Earlier this year a blog post by George R.R. Martin got a bit of attention for its discussion of anti-fans.
As it happened, that was just one of the things he talked about in that post--and I think the rest of the things he had to say merit at least as much attention. Said post, as it happened, was his annual post "looking back over the year that was ending and ahead to the year to come"--and so was this one--but the dominant note was that 2023 was a horrific year, one he is "glad . . . is over," while "so far 2024 looks to be even worse."
Mr. Martin said none of this lightly--or entirely because of personal losses (though Martin reports the deaths of many a longtime colleague and friend Howard Waldrop, for one of whose short story collections, I remember, he wrote a memorable introduction). The "Weimar Republic" turn of American politics, the escalation and spread of war in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and elsewhere (unlike many he did not overlook the conflicts in Myanmar and South America) that leaves him thinking that "[i]f climate change does not get us, war will," make the toxicity of online fan discourse seem a small thing indeed--though I dare say that it is not so inseparable from those other divisions and conflicts that distress him. Indeed, as he writes "[t]he era of rational discourse seems to have ended," such that he has become "cynical" about his own blogging, wondering if, with his undeniable platform, "Has anything I have ever written here ever changed a single mind, a single vote?" and suspecting the answer to be in the negative.
Reading that I wondered what others said in reply--but alas, the comments were disabled for this post. Ideally one might have seen in those comments being on someone saying something offering grounds for hope--but I suspect that the toxicity of which he wrote discouraged his allowing any such thing. Knowing just how real it is I suppose that, as it is a personal blog, and he cannot spend his whole day policing it against spammers and bots and trolls and other refuse of our online life (given how much attention from them a big platform like his would attract), I can hardly fault him for his choice.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Rise of the Anti-Fan
George R.R. Martin blogged some time ago about the ascent of the "anti-fan," who rather than discussing their likes and dislikes in book and film, etc., much prefer to "talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped."
However, he had nothing to say of why this is happening (at least, nothing explicit)--of why people are so invested in the commercial failure of other people's work when they will not benefit from that failure. (If a Hollywood studio loses money, what is it to them?)
The obvious answer is the country's "culture wars," and the way that, in the course of swallowing up everything else, they have swallowed pop culture too, and the fan discourse about it. Powerful a force as this has been in itself it has been reinforced by the way the pop culture industry promotes its own products, preoccupying everyone with, in the case of film, studio personalities and politics and finances, with budgets and grosses and profits and losses, with what has been described as "market populism" and "corporate wokeness," as part of the effort to get hold our interest amid the obscene cacophony of the contemporary mediasphere. The result is that success and failure are much on our mind--so much so that a movie fan at least as easily ends up an "armchair movie executive" as a student of cinema, while their political sympathies and antipathies are constantly touched on, agitated, provoked, by many a work even before they see it. And all this comes together as they insist that the public is really thinking what they are thinking, and proving it with their dollars. ("See that movie I don't like because of its politics? Look at how it flopped. Because that's not how the public feels about that.") And on and on it has gone until we seem ever less cognizant of there being anything else worth talking about when we talk about movies.
However, he had nothing to say of why this is happening (at least, nothing explicit)--of why people are so invested in the commercial failure of other people's work when they will not benefit from that failure. (If a Hollywood studio loses money, what is it to them?)
The obvious answer is the country's "culture wars," and the way that, in the course of swallowing up everything else, they have swallowed pop culture too, and the fan discourse about it. Powerful a force as this has been in itself it has been reinforced by the way the pop culture industry promotes its own products, preoccupying everyone with, in the case of film, studio personalities and politics and finances, with budgets and grosses and profits and losses, with what has been described as "market populism" and "corporate wokeness," as part of the effort to get hold our interest amid the obscene cacophony of the contemporary mediasphere. The result is that success and failure are much on our mind--so much so that a movie fan at least as easily ends up an "armchair movie executive" as a student of cinema, while their political sympathies and antipathies are constantly touched on, agitated, provoked, by many a work even before they see it. And all this comes together as they insist that the public is really thinking what they are thinking, and proving it with their dollars. ("See that movie I don't like because of its politics? Look at how it flopped. Because that's not how the public feels about that.") And on and on it has gone until we seem ever less cognizant of there being anything else worth talking about when we talk about movies.
The Contraction of the American Box Office: Likely Implications
Considering what we have seen in 2023 and 2024 it can seem as if the American film market may have stabilized at 50-70 percent of its pre-pandemic level in real terms (Americans now going to the movies somewhere around 2-3 times a year instead of 4 as they used to do).
Of course, that leaves the matter of the makeup of that box office--how the gross is likely to be distributed among particular films.
Going by such successes as Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Top Gun and Avatar sequels, The Super Mario Bros Movie, and Barbie, it seems that the biggest movies still have the potential to do as well as they ever did. However, if the ceiling is as high as ever it would seem that the public is less easily drawn out for a new round of the same old thing and hits thus more difficult to produce, with this easier to explain if one remembers how Disney was doing in the mid-'10s. Back then Disney all but regularized the billion-dollar hit (billion in deflated, pre-pandemic, dollars) by focusing on a slew of franchises and brands that could be counted on to deliver such hits with regularity (Marvel, Lucasfilm/Star Wars, Pixar, along with live-action adaptations of its animated classics), and exploiting them with, if far from perfect competence, sufficient competence to rack up more wins than losses. (In 2018 Disney had Solo--but it also had Avengers 3 and Black Panther and Incredibles 2, and more modestly also Wreck-It-Ralph 2 and Ant-Man 2--and 2019 was better still.) Alas, in 2023 the same strategy saw the routinization not of billion-dollar grosses but megabuck disappointments (as seen with Captain Marvel 2, and Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones 5, and Wish, and The Little Mermaid, and Ant-Man 3, with even Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental, if profitable at least, more qualified successes than before).
I thus expect a more volatile box office, perhaps a bit less top-heavy than before because there is less room at the top (far from having nine billion-dollar hits the way 2019 did, 2024 may not even see one, with all that means for the concentration of grosses at the top of the chart), though the broader consequences rest on whether the studios can rise to the challenge of the more difficult market--for instance, making some unexploited genre as popular with filmgoers as the superhero genre has been for the years 2000-2022.
Given everything we know about the people in charge I would not advise holding one's breath in anticipation of such an outcome.
Of course, that leaves the matter of the makeup of that box office--how the gross is likely to be distributed among particular films.
Going by such successes as Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Top Gun and Avatar sequels, The Super Mario Bros Movie, and Barbie, it seems that the biggest movies still have the potential to do as well as they ever did. However, if the ceiling is as high as ever it would seem that the public is less easily drawn out for a new round of the same old thing and hits thus more difficult to produce, with this easier to explain if one remembers how Disney was doing in the mid-'10s. Back then Disney all but regularized the billion-dollar hit (billion in deflated, pre-pandemic, dollars) by focusing on a slew of franchises and brands that could be counted on to deliver such hits with regularity (Marvel, Lucasfilm/Star Wars, Pixar, along with live-action adaptations of its animated classics), and exploiting them with, if far from perfect competence, sufficient competence to rack up more wins than losses. (In 2018 Disney had Solo--but it also had Avengers 3 and Black Panther and Incredibles 2, and more modestly also Wreck-It-Ralph 2 and Ant-Man 2--and 2019 was better still.) Alas, in 2023 the same strategy saw the routinization not of billion-dollar grosses but megabuck disappointments (as seen with Captain Marvel 2, and Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones 5, and Wish, and The Little Mermaid, and Ant-Man 3, with even Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental, if profitable at least, more qualified successes than before).
I thus expect a more volatile box office, perhaps a bit less top-heavy than before because there is less room at the top (far from having nine billion-dollar hits the way 2019 did, 2024 may not even see one, with all that means for the concentration of grosses at the top of the chart), though the broader consequences rest on whether the studios can rise to the challenge of the more difficult market--for instance, making some unexploited genre as popular with filmgoers as the superhero genre has been for the years 2000-2022.
Given everything we know about the people in charge I would not advise holding one's breath in anticipation of such an outcome.
Josh Varlin's Review of Dune
Back in 2021 Josh Varlin penned an impressive review of the first part of Denis Villeneuve's remake of Dune--strengthened considerably by his familiarity with the novel and its author, which enabled him to have an informed and appreciative but critical perspective on both the book and its adaptation--a far cry from what seemed to me the claquing that generally characterized that movie's reception. (It is telling of the intensity of the claquing that the movie has an 83 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 2021, including Best Adapted Screenplay.) While as Mr. Varlin has explained he found Dune's "future for humanity not only improbable but short-sighted and pessimistic," and regarded it as containing elements he found troubling (like the religious mysticism, and the eugenic element of the plot), he also found it a deep work that, through "graceful imagery," compellingly treated a great many intriguing themes--"anthropological, ecological, anti-colonial, political, even psychological." Looking at Part One of the film he saw a film that "mostly provided an introduction to its own sequel," which did not do very much with all that (indeed, "downplay[ed] several critical aspects of the novel . . . to its detriment")--but hoped that Part Two would make up for that, albeit while recognizing the "pressures" that would work against that possibility. (After all, Dune was being remade as a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, with all that implies.)
Mr. Varlin has since followed up that first review with a review of Part Two--in which he said that "[i]t is no pleasure to report that those pressures won out against those more 'intriguing' elements of the novel." The world and the plot are greatly simplified through fundamental elisions and modifications (the film notably "ignor[ing] the complex political and economic structures that frame Herbert’s novel, including . . . CHOAM, the Spacing Guild and the Great Houses of the empire," reducing the relationship of Paul and Chani to "a teenage romance," etc.), with "[t]he complex factors motivating" the characters like "the curse of prescience, the desire for a verdant Arrakis, religious prophecies, feudal social norms, ecological constraints . . . hinted at but rarely explored," the "'organic' 'historical' sense, of toil and strife of the oppressed against the oppressors . . . entirely absent from the film," and the "the movement of societies on a mass scale . . . the clash of social forces" just so much "military action," "military pageantry." The result not only "fail[ed] to capture much of what's best in Frank Herbert's" book, but also failing to replace it with anything of substance had the "overall effect [of] . . . hollowing out . . . the novel," leaving "a skeleton at best" of the book and any sort of idea-oriented science fiction for that matter--and a general retreat into mere spectacle" in "a bland," "flat and lifeless" product consisting of a "seemingly endless series of explosions and gunfights."
In short, Dune, Part Two is in itself, and confirms the two-film sequence it closes as, a considerably dumbed-down version of Frank Herbert's narrative--just one way in which it pandered to contemporary prejudices of various kinds. When the claquing dies down, I suppose, and it becomes convenient to run the film down--for instance, because a remake-obsessed Hollywood studio system will want to do this one over again--I suppose we will hear more about that on the way to getting what I am sure we will be promised will be the "definitive" version.
Somehow, I suspect it will not live up to that promise either.
Mr. Varlin has since followed up that first review with a review of Part Two--in which he said that "[i]t is no pleasure to report that those pressures won out against those more 'intriguing' elements of the novel." The world and the plot are greatly simplified through fundamental elisions and modifications (the film notably "ignor[ing] the complex political and economic structures that frame Herbert’s novel, including . . . CHOAM, the Spacing Guild and the Great Houses of the empire," reducing the relationship of Paul and Chani to "a teenage romance," etc.), with "[t]he complex factors motivating" the characters like "the curse of prescience, the desire for a verdant Arrakis, religious prophecies, feudal social norms, ecological constraints . . . hinted at but rarely explored," the "'organic' 'historical' sense, of toil and strife of the oppressed against the oppressors . . . entirely absent from the film," and the "the movement of societies on a mass scale . . . the clash of social forces" just so much "military action," "military pageantry." The result not only "fail[ed] to capture much of what's best in Frank Herbert's" book, but also failing to replace it with anything of substance had the "overall effect [of] . . . hollowing out . . . the novel," leaving "a skeleton at best" of the book and any sort of idea-oriented science fiction for that matter--and a general retreat into mere spectacle" in "a bland," "flat and lifeless" product consisting of a "seemingly endless series of explosions and gunfights."
In short, Dune, Part Two is in itself, and confirms the two-film sequence it closes as, a considerably dumbed-down version of Frank Herbert's narrative--just one way in which it pandered to contemporary prejudices of various kinds. When the claquing dies down, I suppose, and it becomes convenient to run the film down--for instance, because a remake-obsessed Hollywood studio system will want to do this one over again--I suppose we will hear more about that on the way to getting what I am sure we will be promised will be the "definitive" version.
Somehow, I suspect it will not live up to that promise either.
Filming Dune: Messiah? (A Note on the Potential Obstacles)
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
With the second half of Denis Villeneuve's Dune out the verdict is in on the project as a whole. At the moment the reception for that second half, and arguably for the whole, seems stronger than that to the first half back in 2021. (The Rotten Tomatoes critics' score for Part 2 is 93 percent, while the ticket sales have been treated as cause for tears of relief after the prior lousy half year.)
It thus became easy enough to imagine Villeneuve helming a sequel after the first weekend in play, and indeed the word we are hearing now is that a Dune: Messiah adaptation as officially happening.
Is such a movie a good idea, however?
First of all let us consider what Dune: Messiah was in the original Dune series--not just a follow-up to Dune, but a prelude to the third book, Children of Dune, which concluded the ultimately tragic story of Paul Atreides and clarified What it All Ultimately Meant for Humanity. Adapting just the second book without any expectation of adapting the third seems rather pointless to me--again, a matter of telling just part of the story. (Indeed it was a very sound decision on the part of the then-SciFi Channel when it filmed the second and third books together as a single six-hour miniseries back in 2003.) And as it happens, no one seems to be talking about that third book--partly, I suppose, because the commentariat DO NOT READ BOOKS, and therefore do not know how incomplete a Dune: Messiah would leave the saga.
One should also consider the source material for such a sequel, and its significant differences with the original Dune. As Josh Varlin made very clear, in adapting the first Dune novel Villeneuve's movie did a lot of violence to the background to the later books--enough so that it will have repercussions for any adaptations of the follow-up, like, to cite only the most obvious issue, the fact that at the end of the first film Chani left Paul. (After all, in the book the triangle between Paul, Irulan and Chani is indispensable to the intrigues directed against Paul--as is Chani's dying but leaving Paul newborn twins who are the protagonists of the third book.) The fact that Alia was unborn at that point in the narrative, and could not play her part in the events of the first novel, with all their resonance for the personality that emerges in her mind in the third; the downplaying of the complex power structure of the Empire that proves so important to the second book's plot--such things, too, work against any easy shift from the Dune movies we know to an adaptation of the second and third books of the series. (I will add that I have a hard time picturing Timothée Chalamet being up to the extraordinary dramatic demands that the radical shifts in Paul's fortunes impose on anyone essaying the part--and for that matter, seeing Jason Momoa keeping Duncan Idaho credible in the far more involved performances any faithful adaptation of the third book would require.)
Perhaps more fundamental, Villeneuve's movie hollowed out all the substance in the interest of giving us a big action movie (especially when handling Part Two). Problematic enough with the first book, the later books offer far less scope for that--all as the books get more philosophical. (As the writer for the Hollywood Reporter said, quoting a review on Amazon, Messiah "is 'a lot of sitting around and talking.'") They also get stranger. (Indeed, Varlin, an admirer of the original novel who in his review of the first part said that if the movie did no more than inspire "more people to read Herbert's Dune, it will have done a small service," characterized the later entries in the Dune series as "basically unreadable, except by the most devoted fans.") To satisfy the requirement of the studios for blockbuster-type material that will please fans of Part Two of Dune (expecting the same action-oriented filmmaking, at least as much as continuity with the established plot), we would probably get something nearly unrecognizable--and almost certainly even more dismaying to purists than what we have seen to date. Perhaps that unrecognizable product will sell tickets to the general audience--which is really all the Dauriats of Hollywood care about--but it is easy to picture the compromises in the end pleasing no one.
With the second half of Denis Villeneuve's Dune out the verdict is in on the project as a whole. At the moment the reception for that second half, and arguably for the whole, seems stronger than that to the first half back in 2021. (The Rotten Tomatoes critics' score for Part 2 is 93 percent, while the ticket sales have been treated as cause for tears of relief after the prior lousy half year.)
It thus became easy enough to imagine Villeneuve helming a sequel after the first weekend in play, and indeed the word we are hearing now is that a Dune: Messiah adaptation as officially happening.
Is such a movie a good idea, however?
First of all let us consider what Dune: Messiah was in the original Dune series--not just a follow-up to Dune, but a prelude to the third book, Children of Dune, which concluded the ultimately tragic story of Paul Atreides and clarified What it All Ultimately Meant for Humanity. Adapting just the second book without any expectation of adapting the third seems rather pointless to me--again, a matter of telling just part of the story. (Indeed it was a very sound decision on the part of the then-SciFi Channel when it filmed the second and third books together as a single six-hour miniseries back in 2003.) And as it happens, no one seems to be talking about that third book--partly, I suppose, because the commentariat DO NOT READ BOOKS, and therefore do not know how incomplete a Dune: Messiah would leave the saga.
One should also consider the source material for such a sequel, and its significant differences with the original Dune. As Josh Varlin made very clear, in adapting the first Dune novel Villeneuve's movie did a lot of violence to the background to the later books--enough so that it will have repercussions for any adaptations of the follow-up, like, to cite only the most obvious issue, the fact that at the end of the first film Chani left Paul. (After all, in the book the triangle between Paul, Irulan and Chani is indispensable to the intrigues directed against Paul--as is Chani's dying but leaving Paul newborn twins who are the protagonists of the third book.) The fact that Alia was unborn at that point in the narrative, and could not play her part in the events of the first novel, with all their resonance for the personality that emerges in her mind in the third; the downplaying of the complex power structure of the Empire that proves so important to the second book's plot--such things, too, work against any easy shift from the Dune movies we know to an adaptation of the second and third books of the series. (I will add that I have a hard time picturing Timothée Chalamet being up to the extraordinary dramatic demands that the radical shifts in Paul's fortunes impose on anyone essaying the part--and for that matter, seeing Jason Momoa keeping Duncan Idaho credible in the far more involved performances any faithful adaptation of the third book would require.)
Perhaps more fundamental, Villeneuve's movie hollowed out all the substance in the interest of giving us a big action movie (especially when handling Part Two). Problematic enough with the first book, the later books offer far less scope for that--all as the books get more philosophical. (As the writer for the Hollywood Reporter said, quoting a review on Amazon, Messiah "is 'a lot of sitting around and talking.'") They also get stranger. (Indeed, Varlin, an admirer of the original novel who in his review of the first part said that if the movie did no more than inspire "more people to read Herbert's Dune, it will have done a small service," characterized the later entries in the Dune series as "basically unreadable, except by the most devoted fans.") To satisfy the requirement of the studios for blockbuster-type material that will please fans of Part Two of Dune (expecting the same action-oriented filmmaking, at least as much as continuity with the established plot), we would probably get something nearly unrecognizable--and almost certainly even more dismaying to purists than what we have seen to date. Perhaps that unrecognizable product will sell tickets to the general audience--which is really all the Dauriats of Hollywood care about--but it is easy to picture the compromises in the end pleasing no one.
Dune's Place in Science Fiction History: A Few Notes
I remember how when I first read Frank Herbert's Dune I was utterly blown away by it--so much so that I had finished the five sequels in a year's time and years later, in spite of reserve toward his son Brian's contributions to the franchise, eagerly read his continuations of the story for two volumes beyond Chapterhouse: Dune (2006's Hunters of Dune and 2007's Sandworms of Dune).
Looking back on Herbert's saga I still respect its accomplishment--but it is not quite the touchstone that it once was for me.
One reason is that I have read a good deal since--including a lot of still earlier work--and seen that a long development of the genre led up to that, what Herbert produced remarkable in many ways, but not so original as it once looked. The galactic scale empire, the cosmic time scale--all this was frankly old hat in 1965, and in some respects others had outdone it long before. (Certainly an Olaf Stapledon's vision had been even wider and broader and more fundamentally idea-packed.) I can add that Dune's protagonist Paul Atreides came to seem just a late expression of the longtime obsession of the genre, and especially the John Campbell crowd (one should remember that that early version of Dune, Dune World, first ran in Campbell's Analog), with the idea of supermen rising above the rest of the species and shifting its destiny, with the eugenics, psychic powers and esoteric training involved in making Paul a superman all familiar elements of that body of work. Indeed, A.E. van Vogt's likewise macro-scale Null-A space operas seemed especially relevant, their protagonist's "cortical-thalamic" training anticipating Paul's training in the techniques of the Bene Gesserit, while what van Vogt called the "famous cortical-thalamic pause" even came to seem the obvious inspiration to the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear. ("'I am now relaxing . . . and all stimuli are making the full circuit of my nervous system . . . Always, I am consciously aware of the stimulus moving up to and through the cortex'" in van Vogt's version; "I will face my fear . . . permit it to pass over and through me" in Herbert's less clinically biomedical and more poetic version.) Even van Vogt's propensity for opening his chapters with epigrams now seemed a precedent for Herbert's own--a more developed, ambitious, artful usage, but one building on that earlier work nonetheless.
I found myself developing a more critical attitude toward some of those old elements, too. The treatment of artificial intelligence here (essentially banning it) struck me as all too much in line with the awkwardness of science fiction writers in the computer age that Vernor Vinge wrote about in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity"--coming to "an opaque wall across the future" and just not dealing with it. There is also that matter of feudalism-in-space--which seemed more suited to pulpy melodramatics of the George Lucas variety than the more serious stuff Herbert aimed at producing, as I increasingly sympathized with Mack Reynolds' being "sick and tired of reading stories based 10,000 years in the future where all the sciences have progressed fabulously except for one," exemplified by how rather than going forward, or even sideways, we just went backward.
The result was that Dune now looks to me as much monument to the genre's prior growth as foundation for later work, indeed maybe more striking in the first way than in the second--and testament to the limits its writers faced even in this comparatively dynamic era for the field.
Looking back on Herbert's saga I still respect its accomplishment--but it is not quite the touchstone that it once was for me.
I found myself developing a more critical attitude toward some of those old elements, too. The treatment of artificial intelligence here (essentially banning it) struck me as all too much in line with the awkwardness of science fiction writers in the computer age that Vernor Vinge wrote about in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity"--coming to "an opaque wall across the future" and just not dealing with it. There is also that matter of feudalism-in-space--which seemed more suited to pulpy melodramatics of the George Lucas variety than the more serious stuff Herbert aimed at producing, as I increasingly sympathized with Mack Reynolds' being "sick and tired of reading stories based 10,000 years in the future where all the sciences have progressed fabulously except for one," exemplified by how rather than going forward, or even sideways, we just went backward.
The result was that Dune now looks to me as much monument to the genre's prior growth as foundation for later work, indeed maybe more striking in the first way than in the second--and testament to the limits its writers faced even in this comparatively dynamic era for the field.
The Trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (Joker 2) is Out
As I remarked before I found the 2019 film Joker to have a very interesting premise and display a good deal of ambition, and achieve moments of real bite--but as is all too often the case in contemporary filmmaking its derivativeness and conventionality ultimately got the better of it, leaving us with elements that proved discordant, and undermined the whole. (When you want to say something about reality it is best to avoid playing "reality games" with the audience--and sticking so close to the inspiration of Martin Scorsese seemed to result in exactly that. It also seemed to me a mistake to make Arthur Fleck such a nonentity.) The result was still a worthwhile film, but one which still fell short of its potential.
Of course, the film was a billion dollar hit anyway--which all but guaranteed a sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, which we were told would be a musical. My first thought was that this could see the movie end up New York, New York to its predecessor's Taxi Driver--a big failure following a big hit. Still, I checked out the trailer with interest--and am not sure what to make of it. It gives an impression of a (very) dark and twisted take on that old standard, the romantic comedy musical, with the lovers in question the Joker and Harley Quinn (here not his psychiatrist, but another mental patient at Arkham Asylum). Yet that seems unlikely to be all there is here--especially going by what we have heard about a possible order-of-magnitude ramping up of the violence of the first film, and at the same time, the themes of the first film that caused such a moral panic, namely societal decay, inequality, mental illness, and the confluence of them in monstrosities like the Joker.
Especially reading comparisons to A Clockwork Orange on the part of people who claimed to have seen the script, I suspect we are more likely to see a nihilistic reveling in brutality than any thoughtful attempt at social criticism. That, of course, would be just fine with those who so vocally despised the first movie.
Of course, the film was a billion dollar hit anyway--which all but guaranteed a sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, which we were told would be a musical. My first thought was that this could see the movie end up New York, New York to its predecessor's Taxi Driver--a big failure following a big hit. Still, I checked out the trailer with interest--and am not sure what to make of it. It gives an impression of a (very) dark and twisted take on that old standard, the romantic comedy musical, with the lovers in question the Joker and Harley Quinn (here not his psychiatrist, but another mental patient at Arkham Asylum). Yet that seems unlikely to be all there is here--especially going by what we have heard about a possible order-of-magnitude ramping up of the violence of the first film, and at the same time, the themes of the first film that caused such a moral panic, namely societal decay, inequality, mental illness, and the confluence of them in monstrosities like the Joker.
Especially reading comparisons to A Clockwork Orange on the part of people who claimed to have seen the script, I suspect we are more likely to see a nihilistic reveling in brutality than any thoughtful attempt at social criticism. That, of course, would be just fine with those who so vocally despised the first movie.
Boxoffice Pro's Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Prediction: Thoughts
Boxoffice Pro has issued its prediction for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes--the fourth movie in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series. The publication's staff anticipate a $40-$50 million opening weekend, and a $100-$140 million overall domestic run for the film.
How do these numbers compare with those its predecessors? Consider the figures for these below (presented with the current dollar grosses of which are outside the parentheses, the adjustment of the figures for March 2024 dollars in them):
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)--$177 million ($244 million)
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)--$209 million ($274 million)
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)--$147 million ($188 million)
Looking back we can see that the three films were, by summer blockbuster standards, respectable earners, rather than really stellar ones (not one of these movies making its year's top ten in-calendar grossers), while the third film was the low point for the series commercially.* However, that movie's gross was still considerably higher than even the best anticipated for Kingdom, which itself may prove optimistic given this particular film and the market it faces. Coming seven years after the last sequel, and likely seeming unnecessary in the wake of that last film's apparent rounding off a well-received trilogy, extensions of run-down sci-fi franchises are proving a very tough sell these days (the story of 2023).
Still, let us for the moment accept the $100-$140 million figure for now, and put it into a bigger context as part of a bigger worldwide gross. Looking over the international numbers I am struck by how China was an important market for the latter two films (which more than doubled their domestic gross internationally with the help of $100 million+ worth of ticket sales in that country). China being less likely to help out so much this time, I think it safe to guess at a global gross divided more like that of the first film (with the domestic take closer to 40 than 30 percent). That being the case one might anticipate a gross under $450 million, and more likely in the range of $250-$400 million.
At the same time, if the production cost anything like that for the prior two films ($150 million+, before inflation), we could be looking at, between the cost of the production, and the added costs, an outlay of $400-$600 million, necessitating a gross of $500 million+ to get the movie to the break-even point in a relatively optimistic scenario.
The gap between that break-even point, and the likely cost, is such that even a much smaller outlay by the backers than is suggested here may still exceed the film's likely take.**
The result is that it is easy to picture this movie--arguably reflecting the pre-pandemic and pre-2023 logic rather than the thinking demanded by the present situation--losing its backer a good deal of money, perhaps a lot of it. Still, I suspect that just as has been the case in 2023 competition for a place on Deadline's list of the year's biggest flops will prove very stiff indeed, such that I would not rush just yet to claim a spot for it in the list's upper ranks. (For instance, have you heard about this Gladiator 2?)
* The 2011 and 2014 films made only the #11 spot, the 2017 film the 22nd position.
** This is based on usage of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index indicating that $150 million+ in 2014-2017 approximately equal $200 million in early 2024 prices; and, in line with my previously discussed premises, the likelihood that the full expenditure on the film will be 2-3 times the net production budget, the movie need to make up a rough 60 percent of its cost at the box office, and the studios keeping about half the box office gross.
How do these numbers compare with those its predecessors? Consider the figures for these below (presented with the current dollar grosses of which are outside the parentheses, the adjustment of the figures for March 2024 dollars in them):
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)--$177 million ($244 million)
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)--$209 million ($274 million)
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)--$147 million ($188 million)
Looking back we can see that the three films were, by summer blockbuster standards, respectable earners, rather than really stellar ones (not one of these movies making its year's top ten in-calendar grossers), while the third film was the low point for the series commercially.* However, that movie's gross was still considerably higher than even the best anticipated for Kingdom, which itself may prove optimistic given this particular film and the market it faces. Coming seven years after the last sequel, and likely seeming unnecessary in the wake of that last film's apparent rounding off a well-received trilogy, extensions of run-down sci-fi franchises are proving a very tough sell these days (the story of 2023).
Still, let us for the moment accept the $100-$140 million figure for now, and put it into a bigger context as part of a bigger worldwide gross. Looking over the international numbers I am struck by how China was an important market for the latter two films (which more than doubled their domestic gross internationally with the help of $100 million+ worth of ticket sales in that country). China being less likely to help out so much this time, I think it safe to guess at a global gross divided more like that of the first film (with the domestic take closer to 40 than 30 percent). That being the case one might anticipate a gross under $450 million, and more likely in the range of $250-$400 million.
At the same time, if the production cost anything like that for the prior two films ($150 million+, before inflation), we could be looking at, between the cost of the production, and the added costs, an outlay of $400-$600 million, necessitating a gross of $500 million+ to get the movie to the break-even point in a relatively optimistic scenario.
The gap between that break-even point, and the likely cost, is such that even a much smaller outlay by the backers than is suggested here may still exceed the film's likely take.**
The result is that it is easy to picture this movie--arguably reflecting the pre-pandemic and pre-2023 logic rather than the thinking demanded by the present situation--losing its backer a good deal of money, perhaps a lot of it. Still, I suspect that just as has been the case in 2023 competition for a place on Deadline's list of the year's biggest flops will prove very stiff indeed, such that I would not rush just yet to claim a spot for it in the list's upper ranks. (For instance, have you heard about this Gladiator 2?)
* The 2011 and 2014 films made only the #11 spot, the 2017 film the 22nd position.
** This is based on usage of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index indicating that $150 million+ in 2014-2017 approximately equal $200 million in early 2024 prices; and, in line with my previously discussed premises, the likelihood that the full expenditure on the film will be 2-3 times the net production budget, the movie need to make up a rough 60 percent of its cost at the box office, and the studios keeping about half the box office gross.
Gladiator 2: What Are its Chances of Profitability?
The release of a new trailer for Gladiator 2 has, of course, caused a spike in chatter about the film--overwhelmingly enthusiastic, to go by what I have seen. The critical and commercial failure that was Ridley Scott's prior historical epic, Napoleon (and the fact that Napoleon's failure has been the norm for Scott's epics) seems utterly absent from the dialogue as instead the commentators, befitting their function as les claqueurs, fixate on Scott's one real "win" in the form with 2000's Gladiator--while overlooking any problems with the concept of a follow-up, which seem quite evident in the trailer they are celebrating. The movie, a sequel to a movie where both the hero and the villain died, and which presumably made what followed an "alternate history" given its extreme remoteness from the facts (the Roman Republic restored!), looks less like follow-up than do-over of the first, scaled-up and disguised as a sequel, with (per usual for Scott) the spectacle coming in far, far ahead of anything else for all the melodramatic implications of the bits of dialogue, the blaring music.
In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?
As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.
Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.
As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.
In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?
As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.
Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.
As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.
What a Difference a Year Makes: Anticipating the Summer 2024 Movie Season
At the outset of 2023 I predicted the normalization of the box office on the basis of the combination of the prior year's evidences of the revival of North American moviegoers' readiness to go to the theater (seen in how the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels took in over $2 billion between them) with the first pre-pandemic style slate of would-be blockbusters since 2019.
Things did not go that way. Rather than the box office recovering from the 54 percent of the (real, inflation-adjusted) pre-pandemic 2015-2019 norm that it was in 2022 to 100 percent of that norm, or 90 percent of that norm, or 80 percent, or even 70 percent, 2023 saw the box office take a mere 64 percent of the 2015-2019 average in ticket sales. Yes, the year was packed with "big movies" in a way not seen in years, but moviegoers shunned most of them, resulting in a year crowded with costly flops, and the year's combined take only marginally higher than before--even with the help of that handful of less conventional successes that beat the expectations for them (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the animated Spider-Man, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and to a lesser degree a few others like the Taylor Swift concert movie), without which the 2023 box office would have probably seen a decline from 2022.
One can argue for various factors at work here. Perhaps the pandemic has permanently reduced North Americans' relatively high propensity for moviegoing (reducing their 4 trips to the theater per year, if not quite to the 1-2 seen in Germany and Japan, perhaps to 2-3 a year). Perhaps the public has, in the way long expected by some, lost its tolerance for endless sequels and prequels and reboots of the same handful of increasingly long-ago hits from a very few different genres--or at least one of those genres ("superhero fatigue" kicking in). However, there is nothing to make anyone think those factors will not matter to 2024, which has the further disadvantage of many of its potentially biggest movies having been bumped to 2025 by the strikes of last year.
This especially seems something to think about as summer approacheth. Back at this time last year people were speculating about the possibility of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and The Flash being billion dollar hits, about how well Indiana Jones 5 would do, how Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid might restore some of the studio's lost luster, how good will toward Tom Cruise for Top Gun 2 might bolster the fortunes of the latest Mission: Impossible film, etc., etc..
Alas, it did not go the way they thought it would, while even by pre-pandemic standards this summer would not have looked very strong. Yes, there are lots of big sequels--but not a lot of likely record-breaking, billion dollar barrier-blasting first-stringers. The season opens not with Marvel's superheroes--but with an adaptation of The Fall Guy promising the weakest opening for a summer kick-off movie since 2005. After that we have a continuation of the Planet of the Apes reboot that seems an unnecessary addition to a series past its commercial peak, and Mad Max (sequel to a movie more critical darling than box office record-breaker), Twister 2 (following up a movie from 1996!), an adaptation of the Borderlands video game by Eli Roth, yet another Alien prequel (groan), more Bad Boys and more Deadpool, and at the very end of the season, two more superhero films, namely a Crow remake (a relatively low-budgeted remake of a mere cult hit from three decades ago), and another installment in the Sony Spider-Man Universe (you know, the one that brought you Morbius and Madame Web) in Kraven the Hunter. The animated offerings may be a little stronger, with Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 on the way, but I think in each case the studio is pushing its luck, all as, if a Barbie-style hit is necessarily a surprise, I see not the least little hint of any of the other movies on the schedule becoming such a success. The result is that I would not be shocked if the summer of 2024 saw its grosses consistently run below those of 2023 all the way through the season, from a May that seems bound to compare poorly with the preceding one that delivered Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10 and The Little Mermaid (for all their individual and collective underperformance), to August (when the movies by Nolan and Gerwig were raking in the cash and saving the studios).
Things did not go that way. Rather than the box office recovering from the 54 percent of the (real, inflation-adjusted) pre-pandemic 2015-2019 norm that it was in 2022 to 100 percent of that norm, or 90 percent of that norm, or 80 percent, or even 70 percent, 2023 saw the box office take a mere 64 percent of the 2015-2019 average in ticket sales. Yes, the year was packed with "big movies" in a way not seen in years, but moviegoers shunned most of them, resulting in a year crowded with costly flops, and the year's combined take only marginally higher than before--even with the help of that handful of less conventional successes that beat the expectations for them (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the animated Spider-Man, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and to a lesser degree a few others like the Taylor Swift concert movie), without which the 2023 box office would have probably seen a decline from 2022.
One can argue for various factors at work here. Perhaps the pandemic has permanently reduced North Americans' relatively high propensity for moviegoing (reducing their 4 trips to the theater per year, if not quite to the 1-2 seen in Germany and Japan, perhaps to 2-3 a year). Perhaps the public has, in the way long expected by some, lost its tolerance for endless sequels and prequels and reboots of the same handful of increasingly long-ago hits from a very few different genres--or at least one of those genres ("superhero fatigue" kicking in). However, there is nothing to make anyone think those factors will not matter to 2024, which has the further disadvantage of many of its potentially biggest movies having been bumped to 2025 by the strikes of last year.
This especially seems something to think about as summer approacheth. Back at this time last year people were speculating about the possibility of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and The Flash being billion dollar hits, about how well Indiana Jones 5 would do, how Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid might restore some of the studio's lost luster, how good will toward Tom Cruise for Top Gun 2 might bolster the fortunes of the latest Mission: Impossible film, etc., etc..
Alas, it did not go the way they thought it would, while even by pre-pandemic standards this summer would not have looked very strong. Yes, there are lots of big sequels--but not a lot of likely record-breaking, billion dollar barrier-blasting first-stringers. The season opens not with Marvel's superheroes--but with an adaptation of The Fall Guy promising the weakest opening for a summer kick-off movie since 2005. After that we have a continuation of the Planet of the Apes reboot that seems an unnecessary addition to a series past its commercial peak, and Mad Max (sequel to a movie more critical darling than box office record-breaker), Twister 2 (following up a movie from 1996!), an adaptation of the Borderlands video game by Eli Roth, yet another Alien prequel (groan), more Bad Boys and more Deadpool, and at the very end of the season, two more superhero films, namely a Crow remake (a relatively low-budgeted remake of a mere cult hit from three decades ago), and another installment in the Sony Spider-Man Universe (you know, the one that brought you Morbius and Madame Web) in Kraven the Hunter. The animated offerings may be a little stronger, with Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 on the way, but I think in each case the studio is pushing its luck, all as, if a Barbie-style hit is necessarily a surprise, I see not the least little hint of any of the other movies on the schedule becoming such a success. The result is that I would not be shocked if the summer of 2024 saw its grosses consistently run below those of 2023 all the way through the season, from a May that seems bound to compare poorly with the preceding one that delivered Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10 and The Little Mermaid (for all their individual and collective underperformance), to August (when the movies by Nolan and Gerwig were raking in the cash and saving the studios).
David Walsh Takes on the O.J. Simpson Trial
Three decades ago David Walsh wrote about the O.J. Simpson trial. As one might expect of him, he did not neglect what the extreme attention to the event indicated about American society--the idiotic worship of wealth and the "success" that is the euphemism for it, the cult of celebrity, the disconnect of the content of the media from real life, the evasion of pressing world problems, the disorientation of much of the public. However, one of those pieces seem to me particularly worth mentioning as an antidote to the nonsense about how the country was "captivated" by those events of which we are now getting so much. As Walsh observed, "[t]he absorption with these events is largely created or at least manipulated by the media," all as the media endeavors "to implicate the public in the" essential depravity of that absorption--claiming that it is the public's obsession that is keeping the media "fixated on the Simpson trial" in a crisis-ridden world. While the real driver was "the element of calculation" on the media's part, using the "case . . . as a black hole sucking popular attention away from the potentially explosive" world situation--just as it had so many other similar cases before in those years of tabloid inanity as the dominant feature of the evening news (Amy Fisher, Tonya Harding, etc., etc.).
For his part Walsh suggested that "the effort to keep the public absorbed by 'real-life' melodrama is doomed to fail," with "the Simpson case . . . perhaps the last gasp of this sort of mindlessness." Alas, if it can seem that no really comparable trial has had quite the same hold on the mediasphere since, the tabloid mentality nevertheless prevailed, infecting political life ever since, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton a signal moment in that process, as more broadly the media, news media included, has never stopped trying to keep the public absorbed by "'real-life' melodrama," with the process growing so intense and absurd and grotesque as to make the depravity of the '90s look arcadian by comparison with where American culture stands today.
For his part Walsh suggested that "the effort to keep the public absorbed by 'real-life' melodrama is doomed to fail," with "the Simpson case . . . perhaps the last gasp of this sort of mindlessness." Alas, if it can seem that no really comparable trial has had quite the same hold on the mediasphere since, the tabloid mentality nevertheless prevailed, infecting political life ever since, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton a signal moment in that process, as more broadly the media, news media included, has never stopped trying to keep the public absorbed by "'real-life' melodrama," with the process growing so intense and absurd and grotesque as to make the depravity of the '90s look arcadian by comparison with where American culture stands today.
Remembering the Coverage of the O.J. Simpson Trial
The NBC headline regarding O.J. Simpsons' death ran "O.J. Simpson, former NFL star whose trial captivated the country, dies of cancer at 76."
NBC is not alone in reporting the matter as such, the use of the term "captivated" a cliché of the current coverage, to be found in reporting of Mr. Simpson's death by outlets as varied as, besides fellow network news operations like ABC and CBS, the more staid newscast on PBS, newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today, and of course, entertainment publications such as The Hollywood Reporter.
My recollection of the actual events, which I trust infinitely more than I do NBC, and all those previously named outlets combined, is not of the Simpson trial "captivating" the country, but its being mercilessly inflicted on it by the lowest common denominator, hot button-pushing, tabloid trash-peddling scum of the mainstream media that people quite remote from reality admonish us for not respecting as the sole valid source of information about current events. The public was indeed captive--but not to its supposed fascination with the trial, rather to the priorities of those occupying that media's commanding heights, who contrary to those who may hope that the media have "learned something" since that fracas, have done little but disgrace themselves instead, as a glance at the headlines on our news pages shows--not only because of the manner in which they report the news, but the hard reality that the way they report it has left the world worse off, contributing to the consistently horrifying character of those headlines.
NBC is not alone in reporting the matter as such, the use of the term "captivated" a cliché of the current coverage, to be found in reporting of Mr. Simpson's death by outlets as varied as, besides fellow network news operations like ABC and CBS, the more staid newscast on PBS, newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today, and of course, entertainment publications such as The Hollywood Reporter.
My recollection of the actual events, which I trust infinitely more than I do NBC, and all those previously named outlets combined, is not of the Simpson trial "captivating" the country, but its being mercilessly inflicted on it by the lowest common denominator, hot button-pushing, tabloid trash-peddling scum of the mainstream media that people quite remote from reality admonish us for not respecting as the sole valid source of information about current events. The public was indeed captive--but not to its supposed fascination with the trial, rather to the priorities of those occupying that media's commanding heights, who contrary to those who may hope that the media have "learned something" since that fracas, have done little but disgrace themselves instead, as a glance at the headlines on our news pages shows--not only because of the manner in which they report the news, but the hard reality that the way they report it has left the world worse off, contributing to the consistently horrifying character of those headlines.
Looking Back: Stanley Kubrick's Answers the Charge of Fascism in the New York Times
When A Clockwork Orange hit theaters the movie was controversial not simply for its violent content, but for its perceived politics, with those of liberal opinions commonly regarding it as a very right-wing movie (in Roger Ebert's words, "a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning")--and the New York Times education editor Fred Hechinger saying that "an alert liberal . . . should recognize the voice of fascism" in it.*
A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick took great exception to that the charge of fascism, and was given the opportunity to offer his response in the pages of the Times itself. Kubrick's counter-argument stressed Hechinger's not supporting his claim about the movie initially, and that others had understood the film differently, citing the views of not just Clockwork Orange writer Anthony Burgess but Catholic News film critic John Fitzgerald of the film as a "Christian sermon" about free will and what its lack would mean. Of course, he did not clearly endorse their view, but he did go on to a more substantive counter-argument--in which he repeated the very opinions that Hechinger quoted in criticism of Kubrick (reiterating his own anti-Rousseau, anti-Enlightenment anti-humanistic, Robert Ardrey's ethology-influenced pessimism, acknowledging his anti-liberalism), but denied that these were fascist opinions.
Kubrick is quite prolix in that denial--but never offers a definition of fascism, a standard for what would constitute fascism, such that one could distinguish his, or anyone else's, views from it. The result is that those inclining toward sympathy for Kubrick's denial might be impressed by his defense--but those taking a more critical attitude toward Kubrick's position, especially seeing Kubrick double down at length on the hard right position he had already taken, probably came away thinking that Kubrick had failed to refute Hechinger's reading, and indeed validated it in respects, the more in as those on the left have come to expect to be attacked for merely using the "F" word whether they do so correctly or not.
* Ebert said of the film (in what is filmically an exceptionally literate review that discusses the cinematography, music, etc. in detail) that while "[i]t pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control . . . all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex," with which nastiness it endeavors to make the reviewer identify--all in imparting its philosophical-political message about human vileness and the hopelessness one must accordingly accept.
A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick took great exception to that the charge of fascism, and was given the opportunity to offer his response in the pages of the Times itself. Kubrick's counter-argument stressed Hechinger's not supporting his claim about the movie initially, and that others had understood the film differently, citing the views of not just Clockwork Orange writer Anthony Burgess but Catholic News film critic John Fitzgerald of the film as a "Christian sermon" about free will and what its lack would mean. Of course, he did not clearly endorse their view, but he did go on to a more substantive counter-argument--in which he repeated the very opinions that Hechinger quoted in criticism of Kubrick (reiterating his own anti-Rousseau, anti-Enlightenment anti-humanistic, Robert Ardrey's ethology-influenced pessimism, acknowledging his anti-liberalism), but denied that these were fascist opinions.
Kubrick is quite prolix in that denial--but never offers a definition of fascism, a standard for what would constitute fascism, such that one could distinguish his, or anyone else's, views from it. The result is that those inclining toward sympathy for Kubrick's denial might be impressed by his defense--but those taking a more critical attitude toward Kubrick's position, especially seeing Kubrick double down at length on the hard right position he had already taken, probably came away thinking that Kubrick had failed to refute Hechinger's reading, and indeed validated it in respects, the more in as those on the left have come to expect to be attacked for merely using the "F" word whether they do so correctly or not.
* Ebert said of the film (in what is filmically an exceptionally literate review that discusses the cinematography, music, etc. in detail) that while "[i]t pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control . . . all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex," with which nastiness it endeavors to make the reviewer identify--all in imparting its philosophical-political message about human vileness and the hopelessness one must accordingly accept.
Revisiting the Philosophical Controversy Over Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange
When Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange hit theaters the movie was instantly and significantly controversial--not only for its brutal violence, but because of its politics, and in a way that seems of particular interest today. Where today it is standard to equate "liberal" and "conservative," "left" and "right" with grab-bags of opinions about laundry lists of hot button issues, the argument over Kubrick's movie addressed what these words have traditionally meant to the politically literate--stances toward that fundamental question of political philosophy since the Enlightenment, namely the nature of human beings, what this means for the possibilities for society's shape, and especially whether or not reason can be used to bring about a freer, more equal, more just, more flourishing order of things. It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that A Clockwork Orange, true to Anthony Burgess' source material, espoused a deeply pessimistic view of the matter identifiable not with the Enlightenment's liberalism, but the Counter-Enlightenment's anti-liberalism--the right, indeed the hard right, rather than the left, with this today bolstered by Kubrick's consistent, explicit, political statements at the time (in two interview-based pieces in the New York Times, and then again in a piece in the pages of that same publication). Moreover, at the time liberals called out the film as such--as a right-wing and even fascist movie (with it seeming significant that while Kubrick denied the film was fascist, he reiterated what would be conventionally taken as very right-wing views).*
Where the lack of comparable controversy over a piece of pop culture in a long time is concerned, it seems to me that besides the decline of the political literacy that made such argument possible there has been, essentially, a triumph of deeply conservative views among the mainstream commentariat--even those members of it who would not identify as conservative. In the view of a great many observers, David Walsh has remarked, "realism" has come to mean "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light," with filmmakers endeavoring to "outdo each other . . . in their depictions of people’s depravity and sadism," not least by "sticking in all the sordid details one can think of," while far from being "indignant" at the state of the world, they show "a warm, almost grateful acceptance of the filthiness" that they hold to come "from the rottenness of humanity itself"--often, I would add, in a tone of self-satisfied, trollish, "Welcome to the real world!" swagger. They have thus come to take the kind of politics A Clockwork Orange presented in stride, as unworthy of remark, as mere conventional wisdom, with any other outlook so "dated" or otherwise out of touch with "reality" as to not be worth answering--a result not just the right but the political Center fought to achieve.
* Indeed, the film's star Malcolm McDowell remarked in an interview liberal dislike of the film. Sounding like what would today be called a troll ("Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers and it shows them realities . . . Cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth?" which was that "People are basically bad, corrupt," as he had "always sensed") McDowell claimed later in a letter to the Times that his remark was not "gleeful" but "despondent" (odd as that may seem to one who reads the whole interview, and little as this actually changes).
Where the lack of comparable controversy over a piece of pop culture in a long time is concerned, it seems to me that besides the decline of the political literacy that made such argument possible there has been, essentially, a triumph of deeply conservative views among the mainstream commentariat--even those members of it who would not identify as conservative. In the view of a great many observers, David Walsh has remarked, "realism" has come to mean "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light," with filmmakers endeavoring to "outdo each other . . . in their depictions of people’s depravity and sadism," not least by "sticking in all the sordid details one can think of," while far from being "indignant" at the state of the world, they show "a warm, almost grateful acceptance of the filthiness" that they hold to come "from the rottenness of humanity itself"--often, I would add, in a tone of self-satisfied, trollish, "Welcome to the real world!" swagger. They have thus come to take the kind of politics A Clockwork Orange presented in stride, as unworthy of remark, as mere conventional wisdom, with any other outlook so "dated" or otherwise out of touch with "reality" as to not be worth answering--a result not just the right but the political Center fought to achieve.
* Indeed, the film's star Malcolm McDowell remarked in an interview liberal dislike of the film. Sounding like what would today be called a troll ("Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers and it shows them realities . . . Cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth?" which was that "People are basically bad, corrupt," as he had "always sensed") McDowell claimed later in a letter to the Times that his remark was not "gleeful" but "despondent" (odd as that may seem to one who reads the whole interview, and little as this actually changes).
"Welcome to the Real World!"
The phase "Welcome to the real world!" is notoriously uttered with condescension and outright Schadenfreude in response to someone else being unpleasantly disillusioned, or more deeply pained, by contact with the supposed "real world."
Few ask what they mean by "real" here. Alas, in line with the standard of "realism" David Walsh describes as what the conventional have in mind, it means "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light"--what is revolting, the "real," and all else somehow not real. Society as a Hobbesian state of nature on steroids, with anything else "fake," to be believed in only by the contemptibly naive.
Some grasp of reality, that--and all too much in line with the stupid swagger and general nastiness of the phrases that do so much to befoul spoken and written English in our time.
Few ask what they mean by "real" here. Alas, in line with the standard of "realism" David Walsh describes as what the conventional have in mind, it means "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light"--what is revolting, the "real," and all else somehow not real. Society as a Hobbesian state of nature on steroids, with anything else "fake," to be believed in only by the contemptibly naive.
Some grasp of reality, that--and all too much in line with the stupid swagger and general nastiness of the phrases that do so much to befoul spoken and written English in our time.
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