The Japanaphobic Thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s: Why All the Two-Bit Sociology About Japan?

Reading the Japan-themed thrillers of the '80s and '90s I was struck time and again by how, more than in the case of thrillers about other countries, the authors postured as experts on the culture of their villains and presumed to educate their readers about it--in the main, retailing the clichés then in vogue among Establishment experts. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novel Dragon was no exception, my own review of the book finding it to have repeated the standards

about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America.

However, as was also common to such commentators, whose sensibility tended well to the right of the center of the political spectrum, much as they saw the Japanese as "Other and threatening," they all too plainly envied them that social model--the respect for elites, the deference of inferiors--in part because of the reason why there was so much comment about Japanese culture in the first place. Such persons, as conservatives inclining toward a stress on difference over similarity between societies, have also been prone to explain the hugely important matter of a country's economic success or failure in terms of culture, particularly as it makes for individual qualities. Except when banging on about the necessity of society pandering to "entrepreneurs," regarding itself as owing them everything and they as owing it nothing in return, they brush aside such matters as geography, institutions, the spillover effects of others' actions (and of course, the matter of exploitation) in favor of, for example, chalking up a success or failure to their people being more or less "hard-working," etc..

Looking at the Soviet Union, even in that period in which seemed to them most dynamic (the years surrounding the launch of Sputnik), Anti-Communism meant that they were sure they had nothing to learn from, or admire in, the Soviets. By contrast the Japanese in the '80s, if practicing a form of capitalism that seemed distastefully statist to many commentators (the main source of skepticism about Japanese success in those years), was still a conservative, capitalist, country they feared was beating America at its own game. And that drove them to try and make some sense of the country--if with the meager results that have many of those picking up these books today appalled by what it was common to write then, just as, in relation to many a different culture, many will similarly be appalled by the two-bit sociology standard in the early twenty-first century.

Did Margaret Thatcher Actually Say That Any Man Riding the Bus After the Age of Twenty-Five Was a Failure?

The remark that "If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of twenty-six, he can count himself a failure in life" has been widely attributed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--and at the same time the attribution widely contested.

Considering the resulting debate it seems worth saying that those skeptical Thatcher ever made that remark point out that the quotation has been worded differently in various reports, that documentation of any one of those statements has been elusive, and that a very similar remark has been attributed to other figures long before Thatcher was Prime Minister, among them "socialite" Loelia Ponsonby ("Anyone seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life"), who is herself suggested by some to have merely repeated someone else's words (with poet Brian Howard identified as that person by one investigator).

However, it is also worth pointing out that the various forms of the quotation do not disprove that there was an original form of that statement; the absence of documentation does not mean that she did not say it, only that no one has yet found a possible form of the statement on the record; and that others had said it before does not mean that she did not repeat it herself, either exactly or in some form.

The result is that one can regard the claim as "unproven," rather than "debunked," but many rush to the latter conclusion. (Thus did a writer for the Guardian, in a piece all about said writer's softening attitude toward Thatcher, hasten to declare it a "bogus story.") Indeed, considering this attribution that is awkward for Thatcher's sympathizers--like her very well-documented utterance that "There is no such thing as society," which all too obviously means what it seems to no matter how they deny it--I am struck by the burden of proof laid on those who would claim that Thatcher actually made the remark about bus riders being failures. It is a rather selective exercise in historical sticklerism that, as such selectivity demonstrates (compare it with how you can make up any cynical remark, put the words in the mouth of a Communist leader, and never be questioned), demonstrate of the force of the political biases in favor not just of Thatcher but the political philosophy, the program, the economic and social model, the societal vision she championed, and from which her political legacy has since been inextricable, rather than a principled insistence on getting the facts rights.

A Word on Loelia Ponsonby

The first place I ever encountered the name "Loelia Ponsonby" was in the novels of Ian Fleming. The character made little impression--almost nothing of her but the name lingering in my mind afterward, I suppose because first and last name were fairly unusual.

Later I was surprised (though by that point I ought not to have been given Fleming's borrowing from acquaintances) to find out that Fleming knew a real-life Loelia Ponsonby--Ponsonby the maiden name of Loelia Mary, Lady Lindsay. Surprised, too (though by that point I ought not to have been given the circles in which the ultra-privileged Fleming moved), to find out that she was prominent enough to rate her own Wikipedia page (styling her Loelia Lindsay).

Far and away the most interesting thing about Ms. Ponsonby (to me these days, far more interesting than what inspiration she may have provided Fleming in creating James Bond's universe) is that she popularized the phrase (apparently beloved by collectors of nasty little aphorisms) that "Anyone seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life."

Margaret Thatcher, of course, has been reported to have spoken a variation on that statement: "'If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of twenty-six, he can count himself a failure in life'" (in one version of the story, at any rate).

The discussion about whether Thatcher actually did so is exceedingly contentious, and I will not presume to settle the matter one way or the other here (or anywhere else). However, it seems that one can at least say something about how Thatcher's alleged comment has been interpreted--as an expression of disdain for the working people who depend on public services, and indeed as evidence that, while she promised her policies would help the whole country she really expected nothing of the kind, the claims for their beneficent character pure bad faith on the part of a right-wing ideologue, kicking the interests of those she contemptuously dismissed as "failures" to the curb as she pursued her ideological bias against the public sector and her political interest in pandering to business at working people's expense, while feeling a good deal of Schadenfreude toward the victims as she went about it. This is all the more the case in as the pattern really did extend specifically to bus service by way of the Transport Act 1985, which has had exactly the consequences her opponents predicted and feared for the country's transit riders.

The circumstances and implications of Thatcher's supposed utterance makes for an interesting contrast with the spirit of Ms. Ponsonby's statement. Certainly as could be expected given her social origin Ms. Ponsonby's mode of life, personal connections (like her marriage to Hugh Grosvenor), and the outrageous snobbery known to have gone with them, seems to have had utter contempt for "the plebs." Indeed, the comment was even nastier in the '40s than in the '80s, when as yet only a small minority of British households had automobiles. However, there was also the fact that Ponsonby was now in the same boat, or bus, as them, after her 1947 divorce, following which, according to at least one account I have encountered, she was herself riding the bus in the rain. The daughter of a baron who had been a godson to the Emperor of Germany and courtier of Queen Victoria, who as an adult married a duke counted among the world's wealthiest men (the aforementioned Grosvenor), and through it all lived it up in a manner that can almost seem a parody of the lives of the idle rich (as a "bright young thing" in the '20s, later as the wife of that duke-real estate millionaire), the now far past thirty Lindsay/Ponsonby would seem to have been speaking of herself when she spoke of "failure" in a display of what, were writers prone to judge the rich as harshly as they do the poor, they would call self-pity.

Of Swagger in International Politics

Writing of the "Machiavellian" Renaissance princes and their advisers, not least Niccolo Machiavelli himself, H.G. Wells remarked in The Outline of History that these were all "scheming to outdo one another, to rob weaker contemporaries, to destroy rivals, so that they might for a brief interval swagger"--no more.

Reading that I am not sure Wells' assessment was altogether fair, not least in regard to Machiavelli, whom he characterizes as having presented his vision of a united Italy in The Prince as simply "a great opportunity for a prince" rather.

Still, there is no denying that the stupid desire of heads of government and the elites behind them and the courtiers of all these to swagger plays its part in international politics--a frighteningly, distressingly, large part, especially in this era in which self-satisfied vulgarian clowns delighting in their own offensiveness to others increasingly seem to hold the highest offices, as the world media indulges the absolute worst of their behavior; and that same media, among much, much else to its absolute discredit, increasingly treats the Unthinkable as the Very Much Thinkable (to such a degree that it lavishes Oscars on movies about it While Completely Missing the Point).

Of "Swagger"

The word "swagger," according to Google's Oxford Language-based dictionary, denotes a person's conducting themselves in a "typically arrogant or aggressive way."

Basically, someone who swaggers acts like an "asshole."

Yet one finds that the word "swagger" tends to be used much less pejoratively than "asshole"--indeed, used admiringly in regard to such behavior.

Where does that come from? Quite simply there is the way that people are relentlessly encouraged to identify upwards, with those who have power and status. To think what they do necessarily commendable and worthy of emulation, to try and do it themselves when they can, to fancy themselves doing the same thing in their position when they cannot--to vicariously live through their supposed superiors, and in this case, swagger vicariously through them.

It all betrays the delusions of men who are little in every sense of the word--and in this failing all too commonplace.

Remembering H.G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads"

Those who delve into the history of tank warfare are likely to learn that H.G. Wells' short story "The Land Ironclads" was an important anticipation, and even influence on, the development of the technology--Winston Churchill (and likely others besides) having remembered the story when he backed the development of the tank during World War I.

Still, I have no idea how many have actually read the story in a very long time, let alone appreciated it as more than a piece of "gadget fiction" of the Gernsbackian type. The story is not only about a tool of war but an expression of a broader understanding of modern war, as we see when we consider not the soldiers facing the oncoming "land ironclads" but the drivers of those vehicles. In modern war, Wells shows us, loudmouthed jingoism, stupid swagger and martial melodramatics ("bawling patriotism," "truculent yappings," "petty cunning," "that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry" all too proud of its "brute" character) count for far less than the intelligent deployment of science to the ends in question--which civilized intelligence is, not incidentally, apt to sincerely, not hypocritically, find a disagreeable necessity at best when really and truly forced upon it, rather than a thing to celebrate (but all the same, do it more efficiently than the barbaric opponents who force war upon them).

A century on it can seem that many, especially among those situated in high places and with very public platforms to express their views, have yet to learn that lesson--in just one more testament of how it is not those who think as Wells did who triumphed in the battle of ideas this past century.

The Appropriation of the Nerd Image as Meritocratic Propaganda

Not long ago I remarked the class overtones of the stereotypical image of the "nerd" and the disdain for those adhering to it--the upper-class resentment of those who challenged their entitlement by trying to get ahead on the basis of diligence and education. Belonging to a world of aristocratic privilege and its defense, the ways of rationalizing inequality have long since changed to claims for society as meritocratic--and unsurprisingly, attitudes toward the "nerd" have changed in some ways. Especially with the neoliberal era seeing the exaltation of the self-made inventor-businessman--the tech billionaire as usually presented to the public--as the supreme example of the meritocrat, there has over recent decades been much talk of the "revenge of the nerds," "nerd pride" and so forth.

It is all quite silly, really, as silly as any of the other neoliberal propaganda out there, the true stories of these things not usually what they are made out to be. (Indeed, looking at many a "self-made" fortune today, as much as in any other time, one constantly finds Josiah Bounderby-like distortion of the facts, not least regarding the share of that critical feature of technical ability in the making of a billionaire.)

Meanwhile, given all the baggage attaching to the term "nerd," so-called attempts to "reclaim" nerdiness and "take pride" in nerdiness ring hollow indeed, with this exemplified by how those who can seem the very faces of the propaganda actually act in real life. Far from embracing their nerdy image, many seem to go to great lengths to discard it--not least by in middle age deciding to enter martial arts tournaments in which they are publicly humiliated by abler opponents.

Coolness, Nerdiness and Pseudo-Maturity

Not long ago I had occasion to write about just what "coolness" tends to come down to--foolish posturing as untouchably above everything, especially by those who are absolutely conventional and conformist, but richer and freer than everyone else, such that it is easy for them to appear "confident," extroverted, even stupidly swaggering. Among the young, pseudo-maturity tends to play a significant part in this--the "cool kids" the ones who can pose as more adult than the others, in part because they are more indulged than the others. (For instance, they might drive to school a car their teachers can only envy, as many of their peers take the bus or, more comfortable if looking less independent, get driven to school.)

Being the opposite of cool on these points would seem to have a lot to do with the nerdy image. Instead of stupid pretenses to being everything and untouchable the nerd is stereotypically shy and timid--and often less than conventional and conformist and free. And far from conveying an impression of pseudo-maturity the nerd stereotype suggests immaturity--persons who are less physically and socially developed than they ought to be at their age (hence the nerd as scrawny and awkward), who are more attached to childish things (the conventional view of the "geek" culture of science fiction, comic books, video games, etc. has long been that these things are childish), and less independent than their cool counterparts (prone to stay at home, more attached to and deferential toward their parents).

Given the media's vehemence in associating intelligence with wealth it today seems commonplace to make the nerdy kid a rich kid--but especially given the class baggage that plausibly played its part in the development of conceptions of "nerdiness," it does not seem a stretch to think that the conception of the nerd as we know it is significantly a legacy of a time when it was not those born to privilege but those less well-positioned in society by birth and trying to get ahead who hit the books hardest, and whose social origin constrained them to playing it safe.

Is the "Nerd" Stereotype Classist and Racist? (In a Word, "Yes")

The origins of the image of the "nerd" in American culture are hazy, with the etymology of the term and all associated with it substantially matters of speculation. Still, it has a certain undeniable charge. The concept seems undeniably anti-intellectual--and indeed it seems no coincidence that the term "nerd" was popularized in the thoroughly anti-intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s.

However, there are other charges as well, which can seem to reflect far older roots than that. Consider those two crucial nerd traits--the combination of intellectualism with social awkwardness. Looking back at early modern history one defining social conflict, amid this period in which the feudal nobility was declining, the bourgeoisie rising, and new career opportunities sought after by both groups in the emergent state apparatus, was the attitude of aristocrats who regarded themselves as entitled to preferment in civil service and military posts over "commoners" who were trying to get ahead in the race for such jobs on the basis of education, diligence, knowledge--such that one can picture the sneer of the nobleman at these bookish middle class types they regarded as lacking the graces by which the aristocrats defined themselves, and despising them for the book learning they did have. All of this, in fact, became quite serious at times--the clash over posts intensifying in France in the years before the revolution of 1789 (as seen in the regressive 1781 law that required an army officer candidate to have four generations of nobility behind him, shutting out not just the bourgeoisie, but recent nobility of the "robe" rather than the "sword" that had risen from the middle class).

One can also see something of such sentiment in later times, as with the idea of the "gentleman's C" at college. The whole idea of the gentleman's C was that it was beneath a gentleman--the son of wealth--to spend his time "grinding" away at his studies. That was for the ambitious, striving, lower orders, again looked down upon for their origin, and resented for their trying to get ahead rather than keep their place in the social hierarchy--the more in, again, as those who had been born privileged saw in them a threat to their own personal ambitions.

Alongside this upper class resentment of persons they saw as beneath them challenging their position on meritocratic grounds there is, too, what the fuller nerd image entails--and the other stereotypes it evokes. Consider the image of the nerd as not only intellectual and socially awkward, but unathletic, near-sighted, and perhaps also physically repellent in appearance and in other ways, perverse, "creepy." All of this corresponds to a package of stereotype historically associated with more than one ethnic group over the years--quite nastily. Indeed, it can seem that in this era where the bar for taking offense at perceived invocation of stereotype can seem so low that we do not hear more about this.

My guess is that for various reasons those preoccupied with the politics of status and identity have simply not found it convenient to take up this particular side of the matter.

Of Cell Phones in the Classroom: A Few Thoughts

Not long ago I remarked Joe Blevins' discussion of the less than happy realities of teaching he found reflected in the 2011 Jake Kasdan-Cameron Diaz comedy Bad Teacher.

At the time the one that interested me most was the extent to which teaching is, for many teachers, not a first choice of occupation, and many who are not well-suited to it end up doing it for at least a time. However, considering the matter of cell phones in the classroom I do find one other bit relevant: what he had to say about fighting " a battle of wits or wills" with students being "a lose-lose situation."

After all, it seems common for instructors to think cell phones in the classroom are a problem--students paying attention to their phones rather than the lecture or discussion, causing distraction, etc., perhaps in ways that make their job harder. (They weren't listening the first time, they brazenly say if called on. Can you repeat that whole thing again? Like, the whole fifty minute lecture?) However, trying to enforce a ban on cell phone use in class makes for just such a battle of wits and wills as Blevins described.

Moreover, what Blevins described at the middle school level is worse at the college level. At that stage there is no calling their parents or giving them detention. There is also a very good chance that they have very easy access to the instructors' boss--maybe easier access than the instructor themselves--and make full use of it to lodge their complaints. And of course, in college the burden of teaching, especially the toughest teaching where instructors are most likely to encounter problem students--those first-year general ed courses--falls disproportionately on adjuncts who are both overworked and insecure, vulnerable to being let go at any time without due process, often not being so much fired as simply, when they should have got word of the next semester's assignment, no phone call ever coming. Least of all can they afford such "battles of wits or wills"--and so the students do what they want.

Bad Teacher, Revisited

Some years ago I presented some thoughts about Jake Kasdan's 2011 film Bad Teacher--the kind of mediocre comedy that made me think of the kind of material he satirized in his earlier The TV Set (a flawed film, about the long-overdone subject of Hollywood, but at its best a good deal better-crafted and wittier than this one).

Especially as the plans for a franchise fizzled, with the sequel unmade and the TV spin-off airing only a few episodes before CBS dropped it from its line-up, I have not had occasion to really think about it since. Still, running into Joe Blevins' piece for Vulture about the movie (which he regards himself as able to say something about because he, too, was a suburban Cook County junior high school teacher who had been less than ideal in the job) did seem to me to make a few interesting points about the bits of truth within the pile of nonsense that was that film, at times rather wittily. (Blevins likens his experience of teaching "to being a standup comic at an endless open mic night in Hell," which I think those who have been teachers will understand, anyone who did the job long having had an experience describable in such terms.)

Of principal importance here is his admission about how and why he ended up a teacher--a refreshing break from society's general demand that teachers be perfect models of "convenient social virtue" (devotion to the job because it is their true vocation rather than because the non-rich must do something to pay the bills), and the readiness of most teachers to at least pretend to be such. As Blevins admits, he had simply gone to college, "taken nothing particularly useful," and ended up going into education "with absolutely zero enthusiasm" for lack of other options--Blevins, in contrast with those for whom teaching is a "fallback career" (as with so many writers), having no alternative to the "Plan B." Sure enough, he proved to have "no aptitude for this work," and walked away from the job soon enough, even if less equipped than others to do so. (Blevins explains that he became an office temp.)

Here we see a number of underappreciated realities acknowledged--namely the extent to which, given the demand for teachers and the actual supply of people who really want to do the job on the existing terms rather than something else, teaching is often not a first choice of occupation for those who do it; many who end up "falling back" here find that they are not well-suited to the very demanding work, and do not get better (the needs of society as determined by those who make the decisions simply do not align with the supply of talent any more than they do with the supply of willingness); and, contrary to what many of the professional teacher-bashers ever eager to put down the nation's faculty say, those who do not really want the job and do not do the job well often take themselves off to some other occupation that they can do better before very long. It may not seem like much--but it is a far better basis for thinking about problems like the recruitment and assessment and retention of teaching faculty than the prevailing conventionalities.

A Word on Ben Affleck, Two Decades After Gigli

While the entertainment media's talking up Hollywood celebrities and then turning against them is tiresomely routine, but some examples have been especially striking.

One is the way the media turned hostile to Anne Hathaway circa 2013, because it was so abrupt and forceful and without the usual preparation.

Another is that against Ben Affleck, because of how long it went on--and because of the particular circumstances that provided a convenient point of comparison. The big moment in his case came with 2003's Gigli. It was not a good film by any means--but its badness struck me as banal, the badness of any number of crappy independent films that the critics ordinarily treat far more kindly. After that flop the press came after both Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez--and if the backlash against Lopez proved relatively short-lived, the actress and singer's career going on its way, with 2005's Monster-in-Law already becoming a hit in spite of critics' unkindness toward that movie, the hatred for Affleck endured.

Granted, that hatred did ease, but only late, and slowly. I remember, for example, how Affleck drew some positive notices for Hollywoodland (2006)--but this was only a beginning, and that over three years after the release of Gigli. Affleck's turn behind the camera helped, Affleck landing some positive notices for directing The Town (2010), and Argo (2012), but there were distinct limitations to that--of which it can seem telling that while the Academy gave Argo Best Picture, it did not even bother with a Best Director nomination for Affleck, a reminder that approval of the film translated over to him only so far. It also seemed to me to be there in the hostility to Affleck's being cast as Batman in the DC Extended Universe, and the excessive nastiness toward 2003's Daredevil. And so on and so forth.

Rather than a bump in the road it has been a major drag--one that did not prevent him from having what most would regard as a commercially and critically enviable career as director and actor on the whole, but all the same, significant, longstanding damage from a hostility that, I think, has not been helped but cannot be wholly accounted for by the messiness of his personal life. (Foolish as a good deal of his behavior has been, others are forgiven much worse all the time.) It all leaves the element of sheer media stupidity the more blatant.

Remembering the Extreme Stupidity of "Hathahate" on the Eve of The Idea of You

A decade ago, we were told, there was an upsurge of hatred of Anne Hathaway, which seems to be getting some attention again these days--mostly, I think, as part of the publicity for the upcoming release of her romantic comedy The Idea of You.

By the time Hathahate rolled around I had long since realized that the claqueurs of the entertainment media, in their extreme vileness, breathlessly talk up particular figures in the film industry--and then start talking them down at some point, with the presumption involved that said claqueurs are reflecting "everyone's" opinion.

Still, the attacks on Ms. Hathaway did not seem to me to conform to the usual pattern. Often the claqueurs begin the attack on the targeted figure after some big movie of theirs flops (the way, for example, the claqueurs came after Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez following the failure of Gigli). Or they make some public faux pas, however small and however much it has to be blown out of proportion. There had been nothing of the kind in her case, making the turn seem especially strained and artificial.

Considering these disgusting episodes I do not doubt that they serve particular agendas--business and personal. For instance, the Suits need someone cut down to size--maybe many someones--and they get the media to do their bidding, very easily. (Certainly I recall, and think everyone should recall, how the press dutifully played its part when the studios wanted to break the power of the auteur filmmakers of the New Hollywood era.) But even after these years I have no notion of what the agenda might have been in her case, and remember how if something must have been behind it it still felt like a totalitarian thought-control experiment--seeing just how much control they had over the entertainment news audience by seeing just how much they could turn her against Ms. Hathaway on no grounds whatsoever.

I have no idea how many people who are not part of the media actually responded to that--but the thought that any of them did is exceedingly depressing.

The Elephant in the Room During Last Year's Hollywood Labor Battles

Last year the first Hollywood double-strike (of the writers, and actors) since 1960 was big news. Some aspects of the conflict got a bit of discussion--like concern over how working writers' and actors' labors could be used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) software which would be used to put them out of a job (quite naturally, amid the insane hyping of AI that continues to the present moment).

However, other aspects of the matter did not. Not the least of these--perhaps because fewer appreciated it then, and few still do now--is the likely contraction of the business. While in late 2022 it looked like the American box office was returning to its pre-pandemic norm (about 4 ticket sales per capita in North America, and $14 billion a year grossed domestically in today's money), after what we saw in 2023, and given what we can expect of 2024 (confirmed by what we have seen of it up to the present) what seems to be happening is its stabilizing at a well-below-pre-pandemic level (perhaps 50-70 percent of the pre-pandemic level). Meanwhile with Hollywood having a harder time in the Chinese market, and the streaming bonanza drawing to an end, all this is suggestive of a tighter market--one where profitability can only be sustained by cutting back on production.

The result is a smaller volume of business--a smaller pie--over which all concerned have been fighting, even before one gets into the "What might bes" of artificial intelligence.

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.