Another Take on the Cult of Celebrity

My usual first thought regarding the cult of celebrity is its foolishness--and the second, its essential backwardness, reflecting as it does a hierarchical outlook more befitting barbarians than civilized people (the more in as it is so much taken for granted). However, one alternative treatment of the theme that impressed me was David Walsh's discussion of the issue way back when Michael Jordan retired. Certainly he remarks the essentially inegalitarian character of a society where celebrity exists in such a manner. ("Excessive celebrity must be . . . a rationale for inequality and reinforces it." After all, "[t]he heaping of fame and wealth upon a single individual . . . is only possible and meaningful if the vast majority have no access to those rewards.") He noted, too, that the status of celebrities from the world of entertainment was partly a matter of the repellent, toxic quality of the public figures seen to be elsewhere. ("It was impossible for a sports star to swell" to such a "monumental size in the American popular consciousness" as Jordan did "as long as there were figures . . . respected, rightly or wrongly, for their accomplishments on behalf of society as a whole." In the era of the Clinton impeachment that was ongoing as Walsh wrote those words, he asked, "Who deserves such admiration?")

However, he also argued for the fascination with celebrity being a function of what one might (to use a different writer's famous phrase to which Walsh alludes), so many people's "leading lives of quiet desperation." The "millions" doing so,

going about their daily lives without any sense of a greater purpose to their existence than the struggle to make ends meet . . . denied richness and pleasure and variety and meaning . . . turn hungrily to the media-chronicled lives of celebrities--who apparently have everything they don't . . . who are "real" while they are, to themselves, non-existent--in search of a life with content.

He adds that "[t]his vicarious existence stands in for real existence, except because it is not real or substantial . . . can never fill them up, and so they are always desperate for more, something, anything to fill up the gaping hole."

In short, the celebrities "live the fantasy," or at least seem to be doing so, and other people find vicarious satisfaction in it, however faint or limited or tenuous--the more in as they are incessantly told that they too could be doing this, may someday be doing this. ("The media . . . encourages many young people to believe that they can escape their difficult conditions of life by following the basketball star's path. For ninety-nine point nine percent of them this is an illusion, and a bitter one.")

They may as well be the people in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where off-world drug-trippers rely on "virtual" experience of a cushier life; at playing at "being" Perky Pat (ominously, as the atmosphere warms, endangering the survival of life on Earth . . .).

All this, of course, is very sad--but sad as it is it still strikes me as staggering in its stupidity, with stupider still those who exalt people's following celebrity in this way as some sort of need, when really it is at best a way of avoiding looking at their real needs and trying to satisfy those. If we indeed live in a world where quiet desperation is the lot of the mass, after all, they ought to be looking for more than vicarious living through mediated images of people acting the part of those to whom life has given everything as they try to get on after life has given them nothing, or next to it.

Remembering Spin City

Recently considering the politically "safe" character of the '90s-era sitcom I found myself recalling the sitcom Spin City, precisely because it was so blatant an example. Here we have a sitcom with, for a protagonist, the Deputy Mayor of New York, and the Mayor and his staff for supporting characters--but, from what I saw of it (which I thought was a lot in reruns on FX), it was pretty much your standard workplace comedy, full of wacky characters who do not actually do anything but get on each others' nerves and have "Will they/Won't they" romantic tension under the nose of a silly, incompetent, oblivious boss.* A little "identity politics" apart, I have the impression that the "China" episode of the not wholly dissimilar The Office all by itself spent more time on a political issue than anything in Spin City's six seasons did--to say nothing of how it looks in comparison with Michael J. Fox's previous long-running sitcom, Family Ties (to which there is a tiny allusion at the end of Fox's character's departure, when he goes on to a job in Washington D.C. and mentions meeting a Senator Alex P. Keaton from Ohio, of whom his opinion is none too flattering).

In all that, as in a great deal else (yes, a good part of the humor would probably be off-limits today), it was quintessentially of its time.

* Indeed, his Mayor Randall Winston being the first impression Barry Bostwick made on me the thought that he was Thodin in Lexx was quite a shock.

Nineteen Eighty-Nine and the Way the Summer Box Office Used to Be

Recently I remembered here the year 1989 at the box office--both the hype that surrounded it, and the ways in which that year did anticipate the box office as we now know it (in particular, how superhero movies and animated family films, not very big genres prior to that point, would come to dominate the theaters).

Still, it seems worth noting that alongside those anticipations--whose significance is far clearer in hindsight than it was at the time--looking at the year's, and even the summer's, roster of hits reminds us of how different (in some ways, more diverse) "the movies" used to be. Certainly the summer season saw plenty of action movies, which that year were the biggest moneymakers (with Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 2 raking it in). However, they dominated it less completely than they do now. The top hits of that summer, after all, also included Turner & Hooch, When Harry Met Sally, Parenthood and Dead Poet's Society--comedy, romance, dramedy, even drama oriented to people who were at least nominally adults selling a lot of tickets.

What a different cinematic world that was than the one we live in now.

Is the World Already Crawling With Artificial Super-Intelligences?

Amid the present furor over progress in the area of chatbot development many a commentator is raising the tired old specter of inhuman intelligences, perhaps super-intelligences, emerging and escaping human control, perhaps to wreak havoc of a kind that will threaten human freedom and even survival.

Arguably the world has long seen its life dominated by such super-intelligences--the "artificial men" of Thomas Hobbes, the "corporate persons" brought into modern jurisprudence by a nineteenth century argument over railway fences. These entities, with their resources of surveillance, data-processing, decision and action far, far beyond that of any one human, at once everywhere and nowhere, and theoretically capable of living forever, are just as artificial as anything contained within the casing of a computer--and for many a hapless individual just as incomprehensible, intractable, threatening. Indeed, were the world to actually ever be dominated by robot overlords one may wonder if those individuals would feel that their life is any different for it.

H.G. Wells' "Bookish Illiteracy"

In his Experiment in Autobiography there is a point at which H.G. Wells suggests that the "caricature-individualities" of his realist novels might not seem very relevant for long, that civilization would simply have moved on.

Of course, as with so much else in Wells, his creations remain relevant precisely because civilization did not move on in the way in which he imagined. The problems with which the world was wrestling in his time remain the ones which bedevil it now--the organization of human economic and social life in line with not just the possibilities presented but the necessities imposed by the advance of technology and of knowledge broadly. Economic life, war, "sanity"--considering the situation we are in now it can feel as if society has made little to no progress at all, the past century a waste or worse that has left people scarcely trying even as the challenge has got bigger and the stakes higher.

For the moment, though, I have in mind something rather lighter than those problems, like the "bookish illiteracy" of one of those caricature-individualities he specifically raised as likely to have lost its interest before very long, Alfred Polly (of his 1910 novel The History of Mr. Polly). Mr. Polly, Wells tells us, "specialised in," as he put it, "the disuse of English." This was because, while he was fascinated by "words rich in suggestion" and "loved] a novel and striking phrase," his limited formal education left him with "little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English"--with this getting worse the more exotic the material got. To him Boccacio is "Bocashieu," Rabelais "Rabooloose."

Still, in spite of his familiarity with such figures his reading was less a matter of middlebrow chasing after classics than of omnivorousness for anything in print, at least insofar as it promised to satisfy a taste for manly adventure, which was what got him into reading in the first place. "Penny dreadfuls" were a big part of his reading diet in those early adolescent years when he was bitten by the bug, with their Haggardesque tales of tropical exploration and dives into the mysteries beneath the sea and battles where young Polly vicariously "led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts," and "rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten." And the habit stuck, such that later he liked "Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne."*

Considering all this it seems to me that this is all very far from being irrelevant. Indeed, those of us who have ever been bookish have likely been that before we became "literate" (How do you get to be good at reading if you don't do much of it? And who has not mispronounced words they read but did not hear?); or our taste in that reading (as we are unlikely to become enthusiastic readers if it is all a matter of "eating your vegetables"). Certainly looking back at what--and how--I read at his age I do not think I was so different. If I now bore the readers of this blog by writing about people like Balzac--and Wells' realist novels--the author favored back then was Clive Cussler, a teller of adventure stories where exploration and the sea and battles all figure very prominently (if with rather less of the Victorian sensibility that so colored Polly's consumption), while I might add that even today Dumas' Vicomte appeals to me less than does his preceding tales of Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D'Artagnan.

Of course, it may be the case that Wells did not imagine this ceasing to be the case so much as he imagined it not being the case for anyone in adulthood--that complete literacy would be universalized, and certainly that anyone bookish in inclination would not, through the premature end of a poorly conducted formal education, pronounce "Boccacio" as "Bocashieu." In that case one could give him some credit for being right about Polly-like "bookish illiteracy" becoming less relevant--though not in the way he expected or hoped. In our time it is not illiteracy that appears to be on the wane, but rather bookishness, particularly the kind associated with plain and simple literary pleasure.

* Vicomte is the third novel in Dumas' cycle about the Musketeers, after the original The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After--and not just to Polly but anyone expecting a swashbuckler in the style of the prior two apt to be a disappointment, one reason why film adaptations of Vicomte de Bragelonne are very rare next to the others. (Still, they do take part of the book--specifically the portion now remembered as The Man with the Iron Mask, where we do get some "blood and swash.")

On Longtime Fans

I remember how when I first started to look into science fiction seriously, and read some of the history and criticism of the field in the course of that--much of which was, for better and worse, written by veteran authors--they often seemed to me jaded and picky and snobbish and negative.

Later, though, I came around to understanding their attitude. When a fan starts taking an interest in something their interests are fairly wide, and they are prepared to give a lot of things a chance, enough so that they may find the jaded, picky, snobbish, negative attitude hard to understand. But eventually they develop likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies--becoming aware of things they would enjoy more of, and things they never want to see again--at which point they, too, appear jaded and negative, perhaps even in the same ways.

Certainly this happened for me. Many years ago my patience was at an end with dystopia (especially the progress-hating kind designed to crush people's hopes of anything ever being better), and disaster (I think we've seen enough real-life disasters these days to find the fictional formulas unconvincing), and the post-apocalyptic situations to which disaster leads (especially of the reptile-brained survivalist variety), and robot stories of the Frankenstein complex type (I'm on Asimov's side here), and the Luddism generally associated with that (because, aside from being wrong-headed, it's trite and boring). As might be guessed from such a list I also have less patience with ostentatious Modernism and postmodernism in form and content, from the nihilistic poses of the self-satisfied edgelords down to the kind of science fiction storytelling that strives to overwhelm the reader's ability to process what they are reading with minute details irrelevant in any conventional narrative sense (Bruce Sterling once compared it to the "hard-rock wall of sound"), while if still willing to look at a long book, I find myself ever more demanding in regard to their justification of their length. (Basically, if you are going to make me sit through a thousand pages, or even just three hundred, you had better make them count, and few do. Art aside, how often do our adventure storytellers these days match their pulp predecessors for pace, incident, fun?)

Alas, such dislikes rather limit the options these days, or so it seems to me. What do you think? Are we seeing less of these things in recent science fiction than before? And what are we seeing more of?

Remember When They Thought the Action Film Was Dying Out?

Probably not. But that was the way the entertainment press was talking circa 1990, believe it or not.

What brought that on? Simply put, the style of action film that dominated the '80s was looking increasingly decadent between the ever-bigger budgets and ever-sillier results, while the grosses were hitting a limit--with this underlined by sinking franchises.

Thus Rambo: First Blood, Part II was a cultural phenomenon in 1985.

Rambo III was . . . not. This "most expensive film ever made" (capped off by Rambo's joust-like charge in a hijacked Soviet battle tank at a Hind helicopter) was received by many as laughable rather than exciting, as it took in one-third what its predecessor did at the box office.

So did it go with other films like the same year's The Dead Pool, and Red Heat, and the following year's Red Scorpion, and Tango & Cash (and in their different ways the "young adult" version of Rambo that was Disney's The Rescue and that James Bond-redone-as-'80s-action movie Licence to Kill), while even as it became a big hit the $50 million Lethal Weapon 2, with its bomb-in-the-toilet and the bad guys' house sliding down a hill, seemed to testify to the difficulty of "going bigger" as much as Rambo III (and Tango & Cash) did.

This may have been all the more the case with the films losing their thematic charge as the "post-Vietnam" sentiment waned, the moral panic over drugs and crime probably began to burn itself out, and the culture went increasingly "ironic"--and the following year did not change that. In the summer of 1990 the studios backed Total Recall and Die Hard 2 with Rambo III-like budgets in the hopes of seeing the movies achieve commensurately high ticket sales--and did not quite see their hopes fulfilled. Meanwhile the sequels to Robocop and Predator did not do quite so well as hoped, either.

At the same time they watched the romantic comedy Pretty Woman, the romance-cum-supernatural thriller Ghost and the family slapstick comedy Home Alone top the box office that year.

This, they said, is how the box office is going to be trending.

It made for a headline-grabbing narrative--the more in as this was the period of the last really big "moral panic" about violence in popular culture. But it was not really true. Rather those who made the judgment would have done better to pay attention to how big Batman had been the year before, and Dick Tracy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were that year--and even the success of The Hunt for Red October (the last three films all placing among the ten biggest moneymakers of the year). Scaled-up adventures with heavy military hardware helped keep something of the '80s-style action movie going through the '90s, while even if the injection of that element extended its life only so much, the superhero movies showed how the genre was tending. The action movie was not passing, but evolving--such that the superheroes dominate the big screen as the romantic comedies and other such films have been relegated to the small.

Red Forman's Vision of the '70s on That '70s Show

Watching That '70s Show years ago (mostly in reruns) I found it a mixed bag. Some of it worked, some of it didn't.

The antics of the young people who were the focus were pretty forgettable for the most part, and as it happens I actually remember more about what the adults said and did. Not that they didn't have their limitations, of course. Eric Forman's father Red was a pretty standard string of pretty standard period sitcom clichés--a working-class man who, repeatedly and badly dinged by life, has nonetheless found himself with a family in the suburbs with its different tone and expectations in middle age, to whose seemingly unending demands he responds gracelessly and insensitively; and a reactionary old member of the Greatest Generation who is endlessly tearing into the Baby Boomer son he regards as a soft, incompetent, wimp; but who, for all the coarseness and the sarcasm and the yelling, can always be expected to do the "right thing" in the end (however grudgingly and, again, gracelessly), while every now and then reminding us that he is a human being after all.*

. Still, the writers every now and then gave us a little more than the usual--in part by, in this era in which social reality was not to be seen much in a major network sitcom (1998-2006), occasionally mining a little of that reality for comedy, with a memorable black-and-white sequence in the episode "The Velvet Rope" presenting us with what Red imagined his life, and the world, would be like at that point, an era of burgeoning incomes and exploding consumer technology making life better and better for Joes like himself. We heard, too, something of its basis--the sketchy premise that, because the American worker was "experienced, loyal, and hard-working," and Germans and Japanese were not, the post-war boom that made it all possible would just go on and on.

Of course, as people learned the hard way in the '70s, it didn't (and couldn't, certainly on that basis), and the world was very different for it, with one consequence the bitter gap between expectations and reality. (There went the flying cars! Or, as Red Forman seems to have referred to them in that scene, "hovercrafts.")

Much as progress-hating postmodernists sneer at those who dare remember and bring up those broken promises the reality is that those promises really were important, and their breaking important; that there really is a disaster and a tragedy here; and far from helping the world understand with it and cope with it and move on to something better (not their forte) they have preferred to indulge their stupid ironic snobbery as the world falls apart, making them infinitely more deserving of contempt than all the people and things on which they presume to look down.

* It seems worth noting that in the show's equally nostalgic '80s counterpart, The Goldbergs, paterfamilias Murray is very similar.

Cameron Diaz's Last Comedy, and Science Fiction Become Reality: Thoughts on the 2014 Movie Sex Tape

I was not a particular fan of Bad Teacher, but I did end up catching the reteaming of director Jake Kasdan with Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel in Sex Tape three years later.

The film had me thinking of those who love to tell us that if the science fiction genre seems less fresh and visionary and original and vibrant today that is because writers cannot keep up with a reality where technological change is far outstripping the rate at which writers can work. "The whole world has become science fiction!" they tell us triumphantly as they lift their cell phones high. ("I am holding a cell phone! The future is now!")

This kind of talk has never impressed me--struck me as mere shilling for consumer gadgets, and propaganda for the "information age," all as one sees how much technological progress has actually run behind common expectations for decades (got that self-driving car yet?), how little change there has been in the more fundamental areas of life. (The smart phone has been around for so long now that you have people old enough to vote who literally do not remember a time before its appearance--all while such things as the production and content of food, shelter, clothing, energy, transport, medicine have changed very little, to name but a few of those essentials people rarely look away from their screens long enough to notice, except when they do not have them, or use their withering math skills to understand the bill for them and are horrified. No, this is not the world of revolutionized abundance you were promised.)

Still, Sex Tape seems to me to be a movie which really would be a good example of how what would have been science fiction once has become contemporary reality--in its depiction of contemporary mores, and communications technology. Written in 1964, for example, it would have been prophetic--rather like Murray Leinster's extraordinary extrapolation "A Logic Named Joe," which saw fifty years ahead to the era of the Internet very, very clearly indeed. But of course it was no such extrapolation--leaving us with, in this case, rather a mundane farce, rather than any great vision such as gives many a science fiction classic an interest even where it ceases to entertain in the usual ways.

Those Who Walked Away From Self-Publishing

Recently I was surprised to read claims that people are still self-publishing millions of books annually--precisely because self-publishing has proven such a disappointment. I expected that, after their initial experience the discouraged, exhausted--and often poorer--survivors of the marketplace slaughter tended to give up, while their experience discouraged others from going where they had gone before, all the more in as the "revolution" some hoped for never happened, was indeed cut off at the roots by the stagnation of the e-book and e-book reader's proliferation, the decline of book blogging and the ever more controlled nature of the Internet narrowing their publicity options, and of course, the unflagging hostility of the elitist bullies keeping the Gates of Literature so that folks like the Kardashians can become Authors but they can't (as said bullies tell them that they are "unworthy," when really the issue is that the Kardashians are famous but they are not, the insult as dishonest as it is cruel). And indeed, my admittedly unscientific impressions of such authors' pages on Amazon is that after putting out a few books, and (to go by sales rankings, ratings, reviews) not gotten much attention, their output has trailed off.

Is it possible that, in spite of all the disappointment, people have stuck to it? Even become more inclined to it?

There are some possibilities here--the most obvious of which is the extreme strength of the determination of a great many people to become authors, to make a living writing full-time in spite of the poor odds and the ever-abundant discouragement. Still, it seems to me that there is something to be explained here--and another reminder that no one has even begun to properly tell the story of self-publishing in these times.

A Word on Genius: Balzac's The Two Brothers, Again

The two brothers in Balzac's Two Brothers are Philippe and Joseph Bridau. From early on in life, because of how they look and how they handle themselves, everyone expects great things for Philippe, and nothing for Joseph, with this confirmed by the choices of career each makes--Joseph's becoming a painter seen as a disaster by his mother, in contrast with Philippe becoming a soldier, and while frankly a mediocre one happening upon a succession of unlikely opportunities that see him a colonel after only a few years' service.

At least early in life Joseph accepts the assessment of his brother if not himself, mistaking Philippe's "patronizing manners" and "brutal exterior" as reflective of his being a "solider of genius," such that Balzac quips that "Joseph did not yet know . . . that soldiers of genius are as gentle and courteous in manner as other superior men in any walk of life" (and Philippe, distinctly, not one of those). "All genius is alike, wherever found," Balzac adds.

The idea that the person of true genius is "gentle and courteous" would seem unknown not only to the young Joseph, but to people generally these days--be it in how the courtiers who lionize "geniuses" in public life sing of their oafish and nasty conduct as if it were a common, predictable, even necessary part of a package of which we should all be awestruck and admiring. This is, if anything, reaffirmed by the depiction of "genius" in fiction, which often has them thoroughly unpleasant, arrogant people (like the supposed scientist of "genius" as written by the hacks who crank out our pop culture).

Why is that? I suppose it is because a great many people, in line with the prevailing belief that the world is some perfect meritocracy where people get what they deserve, such that it is assumed that those who hold high positions are more meritorious and deserving than others, quite stupidly equate position with capacity. They associate Authority with irascible, impatient, bullying individuals ever tearing into those they see as their "inferiors" (not unreasonably, given that there is never a shortage of this kind of thing), and associate superior intelligence and talent with that (entirely unreasonably, given that there is ever a shortage of these kinds of things in high places), producing a characteristic example of the kind of muddle into which the "conventional wisdom" leads those benighted enough to believe in it.

Was 1989 a Signal Year for the Evolution of the American Box Office?

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."

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.

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.

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).