How Often Will Americans Go to the Movies From Here on Out?

In considering the North American box office few bother to acknowledge just how much more avid North Americans have long been about moviegoing compared to their counterparts even in other comparably affluent advanced industrialized countries. After the bottoming out of the post-TV crash in theater attendance in the 1960s they averaged around 4 trips to the theater per capita for a half century, up to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. By comparison Germans and Japanese were making less than 2 and usually more like 1 trip to the theater each year.

The result is that it was easy to picture Americans' moviegoing falling off significantly--with potentially huge implications for the size of the American box office, their attendance coming to look like that of Germans or Japanese reducing the grosses by half, two-thirds or even more, and indeed I wondered if we could not expect this to eventually happen.

My earlier expectation was that there would be a gradual decline, but instead we had the dramatic shock of 2020--and if subsequent years saw recovery that recovery still seems only very partial. As it happened in 2023 North Americans averaged just a little over two trips to the theater per year--still going more often than the pre-pandemic (and current) norm in Germany and Japan. Considering that by that year Americans' habit of moviegoing seemed to no longer be inhibited by the pandemic, while the year had a pre-pandemic-like slate of blockbusters, it seems plausible to think of it as (flops and all) constituting a "new normal"--the box office essentially stabilized at its current level (2023's take a bit under two-thirds of the pre-pandemic level in real terms, with a little less predicted for 2024).

That being the case the question becomes whether Hollywood can adjust to a new situation where the domestic box office is, thanks to the reduction in the number of American trips to the theater, 50-70 percent of what it was just a few years ago. Thus far I see little acknowledgment of the reality, let alone plans to make accommodation for it--just box office commentators grading the box office performance of big movies on a curve in line with their duties as claqueurs.

Book Review: Craig Thomas' Winter Hawk

By 1987 Craig Thomas had been putting out his thrillers annually for a decade--by which point most genre authors working at such a pace are getting less innovative, and more likely to repeat themselves. Thomas' Winter Hawk was certainly consistent with that tendency to repetition. A second sequel to his 1977 thriller Firefox, it once again had Western intelligence officials alarmed by a Soviet aerospace breakthrough threatening the global balance of military power sending Mitchell Gant sneaking into the Soviet Union on a mission taking advantage of both his flying skills and his Russian language skills in which he is expected to escape the Soviet Union in a stolen Soviet aircraft. In its repetition of earlier themes Winter Hawk, one might add, reused elements of other non-Mitchell Gant, but still "Aubreyverse," work, specifically the plot of Thomas' earlier and less well-known novel Snow Falcon (1979), in which, just as in this book, the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union is making a historic arms control agreement with the West and a Soviet military establishment firmly opposed to the concessions the agreement entails is plotting to sabotage it with a grand display of Soviet military power--with the power struggle inside the Soviet establishment, down to the activities of the Soviet counter-spies looking to stop the subversion, comprising as great a part of the narrative as the doings of the Western agent who is the story's hero. (There even seems a parallel in the titles, both of them two-word titles which are the names of birds of prey, with the first word in their name specifically evoking the coldest season of the year.) The difference here is that the Soviet military's stroke will not occur on Earth, but in space--Thomas in this book seizing on the then-fashionable theme of the Strategic Defense Initiative a year before Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin and Dale Brown's Silver Tower with a scenario in which the Soviets plan to have in orbit a constellation of laser-armed battle stations able to completely neutralize the West's strategic capability.

The result is a much more "big picture"-oriented, and lengthy, narrative than either the original Firefox (tightly focused on Gant's sneaking into the Soviet Union to steal the titular jet in the first half, and in the second flying his stolen plane out), or the 1982 sequel Firefox Down (a combination of man-on-the-run story and salvage job)--the book at 525 pages in the original hardback edition nearly twice the length of the first (288-page) Gant novel.

Meanwhile, as might be guessed from the sheer mass of the book, the number of years which Thomas had been writing, and for that matter the precedent on his more relevant preceding works (like, besides Snow Falcon, 1981's submarine thriller Sea Leopard), the result is less than perfectly even. Like many a maturing author Thomas increasingly inclined to prolixity, and indeed became prone to overwriting, in this case to the point of producing unnecessary incidents, written up lengthily. Exemplary of this is an early episode in which the transport aircraft delivering the two Hind helicopters that Gant and his colleagues will be using in the mission (entering Soviet-controlled airspace by way of Afghanistan, they are supposed to pick up a defector with key intelligence about the Soviet military space program from a safe house outside its great complex at Baikonur) runs into trouble far short of the launch point for the mission in Pakistan. It serves no purpose plot-wise, laying no groundwork for anything that happens later, and mainly ends up dragging things out by throwing an additional obstacle in the heroes' way, one which further suffers from lacking the dramatic interest of enemy action. (One can say for it is that it helps establish how when faced with problems of that kind Gant displays considerable independence, daring, practical ingenuity, though in fairness that becomes apparent in more dramatic ways soon enough, so that again, Thomas fails to justify its inclusion.) At the same time, if some bits are unnecessary other elements that seem necessary appear to have been left out--with Thomas' relation of the Soviet side of the intrigue not so much drawing to a conclusion by the story's close as stopping after Gant's fate has been made clear. (What ever happened to KGB Colonel Dimitri Priabin after the dramatic events earlier in the book, and the two preceding it? We never find out here.) One wonders about other aspects of the continuity, too, with, even as Thomas makes heavy use of some aspects of the prior books (like Priabin and his desire for revenge against Gant), others are totally neglected. (In this Aubreyverse novel not a word is spoken about Kenneth Aubrey, or British intelligence and its role in Gant's prior missions; while we also do not hear a word about the Firefox fighter Gant risked his life to steal and the revolutionary engine, stealth and neural control technologies, let alone see a single Firefox in the air as Gant crosses through so much of Soviet airspace with the Soviet air force determinedly hunting him down.)

One may also add that Thomas' research into his subject did not seem to get much more thorough over the years. (To cite one of the more obvious failings here Thomas seems to think that helicopters carry air search radars as a matter of course, and includes them in models of helicopter where they are most certainly not installed as a matter of course--and that aircraft radars as a matter of course provide the 360 degree coverage provided by ground-based radar.) However, from the standpoint of pure reading experience it may be more important that Thomas did get better at sustaining suspenseful scenes, and writing spectacular action, as simply the distance between the first and second Firefox novels shows (the aerial battle opening the second book far outdoes anything in the first), while if Thomas can be very good with the on-the-ground part of the adventure, he also benefits from keeping Gant in the cockpit of his aircraft for as much of the adventure as possible. Those early troubles getting the helicopters into place apart, just about everything to do with this part of the story works, and works well, with, if one does not nit-pick the technical details, Thomas here second to none at bringing together technology and aerial action with a measure of literary flair--and this extending to characterization, with it mattering both that Mitchell Gant is far more compelling than the Jack Ryans and others who headline most techno-thrillers, and that in characterizing the Soviets as well Thomas by this point has come a long way from the Cold War caricature of the Soviet figures on which he earlier relied to present them as actual human beings leading human lives. The result is that while this book remains an action-adventure-oriented thriller first and foremost Thomas manages to wring some human drama out of his premise. His strength on both scores means that in spite of its shortcomings Winter Hawk actually proved to be the strongest of the three Mitchell Gant novels overall—and one of the richer and more robust works to come out of the techno-thriller genre's '80s-era boom.

A Word on Craig Thomas' Soviet Characters

Big-screen film adaptations of successful books, especially when they are major feature films of the summer blockbuster type, are famously unfaithful to their source material. However, Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Craig Thomas' novel Firefox was very faithful--with that faithfulness extending to what many might be inclined to see as the book's flaws.

Worth considering here is what the New York Times' Vincent Canby said of the movie, which is just as sayable of the book--that the film "expresses a most cavalier attitude toward the lives of its supporting characters," with all those who aid Mitchell Gant in stealing the Firefox fighter jet killed off "in such numbers, and with so little emotion, that even the screenplay seems to become selfconscious about it," Acknowledging the fact itself. Thus a Gant bewildered by the readiness of the helpers that British intelligence recruited to lay down their lives this way comes out and asks one of them what motivates them--and in the film the answer he gets is that "'It's a small thing compared to my resentment of the K.G.B..'"

All of this may have been congenial to those taking a hard-liner's view of the Cold War, but as this reviewer for the by no means radical New York Times makes clear, it was as unsatisfying dramatically as it was implausible in this more complex reality. And as it happened, Thomas' handling of his Soviet characters in his subsequent books, like the Firefox sequels, increasingly moved past the anti-Communist cliché that dominated the first book, in 1983's Firefox Down, and still more 1987's Winter Hawk. If still not the deepest, most-nuanced or well-balanced picture of Soviet life, here the Soviet Union at least appears a place where, for all the imperfections of their system, there is, just as in Gant's own less-than-perfect Clarksville, a normal, daily life, in which people have families and all their baggage, and personal affections and antipathies, which figure significantly in the elaborate intrigues that play out among the Soviet leadership (and how Gant endeavors to get back out of the Soviet Union again after having got himself into it), Thomas managing to generate some real personal tension here out of the interactions of the Soviet principals in a way novels like these rarely manage to do (the Soviet general in charge of the space-based laser program, his ruthless and ambitious subordinate, the KGB man dogging them), and the book better off for it.

A Word on Craig Thomas' Mitchell Gant

It is one of the ironies of the military techno-thriller genre that while the form was not only invented by British writers in the nineteenth century but revived by them in the twentieth it is Americans who did best out of that revival--as shown by the career of Tom Clancy.

Still, those British writers were a presence on American bestseller lists for all that, with Craig Thomas no exception, and helped by the fact that he was not only ahead of most of the competition here (1977's Firefox long preceding the aviation-themed stories of Coonts and Brown and the rest, and 1981's Sea Leopard beating Clancy's Hunt for Red October to the punch by many years), but that there were ways in which he tended to outdo them. Others came in ahead of Thomas when it came to the scale and intricacy of scenario, or the scale and elaborateness of the action, or the rigor of their research and knack for blending technical detail with story, but Thomas tended to be the superior storyteller and literary craftsman, with characterization one of the areas where he showed this.

In considering that it may seem natural that Thomas was able to make his spymaster Kenneth Aubrey compelling--as an older man with a long life and career behind him, whose conditions of work in London afford him more opportunity to be "complicated" than the younger people physically engaged out in the field and so apt to have their minds on personal survival above all else. Still, Thomas also managed to make that man out in the field, Mitchell Gant, also an interesting creation.

It seems to me that this was partly because he took a different approach to the character. Clancy's Jack Ryan and company tend to be idealized, often to the point of, as action heroes so often are, appearing to be their creators' Gary Stus (and as a consequence, as genially bland as they are hypercompetent). By contrast, from his first appearance in the original Firefox Gant appears as a deeply damaged and troubled man, burdened not only by what he did, witnessed and suffered in the Vietnam War, but a less than picture-perfect family background in a small town in the middle of nowhere that he had ever since striven to escape. Gant's hatred of his domineering and violent drunk of a father down to the moment when he switched off life support for the man as he lay on his deathbed (the end of "an impatient wait with release and the throwing off of hatred at the end of the tunnel"), his both loving and despising his "untidy slut" of a sister who married a drunk like not-so-dear-old-dad, his disdain for and desire to escape his "roots" in Clarksville rather than romanticism about them (to say nothing of the drug use that played its part in his being shot down, or much, much else in his backstory), were not the sort of thing with which American techno-thrillers were likely to saddle their heroes, or for that matter very prominent in their pictures of America. This, too, had its part in making Gant who he is--an "emotional cripple" in the view of the Air Force's psychological profilers (as he discovered to his distress after breaking into the office containing the records during the war).

Unsurprisingly, in spite of the qualities that permitted him to be so accomplished in the cockpit, he had a less than glamorous post-service life, working as a garage hand (seemingly just a notch above a John Rambo who, as the cinematic version announced in the first film's closing monologue, couldn't even get that job) when he was recruited back into the Air Force for service in the kind of elite unit to which his abilities were of particular value. Also unsurprisingly, he is not a natural "organization man," or always likable, Gant cynical and flippant toward everyone he deals with, both authority and less-experienced colleagues--such that it was easy indeed to picture Clint Eastwood in the role. (In fact reading the third book in the Gant series, 1987's Winter Hawk, I wondered if Eastwood's having played Gant in the 1982 film did not, consciously or unconsciously, encourage Thomas in making Gant hew more closely to the Eastwood persona, and especially Eastwood at his more sneering.)

In considering that it is worth acknowledging that there was no political criticism involved in Thomas' taking a different tack. Going by what I have read of his books Thomas appears a conventional, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet Cold War conservative, and to such a degree that in Firefox he can picture British intelligence seemingly having an easy time finding well-placed Soviets who so hate their government they are ready to lay down their lives to help some foreigners steal a fighter jet from their country (something even the reviewer for the far from radical New York Times had a hard time swallowing). In ways even more pointed the later Sea Leopard gives the impression of a man with little use for leftists, college students and intellectuals. And all the while Thomas consistently appears respectful of security state officialdom and the armed services, and on the whole well disposed to America and Americans in good, "Atlanticist" fashion.*

Still, the fact that Thomas was a Briton writing about a hero of another nationality, and a civilian rather than the veteran most of the techno-thriller writers were writing about an Air Force pilot, may have meant that pieties about the armed forces, American small towns, etc. may have had less grip on him--freeing him to create a complex character, and to good result. Where reading the books by Clancy and company I usually found in the "character stuff" just something to endure until the story got to "the good part" in Thomas' books the character stuff held my interest, and made what I usually thought of as the "good part" better--rather than a gesture toward literary standards on the part of a teller of an action story, just as in David Morrell's First Blood or Robert Ludlum's The Aquitaine Progression the damage and baggage helping to make the adventure of the hero when on the run a fresher, more nuanced, more living, more gripping thing than it would otherwise have been.

* As the Times' Vincent Canby explains, in the film (as in the book) "nearly everyone who assists in the planenapping is promptly bumped off"--killed "in such numbers, and with so little emotion, that even the screenplay seems to become selfconscious about it" to go by Gant's asking his helpers how they can sacrifice their lives like this (with the same sayable of the book, to which the film adaptation was faithful in this as in so many other respects).

If Artists are Conservative, Why Do We So Often Picture Them Otherwise?

Recently writing about the politics of artists I discussed Upton Sinclair's view of artists' "sensitivity" leaving them vulnerable to the propaganda of the day--and David Walsh's perhaps not dissimilar view of the artists' working methods (unconscious, intuitive, emotional, impressionistic, centered on the concrete image, as against an analytical approach), with this reinforced by "Bohemianism, individualism, egotism," were prone to leave them running behind their times politically, and indeed susceptible to reactionary agendas.

Yet our stereotypes are different, and it seems worth asking why. One possibility is that we are seeing artists through the eyes of that sort of person prone to exaggerate the political difference between themselves and anyone who disagrees with them--in this case, of the conservative who exchanges words with one mild liberal and feel themselves besieged by extreme leftists. Still another is that the aforementioned Bohemianism of artists, their flouting society's standards, etc., make them seem more leftish than they really are to people who do not inquire too deeply into their attitudes. However, there is also the possibility, or even likelihood, that those "hero" and "martyr" artists make a greater impression than the astutely career-minded artists who play it safe, producing what their patrons require of them. Certainly their life stories appear more dramatic, which may have something to do with this--but one can also argue that they make a contribution out of proportion to their numbers, a Theodore Dreiser, for example, making a far greater mark on the culture than a Booth Tarkington precisely because he challenged rather than affirmed the conventionalities of his day.

In turn one might argue that, given the way artists so often run behind the times, it may be that periods in which there is something other than orthodoxy touching on their sensitivities--in which, perhaps, there are great popular movements afoot--produce more than their share of such artists, and thus more of those who ultimately produce something that endures. Returning to the case of Dreiser, the early twentieth century which produced him (and figures such as Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis, and Jack London, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck) can seem such a period. By contrast the years since the Depression and World War II have been very different--with the stream of such thinning out to leave us with little but a reactionary postmodernism. The result is that where a century on Dreiser, if unloved by the literary establishment ("treated like a 'dead dog'" in Walsh's words), retains his stature as one of the century's greats a century after An American Tragedy, those who are the toast of New York today are likely to slip into the same comparative obscurity as a Tarkington.

David Walsh on the Politics of Artists

Not long ago I cited Upton Sinclair's remarks in Mammonart about the tendency of artists toward the political right in a way extending beyond mere careerism. There was, too, the artistic "sensitivity" that made artists susceptible to the orthodoxy of the day, and the impression of grandeur the rich and powerful strive to make.

As it happens, David Walsh has had some thoughts to offer here, going beyond mere artistic "sensitivity" and the ways in which it leaves artists open to such influence. He specifically suggests that an artist's way of thinking and working, with the unconscious and intuitive, with "sense perception, immediate impressions and emotions," so central, has them thinking and feeling in images, rather than analyzing philosophically and scientifically. Besides leaving them easily propagandized, this also leaves them responsive to irrationalist, anti-rationalist and subjectivist attitudes, with the tendency reinforced by a tendency to "Bohemianism, individualism, egotism." The result has been their running behind the times intellectually--and indeed highly susceptible to reactionary influences. Hence the appeal of Friedrich Nietzsche to so many artists in the pre-World War I period, and after, who, as "wrote scathingly about bourgeois mediocrity and complacency . . . criticized religion and Christian piety and slavishness . . . stood for the 'liberation of the instincts,' spontaneity, egoism . . . intoxication," and appeared "anti-Establishment" in a way that could appeal particularly strongly to those with rebellious impulses (against bourgeois conformity, certainly), while looking more "alluring and apparently 'poetic' than looking at the difficult, often harsh, often tedious conditions of the working class."

Are Artists Naturally Conservative? A Few Thoughts

In his extraordinary study Mammonart Upton Sinclair declared that "the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes," with this not only a matter of "entertaining them," but "teaching their subjects and slaves to stand in awe of them"; that artists more readily walk that path because their very "sensitiv[ity]" makes them even more susceptible than most to the propagandizing of authority that they in turn join in, making them creatures of "snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition," exemplified by how "[e]very little tea-party poet . . . cherishes a strong and cruel dream" such as Nietzsche, Carlyle, Kipling offer.

One thus gets an impression from this that artists are natural conservatives--quite at odds with popular images of artistic radicalism. Of course, as Sinclair makes clear exceptions abound--exceptions which commonly pay the price for not "playing the game" as demanded of them--"hero artists and martyr artists, men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake."

Still, looking at popular culture, and not least Hollywood's movies, it seems to me impossible not to be struck by the relentlessness of such work in glorifying the wealthy and powerful, and validating the order that has made them so; and to think that if some artists become heroes and martyrs, this is the default mode for practitioners of the profession, or at least those which manage to get recognized as artists at all--a very different thing from the far larger set above which we can put the label "Artist."

The Tomb of the Unknown Artist

Looking over the history of literature I am conscious that what I am looking over is a history of what was commissioned, completed, presented, acclaimed, copied, preserved in substance and in memory.

That foundation for literary history is not wrong when we think of literature as what people read.

However, it is more questionable when we think of it as what was written, or what writers tried to write, or of such writing as a record or reflection of the times, for which purpose that basis is a lot less complete and satisfying. Many tried to create, but due to lack of opportunity never finished what they began, or due to censorship in one form or another created and saw their works suppressed before they could make such a mark--and we can only wonder at what might have been created had the circumstances in which they worked been just a little more supportive or free.

Few acknowledge this, or the politics behind it, but to his credit Upton Sinclair does so in Mammonart. As he remarks, "our recognized and successful artists" were generally those who "served their masters gladly and freely." Those who did not "paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile," while if those writers had the misfortune of being "poor and friendless" they did not even reach the point at which they were persecuted and exiled--or find compensation in "the gratitude of posterity." Rather "their dream-children died unborn, and were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown," one of which may have had for an epitaph "'Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest.'"

Today some of those poor and friendless are submitting their work to the slush piles, and pieces running in places like the Guardian, to their discredit, gloat over how their dream-children will be buried in unknown graves.

Is Literacy in Decline?

The claim that the young are inferior to prior age cohorts in studiousness and learning at the same point in their lives is one of the oldest and most grating clichés of the sneering aged--and I suspect has tended to be as inaccurate as it has been trite. In modern times it seems to me that the opposite has tended to be true, due to the spread of educational and cultural opportunity, and changes in curricula that I suspect have been beneficial. (If there is less study of the Classical languages there has been that much more attention to the modern ones. Certainly the teaching of history has progressed beyond the memorization of lists of kings. Etcetera, etcetera.)

Still, there is no question that in recent decades contemporary culture has been undergoing a profound transformation in which, in significant degree, audiovisual content has replaced the written words, and the screen printed media, with great consequences for the tendency to sustained, deep, reading of texts, particularly long texts. It does not seem unreasonable to think diminished use of the faculty is having its consequences--especially for those younger persons whose habits have been more fully formed in the era of the smart phone--all as, for the time being, I am unclear on just what skills they are developing in place of the old reading skills that may render them useful service in a changing world.

Remembering 1998's Lost in Space

The 1998 film adaptation of Lost in Space would seem very much of its time--a feature film based on a '60s-era TV show amid the late '90s space opera boom, which even had a member of the cast of Friends trying to extend their acting career beyond their familiar on-screen persona (Matt LeBlanc an action hero!). Still, it was not very warmly received at the time by critics, while the box office gross, if not low by contemporary standards ($136 million in early 1998 dollars), was still not quite enough to justify the big budget quite evident on the screen. Opinion toward the film does not seem to have grown warmer with time (the critics' and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are 27 and 24 percent, respectively), while a still more recent Lost in Space remake (a 2018-2021 Netflix series) has probably helped further bury the movie.

Still, even if I have not seen it in a long time I vaguely recall the film having its moments, with some bits cropping up in memory again and again. The premise of the film, as it happened, was that old sci-fi standard--the attempt to save humanity following ecological catastrophe on Earth by finding it another planetary home. Assigned to the mission Major Don West (the LeBlanc character) is initially cynical, thinking it mere corporate public relations--because "every school child" knew that "recycling technology" was going to save the Earth.

Professor John Robinson tells West that every school child had been lied to.

So does it seem when we look back on the earnestness with which people spoke once of recycling--and what we hear of it now as the ecological crisis just goes on getting worse.

A Naked Gun Remake? Seriously?

Only lately did I notice that the flood of remakes and reboots nobody asked for being dumped on us by the manure truck that is contemporary Hollywood includes a remake of 1988's hit comedy The Naked Gun.

As is usually the case with Hollywood's remakes the idea completely misses the factors relevant to the original's success.

The Naked Gun, one should remember, was part of that great wave of gag-based comedy emergent in the 1960s through the work of people like Richard Lester and Charles Feldman and Woody Allen, which had a heyday in the 1970s and 1980s in the hands of people like Mel Brooks and the ZAZ team (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker), before entering terminal decline in the '90s, identifiable with the era of the much-maligned Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer.

In those earlier, more productive years, the gag-based comedy was a new way of making a film significantly connected with and complementing the contemporaneous rise of the action movie with James Bond--the two, similarly elevating images presented at an accelerated pace above dramatic conventions, though in the case of the comedy with comedic gags rather than adrenaline-pumping "shocks" or "bumps." (Indeed, it is indicative of the closeness of the two forms that many critics looking at the first Bond movies seem to have thought they were looking at a comedy of this type.)

And just as with the action movie, filmmakers eventually exhausted this genre's possibilities. (Just as the action movie got to a point where the range of set pieces and the things that could be done in and with them was pretty well established, and there was not much to do but repeat them, and there was no going "faster" or "bigger" to any useful effect, there was only so much worth doing with this form--with even a Brooks or ZAZ in the view of most peaking early in their careers, the former with 1974's Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, ZAZ with Airplane!)

The Naked Gun was one of the most memorable of the wave's later films--but a remake seems to me exceedingly unlikely to add to anything but what we already know well, namely Hollywood's utter unhinged determination to keep giving the public the same thing over and over and over again, even as it loses money at the game.

The Other Things He Said: George R.R. Martin's "Dark Days" Blog Post

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.

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.

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.

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.