan Lee's (the "other" Stan Lee's) Dunn's Conundrum--such that this was not implausibly on James Cameron's mind. (Indeed, Terminator 2 can seem a reminder, if any were needed, that that danger did not vanish with the Cold War's end in the manner that those intent on lionizing the victory would have liked the public to believe, while trigger-happiness with nuclear weapons was, again, a significant element of Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss.)
But people never think of The Terminator as a warning about the dangers of nuclear weaponry, without the arms race in which "Skynet" would never have been created, let alone given the means with which to devastate humanity--means humans in the long run might have used no less destructively even without the involvement of artificial intelligence. My guess is that this is partly because the memories of the nuclear danger have been forgotten and buried, with opinion-makers by no means eager to revive them (they blatantly call people alert to that danger "cowards," the world-view of a Barry Goldwater become the mainstream here as in so many other areas of political life), while there is instead a preference for fixating on less plausible and less troublesome dangers--an AI apocalypse, like a zombie apocalypse, being a lot less politically contentious than fears of nuclear or climate catastrophe, with catharsis through thinking about the former perhaps a way of taking the edge off of worries about the latter. Another evasion, of the kind that so characterizes political life in our time.
The idea, in line with the Frankenstein complex that Isaac Asimov had already had occasion to criticize a half century before (to no effect, apparently), is that we will create a powerful artificial intelligence, and it will kill us all.
They pay very little attention to how it did so in the movie--specifically initiating a nuclear exchange. The fact would seem the more significant given that the movie was made in, and came out during, the "Second Cold War" and the associated "Euromissile crisis" when the danger of nuclear war, and the protest movement against war and against nuclear weaponry, was particularly strong--the years of the miniseries The Day After, and movies like WarGames, and novels like David Brin's The Postman and Stan Lee's (the "other" Stan Lee's) Dunn's Conundrum--such that this was not implausibly on James Cameron's mind. (Indeed, Terminator 2 can seem a reminder, if any were needed, that that danger did not vanish with the Cold War's end in the manner that those intent on lionizing the victory would have liked the public to believe, while trigger-happiness with nuclear weapons was, again, a significant element of Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss.)
But people never think of The Terminator as a warning about the dangers of nuclear weaponry, without the arms race in which "Skynet" would never have been created, let alone given the means with which to devastate humanity--means humans in the long run might have used no less destructively even without the involvement of artificial intelligence. My guess is that this is partly because the memories of the nuclear danger have been forgotten and buried, with opinion-makers by no means eager to revive them (they blatantly call people alert to that danger "cowards," the world-view of a Barry Goldwater become the mainstream here as in so many other areas of political life), while there is instead a preference for fixating on less plausible and less troublesome dangers--an AI apocalypse, like a zombie apocalypse, being a lot less politically contentious than fears of nuclear or climate catastrophe, with catharsis through thinking about the former perhaps a way of taking the edge off of worries about the latter. Another evasion, of the kind that so characterizes political life in our time.
The Politics of Edgelordism
It seems to me that, like so much else, "edgelordism" has a politics.
Consider what it means to be an edgelord--to go about provoking people for the sake of provocation. This seems to fairly obviously entail pleasure in an exercise of power over others, and using it to subject them to unpleasantness, that has more than a whiff of the bully about it. This is probably more dissonant for a person espousing the egalitarian values of the left than a person of the anti-egalitarian right.
Meanwhile there is the matter of whom one provokes. It may not always be clear just in which direction someone is punching when they make a provocative statement or perform a provocative act, but inclination apart, they are unlikely to get away with it for long if they offend persons more powerful than themselves. Those who offend for the sake of offending--if they get to do it for long--are probably managing to go on doing so because they take the safer course, making sure to stay on the good side of the former, not just by not directing punches at them, but directing punches at those they dislike (as bullies necessarily do).
Consider, for instance, the country's pieties. As James Galbraith remarked, "one cannot use in public" the word "market . . . without bending a knee and making the sign of the cross." But how many of our edgelords make the market their target? Quite the contrary, I remember how in the episode "Gnomes" the "edgy" creators of South Park made their "shock" ending their siding with Big Business against the mom-and-pop shop--and thus did it go with their sneering at rainforest-protecting environmentalists, and those who criticized the way in which the presidential election of 2000 was decided, and much, much else, so continually taking right-wing positions that some wondered if they were being ironic, and eventually realized they weren't.
The combination of politically conservative politics with a delight in obscenity that would be expected to offend a conservative seemed to them incongruous enough to media-watchers that they coined the term "South Park conservative." Yet "edginess" and conservatism have often gone hand in hand, as any look at a list of literary classics makes clear. The "èpater the bourgeoisie" Decadents are more easily classed with anti-rationalist reactionaries than with any progressive element (in contrast with, for instance, an Emile Zola, who offended in a different way for different reasons). Likewise Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange--all on the Modern Library's list of the Top 100 English-language novels of their century--are all at bottom deeply right-wing works that were edgy in that way, with what Nabokov had to say of his intentions in writing his book in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" making clear that in at least his case edgelordism was a motivation. The result is that rather than an innovator South Park stands in a long tradition, shock at which bespeaks nothing so much as the fact that our designated cultural commentators generally do not read books--or understand books when they do, none of which prevents them from being on the big platforms and getting the big money for being there in that way that makes fools of all those who snivel about the word of letters being a "meritocracy," such that we ought to be awed by its officially designated leaders and respectful of their opinions.
Consider what it means to be an edgelord--to go about provoking people for the sake of provocation. This seems to fairly obviously entail pleasure in an exercise of power over others, and using it to subject them to unpleasantness, that has more than a whiff of the bully about it. This is probably more dissonant for a person espousing the egalitarian values of the left than a person of the anti-egalitarian right.
Meanwhile there is the matter of whom one provokes. It may not always be clear just in which direction someone is punching when they make a provocative statement or perform a provocative act, but inclination apart, they are unlikely to get away with it for long if they offend persons more powerful than themselves. Those who offend for the sake of offending--if they get to do it for long--are probably managing to go on doing so because they take the safer course, making sure to stay on the good side of the former, not just by not directing punches at them, but directing punches at those they dislike (as bullies necessarily do).
Consider, for instance, the country's pieties. As James Galbraith remarked, "one cannot use in public" the word "market . . . without bending a knee and making the sign of the cross." But how many of our edgelords make the market their target? Quite the contrary, I remember how in the episode "Gnomes" the "edgy" creators of South Park made their "shock" ending their siding with Big Business against the mom-and-pop shop--and thus did it go with their sneering at rainforest-protecting environmentalists, and those who criticized the way in which the presidential election of 2000 was decided, and much, much else, so continually taking right-wing positions that some wondered if they were being ironic, and eventually realized they weren't.
The combination of politically conservative politics with a delight in obscenity that would be expected to offend a conservative seemed to them incongruous enough to media-watchers that they coined the term "South Park conservative." Yet "edginess" and conservatism have often gone hand in hand, as any look at a list of literary classics makes clear. The "èpater the bourgeoisie" Decadents are more easily classed with anti-rationalist reactionaries than with any progressive element (in contrast with, for instance, an Emile Zola, who offended in a different way for different reasons). Likewise Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange--all on the Modern Library's list of the Top 100 English-language novels of their century--are all at bottom deeply right-wing works that were edgy in that way, with what Nabokov had to say of his intentions in writing his book in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" making clear that in at least his case edgelordism was a motivation. The result is that rather than an innovator South Park stands in a long tradition, shock at which bespeaks nothing so much as the fact that our designated cultural commentators generally do not read books--or understand books when they do, none of which prevents them from being on the big platforms and getting the big money for being there in that way that makes fools of all those who snivel about the word of letters being a "meritocracy," such that we ought to be awed by its officially designated leaders and respectful of their opinions.
Is Writing Turning into Rewriting in the Age of the Chatbot?
Anyone who has had much experience of writing knows that it is hard, time-consuming work, which is why anyone who buys a book "by" a celebrity who takes it for granted that the celebrity on the cover actually wrote it is very, very ignorant, gullible, or both.
One reason for this is that writing is in large part rewriting, a notoriously tedious and painful process.
Still, as people increasingly rely on chatbots to generate "content," with the artificial intelligence pouring out lots of words that they must then polish, the polishing seems likely to be ever more of what it means to "write."
In considering the situation we should remember two truisms about writing, namely:
1. You can't rewrite well unless you know how to write well in the first place--and people do not pick up that skill just cleaning up chatbot content.
2. Most people who take pleasure in writing at all take pleasure in the experience of writing, not the rewriting, which they are apt to experience as a chore, and want as little as possible to do with.
Together 1. and 2. mean that increasingly relying on chatbots for text creation will leave people with less of the skill needed to polish that created text--and the wherewithal to go about that polish properly (which comes down to a readiness to tough out the tedious, painful process because they care about the quality of the content). The result may well be a decline in the quality of written content from what we get today--especially if the required skills go faster than the improvement in chatbot functioning that would make up for them.
One reason for this is that writing is in large part rewriting, a notoriously tedious and painful process.
Still, as people increasingly rely on chatbots to generate "content," with the artificial intelligence pouring out lots of words that they must then polish, the polishing seems likely to be ever more of what it means to "write."
In considering the situation we should remember two truisms about writing, namely:
1. You can't rewrite well unless you know how to write well in the first place--and people do not pick up that skill just cleaning up chatbot content.
2. Most people who take pleasure in writing at all take pleasure in the experience of writing, not the rewriting, which they are apt to experience as a chore, and want as little as possible to do with.
Together 1. and 2. mean that increasingly relying on chatbots for text creation will leave people with less of the skill needed to polish that created text--and the wherewithal to go about that polish properly (which comes down to a readiness to tough out the tedious, painful process because they care about the quality of the content). The result may well be a decline in the quality of written content from what we get today--especially if the required skills go faster than the improvement in chatbot functioning that would make up for them.
The Decline of the B-Movie Star
Ordinarily when people speak of the "decline of the movie star" these days they have in mind the way in which Hollywood no longer produces "bankable" head-liners of the "A-list" type whose casting as a lead in a major feature film (within reason) can deliver a healthy opening weekend gross.
They speak much less of the B-movie star. This is, in part, because the B-movie itself went into decline--as A-movies became really big B-movies with great technical resources and Big Names attached, and as other forms of small-screen production exploded, as with serial television, leaving less room for two-hour-oriented content of any form. However, the B-movie stars would also seem to have suffered from the same factors that overshadow the stars in the A-movies, including the films having to be sold on some basis other than the appeal of the leads, like brand-name franchises, which has its echo in the "mockbusters" in which the Asylum specializes--like Almighty Thor, Independent Day, Tomb Invader and Top Gunner. Amid all that it is not so easy for the would-be B-movie to stand above the evocation of the big movie, any more than the leads in the A-movies can hope to be bigger than their franchises.
They speak much less of the B-movie star. This is, in part, because the B-movie itself went into decline--as A-movies became really big B-movies with great technical resources and Big Names attached, and as other forms of small-screen production exploded, as with serial television, leaving less room for two-hour-oriented content of any form. However, the B-movie stars would also seem to have suffered from the same factors that overshadow the stars in the A-movies, including the films having to be sold on some basis other than the appeal of the leads, like brand-name franchises, which has its echo in the "mockbusters" in which the Asylum specializes--like Almighty Thor, Independent Day, Tomb Invader and Top Gunner. Amid all that it is not so easy for the would-be B-movie to stand above the evocation of the big movie, any more than the leads in the A-movies can hope to be bigger than their franchises.
It's Only Politics When the Left Does It
Irving Kristol, attempting to distinguish the neoconservatism of which he was the "godfather" from other ideologies, argued that neoconservatism was overtly and explicitly ideological--setting it apart from other forms of conservatism that treated ideology as a uniquely leftist trait (and intellectual sin).
The same seems to me to extend to the way in which those who sniff about the inappropriateness of injecting politics into art approach the matter. People are far more likely to object to politics there when those politics are not their own--and given who has the command of the review pages that generally means that (especially outside the culture war) it is the injection of the left's politics into art that gets artists a hard time from critics for having committed a supposed sin when the reality is that, as George Orwell put it, "All Art is Propaganda."
The same seems to me to extend to the way in which those who sniff about the inappropriateness of injecting politics into art approach the matter. People are far more likely to object to politics there when those politics are not their own--and given who has the command of the review pages that generally means that (especially outside the culture war) it is the injection of the left's politics into art that gets artists a hard time from critics for having committed a supposed sin when the reality is that, as George Orwell put it, "All Art is Propaganda."
Of the Quasi-Middle Class
Recent years have had me thinking me a lot about the term "middle class"--starting with the awkwardness of the "New" middle class concept which completely overlooks the whole issue of property and independence to treat people who work for a paycheck at the pleasure of a master ("boss" is just a euphemism for master, because apparently someone thought saying it in Dutch made it different) as a privileged stratum.
The idea was that they enjoyed a higher level of material consumption, more security, more opportunity to get ahead than other people working for a boss for the sake of a paycheck--but on close inspection it seems that while in the post-war era and after a great many people had houses and cars, this was a matter of having a mortgage and making car payments rather than owning things outright, all as (in part because of their indebtedness and its perils) they had relatively little of the security and opportunity promised. And all in all I think a case can be made that what we speak of as the "middle class" is overwhelmingly just the "quasi-middle class"--and that we would understand the stresses of the present situation a good deal better than we do now if we started to recognize it as such.
The idea was that they enjoyed a higher level of material consumption, more security, more opportunity to get ahead than other people working for a boss for the sake of a paycheck--but on close inspection it seems that while in the post-war era and after a great many people had houses and cars, this was a matter of having a mortgage and making car payments rather than owning things outright, all as (in part because of their indebtedness and its perils) they had relatively little of the security and opportunity promised. And all in all I think a case can be made that what we speak of as the "middle class" is overwhelmingly just the "quasi-middle class"--and that we would understand the stresses of the present situation a good deal better than we do now if we started to recognize it as such.
Whither the Promise of Silicon Valley?
The '90s, as I find myself saying again and again, were a period of profound delusion. Many of the delusions had to do with the New Economy, in which a certain conception of "Silicon Valley" was central. For the information age-singing neoliberal Silicon Valley represented everything good and great about America (such that when its boosters speak of it they seem to be imagining heavenly choirs raising their voices them). Its people were--in line with their obsessive compulsive disorder-like propensity for invidious comparison--the country's "best and brightest" (which was to say that if you were not one of them, you were not best and brightest--you were worse and dumber). It embodied what they regarded as the finest American values ("entrepreneurship," "innovation," and many, many other buzzwords), which they held to be more strongly present here than anywhere else in the country or the world. (It may well be that the origins of the "If Cars Were Like Computers . . ." joke are not what we are told they are, but even so one could easily picture the executives in Detroit getting sick of hearing their counterparts in the Bay Area get talked up so much as to concoct something of the kind.)
Delusional, too, were the populist fantasies that the cheerleaders tried spinning around it. The market populists portrayed the tech billionaires as young upstarts, vaguely progressive and even countercultural--hippie techies out of the West Coast "Ecotopia" who wanted to make the world a better place. ("It's like, freedom, man!") Such people were supposed to be the redeemers on Earth of the neoliberalism that tore the guts out of the industrial base that was the foundation of American economic might--with an unceasing stream of INNOVATION! from which wealth would trickle down to all in ways from "good jobs" to day trading that would make every adult a rentier. And even as they made for a more productive capitalism than ever before they would make for a kinder and gentler one, too, greening our production and making our lives easier not only with their products and the income with which to buy them but their management style as our workplaces became kindergartens for grown-ups, full of beanbag chairs and toys contributing to a gentle, soothing, creativity-nurturing atmosphere.
Of course, it did not work that way. At all. Anyone who imagined that Silicon Valley by itself would make everything wrong with the American economy right found out otherwise in short order as Silicon Valley hype actually tanked the economy with dot-com bubble and bust--while the same old problems just went on getting worse through and after it, as Silicon Valley's INNOVATION! engine all but sputtered compared with the promises of the '90s. (The prospect of genuine advances like self-driving cars came to nothing, as they pushed things no one asked for and most people refused when offered them, like that Internet of Things they never shut up about.)
The populist fantasies looked especially ridiculous. Those supposed upstarts (rarely of such obscure origin as their PR people would have folks believe), who were supposed to have challenged the club of Old Men ruling the economy became a club of Old Men in their turn. And they, and the corporate empires they built, have become monuments to extreme and ever-more established wealth, and the inseparability and ultimate indistinguishability of the newest money from the oldest in connections, style, tone and even possessions (the onetime icon of tech wealth since become the biggest private landowner in the country). Monument to Wall Street paper profiteering and offshore banking and race-to-the-labor-standards bottom offshoring and sweatshop exploitation; to monopoly power and Orwellian surveillance and censorship; to hyper-elitism and contempt for the have-nots, in ways from the Josiah Bounderby pretenses and Ebenezer Scrooge callousness to the ideologies to which those to whom so much is given so easily incline, desperately trying to persuade the world that they are the supermen of Ayn Rand's inverted proletarian lit stories (with the media a very willing accessory as it promulgates their images of themselves as chess-playing math whiz child prodigies all growns up who will personally unlock the secret to immortality as Prometheus stole fire from the gods!).
It is increasingly difficult, and perhaps not even possible, to regard the Silicon Valley people were promised, always a delusion that one had to be truly gullible to be taken in by, as anything but that delusion now--and indeed there seems a certain symbolism in the Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group being bankrupt, just like the hucksterism that may prove to be the place's single greatest cultural legacy.
Delusional, too, were the populist fantasies that the cheerleaders tried spinning around it. The market populists portrayed the tech billionaires as young upstarts, vaguely progressive and even countercultural--hippie techies out of the West Coast "Ecotopia" who wanted to make the world a better place. ("It's like, freedom, man!") Such people were supposed to be the redeemers on Earth of the neoliberalism that tore the guts out of the industrial base that was the foundation of American economic might--with an unceasing stream of INNOVATION! from which wealth would trickle down to all in ways from "good jobs" to day trading that would make every adult a rentier. And even as they made for a more productive capitalism than ever before they would make for a kinder and gentler one, too, greening our production and making our lives easier not only with their products and the income with which to buy them but their management style as our workplaces became kindergartens for grown-ups, full of beanbag chairs and toys contributing to a gentle, soothing, creativity-nurturing atmosphere.
Of course, it did not work that way. At all. Anyone who imagined that Silicon Valley by itself would make everything wrong with the American economy right found out otherwise in short order as Silicon Valley hype actually tanked the economy with dot-com bubble and bust--while the same old problems just went on getting worse through and after it, as Silicon Valley's INNOVATION! engine all but sputtered compared with the promises of the '90s. (The prospect of genuine advances like self-driving cars came to nothing, as they pushed things no one asked for and most people refused when offered them, like that Internet of Things they never shut up about.)
The populist fantasies looked especially ridiculous. Those supposed upstarts (rarely of such obscure origin as their PR people would have folks believe), who were supposed to have challenged the club of Old Men ruling the economy became a club of Old Men in their turn. And they, and the corporate empires they built, have become monuments to extreme and ever-more established wealth, and the inseparability and ultimate indistinguishability of the newest money from the oldest in connections, style, tone and even possessions (the onetime icon of tech wealth since become the biggest private landowner in the country). Monument to Wall Street paper profiteering and offshore banking and race-to-the-labor-standards bottom offshoring and sweatshop exploitation; to monopoly power and Orwellian surveillance and censorship; to hyper-elitism and contempt for the have-nots, in ways from the Josiah Bounderby pretenses and Ebenezer Scrooge callousness to the ideologies to which those to whom so much is given so easily incline, desperately trying to persuade the world that they are the supermen of Ayn Rand's inverted proletarian lit stories (with the media a very willing accessory as it promulgates their images of themselves as chess-playing math whiz child prodigies all growns up who will personally unlock the secret to immortality as Prometheus stole fire from the gods!).
It is increasingly difficult, and perhaps not even possible, to regard the Silicon Valley people were promised, always a delusion that one had to be truly gullible to be taken in by, as anything but that delusion now--and indeed there seems a certain symbolism in the Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group being bankrupt, just like the hucksterism that may prove to be the place's single greatest cultural legacy.
What Will the Film Market Be Like in 2031?
Looking at Disney's recently revised schedule of releases I could not help but notice that Disney has Marvel Cinematic Universe films planned all the way through 2027--and Avatar films all the way through 2031.
I generally get the impression that business does too little long-range planning, rather than too much. (However much Establishment commentators like to pooh-pooh those who dare speak of short-termism, it really is an issue.) But it seems to me that the world of film in 2023, which looks quite a different thing from what it did in 2019, let alone 2015 (when Hollywood was orienting itself to China, when the possibilities of streaming were supposed to be unbounded, when Disney looked unstoppable and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was imagined to be replicable and the pandemic was just disaster movie stuff), could be very, very different in 2031, so much so that planning specific installments in specific franchises that far down the road is indicative of someone getting ahead of themselves.
What do you think?
I generally get the impression that business does too little long-range planning, rather than too much. (However much Establishment commentators like to pooh-pooh those who dare speak of short-termism, it really is an issue.) But it seems to me that the world of film in 2023, which looks quite a different thing from what it did in 2019, let alone 2015 (when Hollywood was orienting itself to China, when the possibilities of streaming were supposed to be unbounded, when Disney looked unstoppable and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was imagined to be replicable and the pandemic was just disaster movie stuff), could be very, very different in 2031, so much so that planning specific installments in specific franchises that far down the road is indicative of someone getting ahead of themselves.
What do you think?
James McDonald, and the Demand for "Strong Characters"
In recently surveying the literary scene and asking "Where is Our [Emile] Zola?" James McDonald, noting the extreme neglect of working-class life not only in the more popular genre fiction, but the ever more minute body of "literary" fiction purporting to offer something more than escapist entertainment, had occasion to consider the literary agents who are the field's gatekeepers, their standards, their tastes.
As he noted one commonly finds among the agents' hazily expressed preferences (in fairness, they're not really interested in having some unknown trying to cater to their tastes) a desire for "strong" characters. As McDonald remarks, these agents' "tastes represent an upper-middle class approach to literature," looking for "role-model ("strong") characters," who will somehow "overcome" some contemporary problem, typically of the more fashionable types ("spousal abuse, alcoholism, sexism, to take a few from the current bestsellers") on the basis of "[i]ndividual resilience, 'grit' (the term of the hour) and personal choices," even when purportedly writing realistic, adult fiction (which is rare enough, McDonald emphasizing the preference for "escape into childhood, magic and a romanticized past").
It is, in his view, a step backward from what we were starting to see in the nineteenth century with writers like that pioneer of naturalism, Zola--I would say, a step back into the eighteenth century, when the individualistic, bourgeois novel emerged.
Thus do we, in an age in which "Artificial General Intelligence" may have already arrived, carry forward literary ideals belonging to an era where the steam engine was scarcely becoming serviceable for industrial use, and pat ourselves on the back for how progressive we are in doing so.
As he noted one commonly finds among the agents' hazily expressed preferences (in fairness, they're not really interested in having some unknown trying to cater to their tastes) a desire for "strong" characters. As McDonald remarks, these agents' "tastes represent an upper-middle class approach to literature," looking for "role-model ("strong") characters," who will somehow "overcome" some contemporary problem, typically of the more fashionable types ("spousal abuse, alcoholism, sexism, to take a few from the current bestsellers") on the basis of "[i]ndividual resilience, 'grit' (the term of the hour) and personal choices," even when purportedly writing realistic, adult fiction (which is rare enough, McDonald emphasizing the preference for "escape into childhood, magic and a romanticized past").
It is, in his view, a step backward from what we were starting to see in the nineteenth century with writers like that pioneer of naturalism, Zola--I would say, a step back into the eighteenth century, when the individualistic, bourgeois novel emerged.
Thus do we, in an age in which "Artificial General Intelligence" may have already arrived, carry forward literary ideals belonging to an era where the steam engine was scarcely becoming serviceable for industrial use, and pat ourselves on the back for how progressive we are in doing so.
The Working Class in Fiction, and the Working Class Author on Park Avenue
Recently writing about the near-invisibility of the working class and its life from literary fiction today James McDonald emphasized the tastes of the literary agents who are the publishing industry's gatekeepers.
These tastes certainly play a part in determining what may reach a publisher and what does not. However, given that McDonald was (rightly) insistent that one need not be working class to write well about the working class (just as, more broadly, people can, do and should transcend their limitations as they write about the world), he was less probably less inclined to emphasize the extent to which working-class persons are by and large not to be found in publishing, the Academy or anywhere else--while, contrary to the hopes endlessly raised about the slush pile by the colossal industry playing on the hopes of aspiring authors, barring a "platform" (i.e. the ability to answer "Yes" to the question "Are you famous enough that a commercially significant number of people will buy a book with your name on the cover?") personal connections are pretty much the only way in. Working-class persons are particularly unlikely to have connections of that kind--and what this means for their exclusion from traditional publishing, if far from the only factor in the invisibility of the working class in literature today, does contribute to it.
These tastes certainly play a part in determining what may reach a publisher and what does not. However, given that McDonald was (rightly) insistent that one need not be working class to write well about the working class (just as, more broadly, people can, do and should transcend their limitations as they write about the world), he was less probably less inclined to emphasize the extent to which working-class persons are by and large not to be found in publishing, the Academy or anywhere else--while, contrary to the hopes endlessly raised about the slush pile by the colossal industry playing on the hopes of aspiring authors, barring a "platform" (i.e. the ability to answer "Yes" to the question "Are you famous enough that a commercially significant number of people will buy a book with your name on the cover?") personal connections are pretty much the only way in. Working-class persons are particularly unlikely to have connections of that kind--and what this means for their exclusion from traditional publishing, if far from the only factor in the invisibility of the working class in literature today, does contribute to it.
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