Over the past few months Deadline has published a series of articles about "the Great Contraction" in Hollywood's television production, and the "depression"-like conditions this has meant for the industry. Depicting a hellscape of surprise cancellations of long-running series', shows to which platforms had already committed dropped before they even began, and a dearth of investment in new productions, while when a series does make it to order what follows has tended to be a story of smaller budgets, smaller casts (with regulars getting downgraded to "recurring" characters), and shorter seasons with fewer episodes.* (Those 22-episode network seasons now run more like 13-18 episodes, while network tight-fistedness is translating to fewer really long runs than before, few shows making it to season eight, or even seven.)
Oriented to what this has meant for the writers and actors looking to get along, the articles have struck me as being stronger on description than explanation, not that it is too hard for anyone to understand what has been going on. Previously TV has had its booms and busts, but these have tended to be in a part of the industry, with the decline of one thing usually a function of the ascent of another thing--as when growing original production for cable took a big bite out of the networks' market. After that streaming boomed at the expense of the networks and cable together--really, really boomed in an unsustainable way (companies churning out massive amounts of stuff without regard to profitability, just attracting subscribers, because the Federal Reserve was pretty much giving money away), so that when the streaming boom collapsed (because growth had its limits, because debt piled up, because interest rates went up, because investors were switching their focus from growth to profits) there was nothing else that could really make up for it. The disruptions of the pandemic, and then the recent strikes, made for an even shakier situation--with this reinforced by the broader economic uncertainty, as those doing the math in Hollywood, like their counterparts everywhere else, worried over the movements of the interest rate, the implications of trade war, and much, much else.
Of course, one would ordinarily expect a recovery eventually. Still, there is no plausible basis for a return to the reckless spending of the boom years--as indeed we see the streaming services going for content in other ways, as by buying the rights to old TV shows in the expectation that people will learn to love reruns again (quite plausibly, to go by the evidence), and I suspect in the wake of hits like Squid Game, become more open to bringing North American audiences the kinds of foreign production once virtually barred from the American market. Certainly I see no reason to think broadcast or cable TV are going to pick up the slack, their penuriousness a significant part of this picture. (As Nellie Andreeva informs us, where a decade ago there would have been a hundred broadcast pilots shooting during the relevant season, this year there were only three, and all of them at just one network, NBC, the others not bothering.)
This is all the more the case in as, frankly, if there is no shortage of stories out there worth telling, those thinking in terms of content instead cannot possibly imagine the consumer to be very hungry for more at this point, the market overstocked by that standard (partly thanks to the boom, but also thanks to the tapping of those vast, vast reserves of older content and international content).
Moreover, it may be that even this is not the full story. Consider that critical object of contention in the aforementioned strikes of last year, the possible use of artificial intelligence to replace writers, actors and other industry workers. In considering this object of contention also consider the hype about the rate of progress in artificial intelligence, especially generative artificial intelligence, and particularly what technologies like Sora hint at its possibly permitting its users to do within a matter of months. Should this expectation be borne out even partially the industry is unlikely to ever be the same again--that Great Contraction not an exceptionally deep downturn but the end of an era and the beginning of another in which, as has happened so many times elsewhere, many an occupational category all but disappears.
Thursday, June 20, 2024
Monday, June 10, 2024
The First Five Months of 2024 and the Prospects for the Year's Box Office
Between the start of the year and the end of May the U.S. box office took in about $2.6 billion.
By contrast 2023 had taken in almost $3.4 billion by that point--or more like $3.5 billion in current prices going by the Consumer Price Index.
Similarly adjusting for current prices the box office was even further behind the 2015-2019 average--which was more like $5.8 billion.
This year the month in which the box office picks up actually saw it slow down ($200 million less in the till than in March!), widening the gap between 2024 and prior years. Indeed, with 2024 already $800 million behind 2023 just five months in the expectations that 2024 would see the box office fall by a billion dollars from its 2023 level--from $9 billion in 2023 to $8 billion in 2024--actually seem optimistic now. (Were the performance of the past five months extended through the rest of the year 2024 would finish up with about $5.8 billion--about what 2015-2019 all took in in just their first five months, if you've been paying attention.)
Of course, considering how dark things look as of early June some will point out (as if this hasn't been stressed enough already!) that this May's release slate was exceptionally weak, and that things should pick up next week with Inside Out 2, may already be picking up with the Bad Boys sequel that came out this weekend. There may be something in these expectations. But it will take quite the improvement to get from here to $8 billion, more than may be plausible given the releases the rest of the year has to offer--the more in as those throwing these estimates around still seem to be in denial about the industry's structural crisis.
When people start taking that into account we might start seeing the estimates better approximate the reality.
By contrast 2023 had taken in almost $3.4 billion by that point--or more like $3.5 billion in current prices going by the Consumer Price Index.
Similarly adjusting for current prices the box office was even further behind the 2015-2019 average--which was more like $5.8 billion.
This year the month in which the box office picks up actually saw it slow down ($200 million less in the till than in March!), widening the gap between 2024 and prior years. Indeed, with 2024 already $800 million behind 2023 just five months in the expectations that 2024 would see the box office fall by a billion dollars from its 2023 level--from $9 billion in 2023 to $8 billion in 2024--actually seem optimistic now. (Were the performance of the past five months extended through the rest of the year 2024 would finish up with about $5.8 billion--about what 2015-2019 all took in in just their first five months, if you've been paying attention.)
Of course, considering how dark things look as of early June some will point out (as if this hasn't been stressed enough already!) that this May's release slate was exceptionally weak, and that things should pick up next week with Inside Out 2, may already be picking up with the Bad Boys sequel that came out this weekend. There may be something in these expectations. But it will take quite the improvement to get from here to $8 billion, more than may be plausible given the releases the rest of the year has to offer--the more in as those throwing these estimates around still seem to be in denial about the industry's structural crisis.
When people start taking that into account we might start seeing the estimates better approximate the reality.
Gabriel Kolko, Upton Sinclair and the Immigrant Experience at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Reading Gabriel Kolko's remarkable Main Currents in Modern American History (a book sadly out of print so far as I have been able to ascertain) one of its most remarkable chapters seemed to me its discussion of the much romanticized experience of the great wave of European immigrants that came to America in the heady years of expansion between the Civil War and the slamming of the door shut on newcomers in the 1920s.
As Kolko made clear, the immigrants were in the main refugees from economic hardship, and not necessarily intent on staying--many only thinking of working, saving up some money, going back to improve their lot. Typically rural in origin, they were unprepared for industrial and urban life, whose harshest side they commonly experienced, compounding the culture shock, and the broader trauma suffered by people who had already been in a fairly difficult, even desperate, situation uprooting themselves from home, family, community, native culture to deal with another world thousands of miles away from where they were born, often all on their own or nearly so. Often disillusioned, ambivalent, divided, it was commonly the case that even if they did not succeed in amassing that bit of money and going home they found that "You can't go home again," never readjusting to their new-old lot, all as those who stayed in America never quite came to feel themselves at home in their new country either.
Just as Kolko presents a striking picture of all this as a historian, Upton Sinclair does this as a novelist in his classic The Jungle (1906)--a book noted at the time and remembered since mainly for its depiction for what it showed about the actual contents of the food Americans ate, the novel was, as anyone who bothers to actually read it will tell you, was about much, much more than that. Hailed by the great Jack London as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery," it presented by way of the experience of Lithuanian immigrant Justus Rudkus the "jungle" of American life more broadly, from the horrific working conditions in which the meatpacking the book famously depicts went on, to the criminal justice system, to the machine politics of the big cities. Ground down until the honest, optimistic laborer and family man Rudkus was at the outset of the story is reduced to a common criminal by disaster after disaster of a kind all too common, he is saved only by the hope that the society and the world he lives in can become something better.
Of course, that is exactly what has drawn the scorn of Establishment literary opinion down upon this book, and Sinclair generally--such that where the Board of the Modern Library made a place for the slight and nearly forgotten Booth Tarkington on its list of the 20th century's best novels, it pointedly did not give The Jungle or anything else by Sinclair a place there. That is to their discredit, not Sinclair's, who, had he foreseen that society, and its literary Establishment as he described it in Mammonart, would be pretty much the same at the end of the century and after, would have expected exactly that much from them. By the same token the book remains compelling not just as a reminder of what it showed about its time with such great force, but all the ways in which Sinclair's time remains our time, and what Sinclair said still all too relevant to the way we live now.
As Kolko made clear, the immigrants were in the main refugees from economic hardship, and not necessarily intent on staying--many only thinking of working, saving up some money, going back to improve their lot. Typically rural in origin, they were unprepared for industrial and urban life, whose harshest side they commonly experienced, compounding the culture shock, and the broader trauma suffered by people who had already been in a fairly difficult, even desperate, situation uprooting themselves from home, family, community, native culture to deal with another world thousands of miles away from where they were born, often all on their own or nearly so. Often disillusioned, ambivalent, divided, it was commonly the case that even if they did not succeed in amassing that bit of money and going home they found that "You can't go home again," never readjusting to their new-old lot, all as those who stayed in America never quite came to feel themselves at home in their new country either.
Just as Kolko presents a striking picture of all this as a historian, Upton Sinclair does this as a novelist in his classic The Jungle (1906)--a book noted at the time and remembered since mainly for its depiction for what it showed about the actual contents of the food Americans ate, the novel was, as anyone who bothers to actually read it will tell you, was about much, much more than that. Hailed by the great Jack London as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery," it presented by way of the experience of Lithuanian immigrant Justus Rudkus the "jungle" of American life more broadly, from the horrific working conditions in which the meatpacking the book famously depicts went on, to the criminal justice system, to the machine politics of the big cities. Ground down until the honest, optimistic laborer and family man Rudkus was at the outset of the story is reduced to a common criminal by disaster after disaster of a kind all too common, he is saved only by the hope that the society and the world he lives in can become something better.
Of course, that is exactly what has drawn the scorn of Establishment literary opinion down upon this book, and Sinclair generally--such that where the Board of the Modern Library made a place for the slight and nearly forgotten Booth Tarkington on its list of the 20th century's best novels, it pointedly did not give The Jungle or anything else by Sinclair a place there. That is to their discredit, not Sinclair's, who, had he foreseen that society, and its literary Establishment as he described it in Mammonart, would be pretty much the same at the end of the century and after, would have expected exactly that much from them. By the same token the book remains compelling not just as a reminder of what it showed about its time with such great force, but all the ways in which Sinclair's time remains our time, and what Sinclair said still all too relevant to the way we live now.
The American Dream Endures. Sort of.
Louis Hartz, like Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, was one of the mid-century historians who played so large a part in forming that view of America's past that so informed the centrist's consensus-oriented vision of America's social structure and political culture. Significant in this was its muddled attitude toward class, which reflected and reinforced a particular conception of economic individualism, what has been called "the American Dream."
Of course, this Dream has not been viewed uncritically, even by those historians, with Carol Nackenoff, seeing room to speak of Hartz's characterization of America's "atomistic individualism, wedded to Horatio Alger" as a matter of the Federalist-Whig conservatives of the day "selling" America's small farmers and working class "a bill of goods" in false visions of "equality of opportunity" as they won an extremely unequal race, which subsequently became an "ideological straitjacket."
Over the years many have challenged that vision again and again. Indeed, looking back at the early twentieth century, before postmodernism utterly buried the inclination to deal with social reality underneath a great mass of epistemological nihilism, self-satisfied irony, idiot self-absorption and other such dross, one may say that challenge to the American Dream was actually the great theme of American literature. Thus may it be said to have gone with Mark Twain's portions of The Gilded Age.* Thus did it go with such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, the works of Jack London, among others.**
By and large these works have been marginalized. Respectable critical opinion prefers to hail the "road story" and "Go West, young man" stuff of Huckleberry Finn as "the Great American Novel," rather than the novel that actually gave the era its name (!). They remember Jack London as a writer of stories about animals, not people, his works about the latter rather less likely to be acknowledged than, say, The Call of the Wild. So far as those critics are concerned, Theodore Dreiser, as David Walsh put it, is "in the doghouse." And even when the books get attention, the relevant parts of them are ignored--Fitzgerald remembered for style rather than substance, the more easily given the obliqueness of his prose in Gatsby's tale (as against what he presents in This Side of Paradise).
Far from being aloof from them, the politics of literature reflect the politics of society at large, the early nineteenth century conservatism enduring as the conventional wisdom of American life into the early twenty-first century, to the dismay of the left, and the satisfaction of the right, though that satisfaction can seem more qualified these days. Estimates of the extent to which the left's ideas may be finding a new popularity differ immensely--but a Red Scare-ish alarm is definitely there, all as, whether or not they are consciously political, a great many of the young show plenty of evidences of disbelieving in the old premises and seeking other ways to live.
* The portions of The Gilded Age about the Hawkins family, and Beriah Sellers--the really satirical (and actually interesting) parts of the book—are generally attributed to Twain, rather than his cowriter Charles Dudley Warner.
** One can also count under this heading such figures as Upton Sinclair, who depicts a very different experience in The Jungle; or Nathaniel West in his reimagining of Voltaire's Candide in Depression-era America; or what becomes of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath; or Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman.
Of course, this Dream has not been viewed uncritically, even by those historians, with Carol Nackenoff, seeing room to speak of Hartz's characterization of America's "atomistic individualism, wedded to Horatio Alger" as a matter of the Federalist-Whig conservatives of the day "selling" America's small farmers and working class "a bill of goods" in false visions of "equality of opportunity" as they won an extremely unequal race, which subsequently became an "ideological straitjacket."
Over the years many have challenged that vision again and again. Indeed, looking back at the early twentieth century, before postmodernism utterly buried the inclination to deal with social reality underneath a great mass of epistemological nihilism, self-satisfied irony, idiot self-absorption and other such dross, one may say that challenge to the American Dream was actually the great theme of American literature. Thus may it be said to have gone with Mark Twain's portions of The Gilded Age.* Thus did it go with such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, the works of Jack London, among others.**
By and large these works have been marginalized. Respectable critical opinion prefers to hail the "road story" and "Go West, young man" stuff of Huckleberry Finn as "the Great American Novel," rather than the novel that actually gave the era its name (!). They remember Jack London as a writer of stories about animals, not people, his works about the latter rather less likely to be acknowledged than, say, The Call of the Wild. So far as those critics are concerned, Theodore Dreiser, as David Walsh put it, is "in the doghouse." And even when the books get attention, the relevant parts of them are ignored--Fitzgerald remembered for style rather than substance, the more easily given the obliqueness of his prose in Gatsby's tale (as against what he presents in This Side of Paradise).
* The portions of The Gilded Age about the Hawkins family, and Beriah Sellers--the really satirical (and actually interesting) parts of the book—are generally attributed to Twain, rather than his cowriter Charles Dudley Warner.
** One can also count under this heading such figures as Upton Sinclair, who depicts a very different experience in The Jungle; or Nathaniel West in his reimagining of Voltaire's Candide in Depression-era America; or what becomes of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath; or Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman.
Remembering Six Days, Seven Nights
Looking back it can seem that Six Days, Seven Nights was very much a movie of the 1990s.
After all, it was a romantic comedy in a period when the form was doing well. When, in fact, at least one big romantic comedy was an expected part of the summer movie release slate.
When Ivan Reitman was still directing big comedies.
When Harrison Ford played off of an Indiana Jones image that was still a fairly fresh, fond, memory for many--certainly in comparison with what it was in 2023.
When Anne Heche was still being cast as a lead in major movies.
When the cast of Friends were still landing major film roles in those days when it looked as if they just might graduate from TV star to film star (Matt LeBlanc, in fact, making his bid for action hero stardom just a couple of months earlier in Lost in Space, another thoroughly '90s film).
Alas, if the film was very much of its time it was no great hit at that time, not quite living up to either the critical or the commercial expectations held for it, and I will not try to persuade you that it is some criminally underrated gem. Still, it has its good points--like appealing visuals, and a few memorable lines.
Of the latter one that has stuck in my memory was spoken when after Ford's plane crashed in a storm, stranding his and Heche's characters on a Pacific island, and Heche asked why he couldn't just fix the plane and get them back home again. After all, isn't he one of those "guy guys?" she asked. Who can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and . . . build you a shopping mall." Can't he do that?
No, he says, he can't do that--but he can do this, he tells her, sticks a finger in the corner of his mouth and snaps it to make a popping noise.
It was, for a Hollywood film, a rare (and amusing) acknowledgment of the idiotically exaggerated notions people have of others' competence. It is an important plot point that after happening on a lucky break Ford's character is handy enough to (with a little help from Anne's) get the plane in the air again--but no, no one can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and build a shopping mall," even as films and TV shows and stories written by and for the stupid ceaselessly make us think they can, partly out of the groveling elite worship to which the arts (and artists) have depressingly always tended, partly because of the ceaseless exhortations to and promulgation of fantasies of self-sufficient ultra-individualism summed up in the name "Robinson Crusoe," partly because of wildly outdated notions about how things get made and great things happen in the world--the last, of course, absolutely unhelped by that divide between the "two cultures" that so many would like to pretend does not exist.
After all, it was a romantic comedy in a period when the form was doing well. When, in fact, at least one big romantic comedy was an expected part of the summer movie release slate.
When Ivan Reitman was still directing big comedies.
When Harrison Ford played off of an Indiana Jones image that was still a fairly fresh, fond, memory for many--certainly in comparison with what it was in 2023.
When Anne Heche was still being cast as a lead in major movies.
When the cast of Friends were still landing major film roles in those days when it looked as if they just might graduate from TV star to film star (Matt LeBlanc, in fact, making his bid for action hero stardom just a couple of months earlier in Lost in Space, another thoroughly '90s film).
Alas, if the film was very much of its time it was no great hit at that time, not quite living up to either the critical or the commercial expectations held for it, and I will not try to persuade you that it is some criminally underrated gem. Still, it has its good points--like appealing visuals, and a few memorable lines.
Of the latter one that has stuck in my memory was spoken when after Ford's plane crashed in a storm, stranding his and Heche's characters on a Pacific island, and Heche asked why he couldn't just fix the plane and get them back home again. After all, isn't he one of those "guy guys?" she asked. Who can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and . . . build you a shopping mall." Can't he do that?
No, he says, he can't do that--but he can do this, he tells her, sticks a finger in the corner of his mouth and snaps it to make a popping noise.
It was, for a Hollywood film, a rare (and amusing) acknowledgment of the idiotically exaggerated notions people have of others' competence. It is an important plot point that after happening on a lucky break Ford's character is handy enough to (with a little help from Anne's) get the plane in the air again--but no, no one can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and build a shopping mall," even as films and TV shows and stories written by and for the stupid ceaselessly make us think they can, partly out of the groveling elite worship to which the arts (and artists) have depressingly always tended, partly because of the ceaseless exhortations to and promulgation of fantasies of self-sufficient ultra-individualism summed up in the name "Robinson Crusoe," partly because of wildly outdated notions about how things get made and great things happen in the world--the last, of course, absolutely unhelped by that divide between the "two cultures" that so many would like to pretend does not exist.
Remembering Half Moon Street--and David Rothkopf's Superclass
The 1986 film Half Moon Street was a commercial and critical flop when it came out, and seems to have been pretty well forgotten since, never being "rediscovered," acquiring a cult following, or enjoying renewed attention on any other basis. And I know of no reason why it should be otherwise. Still, I can say that a particular bit of dinner-party dialogue in the film did get my attention and has stayed with me since. Specifically a character named Hugo Van Arkady (so IMDB informs me) remarked that the actual population of the world, which had then been approaching five billion, was actually just five thousand. As his dining companions wondered at his reasoning he filled in the picture by giving the "real" populations of different countries. Billion-person China had only two people in it, Britain forty-five, Germany sixty.
Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?
Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.
Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.
Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.
Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?
Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.
Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.
Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.
Of "Conspicuous Callousness"
So far as I can tell "conspicuous callousness" is not a usage--but it should be.
Of course, that claim raises the question--just what do I mean by "conspicuous callousness?"
Let us take it one word at a time.
The term "conspicuous" is an adjective indicating that something stands out so as to draw attention, with its use in the term "conspicuous consumption" telling. Such consumption--like someone's driving a flashy sports car when a much cheaper, lower-maintenance car would be a far more practical way of getting around--is typically on some level intended to draw such notice.
"Callousness" denotes, in the words of Oxford Languages, "insensitive or cruel disregard."
Conspicuous callousness is a display of callousness in a conspicuous, meant-to-be seen way.
Consider, for example, a person who sees a homeless person holding out a cup for spare change--and, even though they have change with which they can well afford to part, pretends not to see them. One may say that they are behaving callously. But in pretending they do not see the homeless person are attempting to not make their callousness evident.
By contrast, someone who yells at the homeless person "Get a job!" is manifesting their callousness in a way calling attention to it. This is all the more in as there is no practical advantage in their doing so (just as there is none in that flashy sports car), only whatever psychological satisfaction they get from being seen inflicting verbal abuse on someone vulnerable to it, by the victim and perhaps others.
Given that satisfaction's being the motive it seems to warrant a word. At the very least in acting this way the person displaying this callousness revels in a sense of their power in relation to that other person. Conspicuous callousness says "I don't have to care what you think, because you simply cannot do anything to me," such that they can rub in the other person's face a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and respect for them--and are doing it simply because they can.
Conspicuous callousness is, of course, vile--and ever-present. Indeed, the Internet is awash in it--so much so that it can seem mainly a vehicle for expressing that one exceedingly mean sentiment, the web access-enjoying scum of the Earth using that access to scream their callousness at the heart of the world. And we are all the worse off for it.
Of course, that claim raises the question--just what do I mean by "conspicuous callousness?"
Let us take it one word at a time.
The term "conspicuous" is an adjective indicating that something stands out so as to draw attention, with its use in the term "conspicuous consumption" telling. Such consumption--like someone's driving a flashy sports car when a much cheaper, lower-maintenance car would be a far more practical way of getting around--is typically on some level intended to draw such notice.
"Callousness" denotes, in the words of Oxford Languages, "insensitive or cruel disregard."
Conspicuous callousness is a display of callousness in a conspicuous, meant-to-be seen way.
Consider, for example, a person who sees a homeless person holding out a cup for spare change--and, even though they have change with which they can well afford to part, pretends not to see them. One may say that they are behaving callously. But in pretending they do not see the homeless person are attempting to not make their callousness evident.
By contrast, someone who yells at the homeless person "Get a job!" is manifesting their callousness in a way calling attention to it. This is all the more in as there is no practical advantage in their doing so (just as there is none in that flashy sports car), only whatever psychological satisfaction they get from being seen inflicting verbal abuse on someone vulnerable to it, by the victim and perhaps others.
Given that satisfaction's being the motive it seems to warrant a word. At the very least in acting this way the person displaying this callousness revels in a sense of their power in relation to that other person. Conspicuous callousness says "I don't have to care what you think, because you simply cannot do anything to me," such that they can rub in the other person's face a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and respect for them--and are doing it simply because they can.
Conspicuous callousness is, of course, vile--and ever-present. Indeed, the Internet is awash in it--so much so that it can seem mainly a vehicle for expressing that one exceedingly mean sentiment, the web access-enjoying scum of the Earth using that access to scream their callousness at the heart of the world. And we are all the worse off for it.
Of the Public Faux Pas
Even the most intelligent, educated and articulate will misspeak sometimes. If they are speaking constantly they will do so that much more often--and if their words are accorded continual publicity they will publicly embarrass themselves again and again (the more in as so many out there will simply have it in for such a figure, and so put the worst possible spin on anything they say or do).
Most of those in public life cannot be described as among "the most intelligent, educated and articulate." Most of them can be described as the extreme opposite. And they especially make sure that their every utterance is highly public--because, on top of their aforementioned failings, the demands of publicity seem to them to require it; because privilege and power and acclaim bring the idiot out in people; because show business, whether the real kind or the kind for "ugly people", is a horrifying hellscape of unhinged narcissists.
I am sure someone warned them at some point. But because of all of the above the warning simply did not matter, helping produce the cultural cesspool we inhabit today.
Most of those in public life cannot be described as among "the most intelligent, educated and articulate." Most of them can be described as the extreme opposite. And they especially make sure that their every utterance is highly public--because, on top of their aforementioned failings, the demands of publicity seem to them to require it; because privilege and power and acclaim bring the idiot out in people; because show business, whether the real kind or the kind for "ugly people", is a horrifying hellscape of unhinged narcissists.
I am sure someone warned them at some point. But because of all of the above the warning simply did not matter, helping produce the cultural cesspool we inhabit today.
What Would Brecht's Worker Who Reads Make of the Received History of Science and Invention?
In Bertolt Brecht's famous poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" his worker wondered at what he read of the "great men" of the past and the way in which they seemed to be singlehandedly credited with enormous feats of military conquest and monumental construction. (Reading about Thebes of the seven gates, he wondered, "Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock" out of which it was built by themselves?) Suspecting others were involved he wondered at the completeness of their absence from the record, the way the most elementary things about them were simply unmentioned (like where the masons who actually built the Great Wall of China went after the job was done).
Of course, we all know that, however much elites are addicted to the theory that everything supposedly great and grand is due to the Great Men and these only--the Atlas who might one day decide to teach their ungrateful inferiors a lesson and shrug--the idea of the kings hauling up the lumps of rock themselves is of course an absurdity, that the feats the Worker reads of are the accomplishments of tens and hundreds of thousands, drawing on the resources of whole countries.
One might say something of the kind if one looks away from conquest and building to science and invention. The conventional thinking about such matters is, of course, exceedingly individualistic--but as a more nuanced view of the matter shows, as with Robert Merton's examination of the sociology of science, the reality is more complex. The scientific endeavor is cumulative, building on what came before, and cooperative, as even the scientist or inventor in their own lab is apt to have their helpers, enough of them to make one wonder just who contributed what, exactly. People can and do make individual contributions, of course, some minute, some not, but scientific and technological revolutions are far from being wholly attributable to single individual "geniuses" (even before one gets to the very hard detective work of actually apportioning credit).
A culture given over to an individualistic elitism, of course, tends to downplay this--but in the end it really is the case that much of the discussion of the history of science has traditionally been no less absurd in its explanations than a historian making it seem as if Caesar conquered Gaul without even having a cook with him.
Of course, we all know that, however much elites are addicted to the theory that everything supposedly great and grand is due to the Great Men and these only--the Atlas who might one day decide to teach their ungrateful inferiors a lesson and shrug--the idea of the kings hauling up the lumps of rock themselves is of course an absurdity, that the feats the Worker reads of are the accomplishments of tens and hundreds of thousands, drawing on the resources of whole countries.
One might say something of the kind if one looks away from conquest and building to science and invention. The conventional thinking about such matters is, of course, exceedingly individualistic--but as a more nuanced view of the matter shows, as with Robert Merton's examination of the sociology of science, the reality is more complex. The scientific endeavor is cumulative, building on what came before, and cooperative, as even the scientist or inventor in their own lab is apt to have their helpers, enough of them to make one wonder just who contributed what, exactly. People can and do make individual contributions, of course, some minute, some not, but scientific and technological revolutions are far from being wholly attributable to single individual "geniuses" (even before one gets to the very hard detective work of actually apportioning credit).
A culture given over to an individualistic elitism, of course, tends to downplay this--but in the end it really is the case that much of the discussion of the history of science has traditionally been no less absurd in its explanations than a historian making it seem as if Caesar conquered Gaul without even having a cook with him.
Friday, June 7, 2024
The May 2024 North American Box Office
We all expected the box office during May to be lackluster--but I think it worth considering just how very, very badly it went for Hollywood.
Simply put, ticket sales during that month came to $550 million. Far from being, as usual, the month in which a sluggish box office really took off this was actually over a quarter down from the March box office this year (when Dune, along with Ghostbusters and Godzilla, helped sell $750 million worth of tickets).
In real, inflation-adjusted terms the May 2024 box office was about a third (31 percent) down from the disappointing box office we had in May as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened below expectations, and Fast and Furious 10 and the live-action version of The Little Mermaid both underperformed.
With the comparison with the May 2023 box office so poor it is predictable that it, again, represents a really great drop from the 2015-2019 average--of 57 percent. That is to say that in May the box office, after inflation, took in only two-fifths as much as it did in those pre-pandemic years (when, in April 2024 prices, $1.27 billion was the average).
Even by the standard of the past year as a whole, and of 2024 thus far (the first four months of which were down just 21 percent from the same period in the prior year), this is bad.
In fairness, one can point out that this May suffered from an unusually weak release slate --that a lot of big movies were indeed bumped to later dates, and that business should pick up as soon as next week with Inside Out 2, etc.. Still, a month with Planet of the Apes and Mad Max would ordinarily have been expected to do better than this, while The Fall Guy's being shifted to the first weekend of the month made no sense in the absence of some expectation of the movie benefiting from it, and that indeed their failure had much to do with this weakness. (Certainly The Fall Guy and Mad Max performed below the not-very-high expectations set for them, while Planet of the Apes did only a little better than the low expectations box office-watchers had for it, as, a near-month into release, it crawls toward the $150 million mark it will not surpass by very much to be a low point for the new iteration of the franchise.)
No, there is no good news here--and those hoping for even the limited turnaround that is the best anyone can reasonably hope for in the circumstances is well-advised to look ahead rather than backward.
Simply put, ticket sales during that month came to $550 million. Far from being, as usual, the month in which a sluggish box office really took off this was actually over a quarter down from the March box office this year (when Dune, along with Ghostbusters and Godzilla, helped sell $750 million worth of tickets).
In real, inflation-adjusted terms the May 2024 box office was about a third (31 percent) down from the disappointing box office we had in May as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened below expectations, and Fast and Furious 10 and the live-action version of The Little Mermaid both underperformed.
With the comparison with the May 2023 box office so poor it is predictable that it, again, represents a really great drop from the 2015-2019 average--of 57 percent. That is to say that in May the box office, after inflation, took in only two-fifths as much as it did in those pre-pandemic years (when, in April 2024 prices, $1.27 billion was the average).
Even by the standard of the past year as a whole, and of 2024 thus far (the first four months of which were down just 21 percent from the same period in the prior year), this is bad.
In fairness, one can point out that this May suffered from an unusually weak release slate --that a lot of big movies were indeed bumped to later dates, and that business should pick up as soon as next week with Inside Out 2, etc.. Still, a month with Planet of the Apes and Mad Max would ordinarily have been expected to do better than this, while The Fall Guy's being shifted to the first weekend of the month made no sense in the absence of some expectation of the movie benefiting from it, and that indeed their failure had much to do with this weakness. (Certainly The Fall Guy and Mad Max performed below the not-very-high expectations set for them, while Planet of the Apes did only a little better than the low expectations box office-watchers had for it, as, a near-month into release, it crawls toward the $150 million mark it will not surpass by very much to be a low point for the new iteration of the franchise.)
No, there is no good news here--and those hoping for even the limited turnaround that is the best anyone can reasonably hope for in the circumstances is well-advised to look ahead rather than backward.
People Are Still Talking About That Stupid Slap (Some Thoughts About the Prospects of Bad Boys 4)
Remember when the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air slapped Cheap Pete?
Very likely you do, to go by how everyone discussing the box office prospects of Bad Boys 4 (out this weekend!) keeps bringing it up as a possible factor in the film's performance.
I suspect this is less because the incident is likely to make much difference to the film's actual box office prospects than because it still amuses them that Smith slapped Rock, and still amuses them to talk about it. Indeed, this is so much the case that if "the slap" has any effect at all, rather than putting people off of Smith and his movie, it would probably help the box office, especially given reports that the movie will play off of the incident in some way.
Indeed, a far bigger danger to the movie's performance than any ill feeling toward Will Smith's display of an idiocy too often overlooked in the past is what the courtiers of the film industry are not talking about--namely the pandemic's exacerbation of the long decline of filmgoing in North America and elsewhere, and what is connected with it, the declining salability of tired action-adventure franchises like the now three decade-old Bad Boys "saga." But there is a reason for that--entertainment journalists preferring to continue adhering to the narrative that the lousy grosses we have seen from 2023 on a matter of particular cinematic and franchise failures (the troubles of Marvel, resolvable with "better writers" and more "supervision" of directors), or particular bumps in the road for the business (the Hollywood strikes of 2023), rather than a matter of structural changes in the business with which people of the caliber of the executives running the studios are profoundly unequipped to cope, no matter how much their courtiers assure them they are all the "smartest guy in the room."
Very likely you do, to go by how everyone discussing the box office prospects of Bad Boys 4 (out this weekend!) keeps bringing it up as a possible factor in the film's performance.
I suspect this is less because the incident is likely to make much difference to the film's actual box office prospects than because it still amuses them that Smith slapped Rock, and still amuses them to talk about it. Indeed, this is so much the case that if "the slap" has any effect at all, rather than putting people off of Smith and his movie, it would probably help the box office, especially given reports that the movie will play off of the incident in some way.
Indeed, a far bigger danger to the movie's performance than any ill feeling toward Will Smith's display of an idiocy too often overlooked in the past is what the courtiers of the film industry are not talking about--namely the pandemic's exacerbation of the long decline of filmgoing in North America and elsewhere, and what is connected with it, the declining salability of tired action-adventure franchises like the now three decade-old Bad Boys "saga." But there is a reason for that--entertainment journalists preferring to continue adhering to the narrative that the lousy grosses we have seen from 2023 on a matter of particular cinematic and franchise failures (the troubles of Marvel, resolvable with "better writers" and more "supervision" of directors), or particular bumps in the road for the business (the Hollywood strikes of 2023), rather than a matter of structural changes in the business with which people of the caliber of the executives running the studios are profoundly unequipped to cope, no matter how much their courtiers assure them they are all the "smartest guy in the room."
"Show Business for Ugly People": A Few Thoughts on the Foolishness
It is these days something of a cliché that politics is "show business for ugly people."
Clichés do not always have much to do with the truth--but this one most certainly does, and indeed, giving it some consideration can lead to other insights, not least into contemporary journalism and its colossal failings.
One of those failings is the disproportion between the attentiveness to the stupid maneuverings and idle speculations that are politics, as against the attention accorded the ends of politics that are policy--recently given fresh empirical confirmation by a notable study in the Columbia Journalism Review.
This has long seemed to me to reflect various aspects of journalism. There is, for example, the tendency to think of the reporter as going after a "story," and writing it up as a "story" for the reader--with politics much easier to turn into a "story" than policy, the former being centered on "people," "characters," whereas the latter is often technical, in a way taxing the understanding of anyone too lazy to do their homework. And certainly centrist prejudice exacerbates all this, with its greater interest in the political process than in the real world and the solution of problems in it, and the elitism that has it revering professional politicians while despising the intelligence of a public to which it thinks explaining policy not worth the trouble anyway, even if they did not think it a thing best left to "the experts" (at least, so long as the experts remain on the right side of the powerful before whom centrists bow and scrape).
However, it may be that there is something of this too--that even if as "show business for ugly people" the doings of Washington are inferior to the glamour of "real" show business (one reflection of which is how Washington types never miss a chance to go Hollywood in the most ludicrous ways, while folks from Beverly Hills get drawn to Washington--then get drawn back to the movies), it still has just enough glitter to make the weak-minded sorts who tend to become journalists at this level go ga-ga over it. Unsurprisingly a very large part of the time what is written about D.C. is no more serious-minded than what is written about Hollywood.
Clichés do not always have much to do with the truth--but this one most certainly does, and indeed, giving it some consideration can lead to other insights, not least into contemporary journalism and its colossal failings.
One of those failings is the disproportion between the attentiveness to the stupid maneuverings and idle speculations that are politics, as against the attention accorded the ends of politics that are policy--recently given fresh empirical confirmation by a notable study in the Columbia Journalism Review.
This has long seemed to me to reflect various aspects of journalism. There is, for example, the tendency to think of the reporter as going after a "story," and writing it up as a "story" for the reader--with politics much easier to turn into a "story" than policy, the former being centered on "people," "characters," whereas the latter is often technical, in a way taxing the understanding of anyone too lazy to do their homework. And certainly centrist prejudice exacerbates all this, with its greater interest in the political process than in the real world and the solution of problems in it, and the elitism that has it revering professional politicians while despising the intelligence of a public to which it thinks explaining policy not worth the trouble anyway, even if they did not think it a thing best left to "the experts" (at least, so long as the experts remain on the right side of the powerful before whom centrists bow and scrape).
However, it may be that there is something of this too--that even if as "show business for ugly people" the doings of Washington are inferior to the glamour of "real" show business (one reflection of which is how Washington types never miss a chance to go Hollywood in the most ludicrous ways, while folks from Beverly Hills get drawn to Washington--then get drawn back to the movies), it still has just enough glitter to make the weak-minded sorts who tend to become journalists at this level go ga-ga over it. Unsurprisingly a very large part of the time what is written about D.C. is no more serious-minded than what is written about Hollywood.
Friday, May 31, 2024
What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Snow's "New International Economic Order"
Considering this it is, of course, significant that the West was in competition with the Soviet bloc--which Snow argued could, if the West refused to help, perform the task of facilitating that industrialization of the developing world by itself (transferring the required knowledge, etc.), to the West's great disadvantage. He then suggested that, for the benefit of all concerned, it would be best if what seemed to him the inevitable effort were a joint one.
Of course, looking back we know that no such effort ever occurred, that indeed outside of an important but still limited portion of East Asia the developing nations remain developing nations more than a half century on, with the gap between "First" World and "Third" grown bigger in many ways. Important to this would seem the fact that Snow overestimated the Soviet Union as a competitor--in line with the way it had been catching up the West in the 1950s, thinking that it was well on the way to success. Instead the Soviet Union was, a little while after that, showing evidences of slipping behind itself--and a long way from the kind of superabundance of techno-industrial strength that would have permitted it to be so open-handed with the developing world. Moreover, even if the Soviet Union had proven as dynamic as Snow thought, and thus brought to bear on the West more pressure to extend such aid to the poorer nations simply to keep itself from being cut out economically and politically, the 1970s, when there really were strong demands from developing nations for a "New International Economic Order," saw the West react very differently. Faced with the Group of Seventy-Seven one saw the emergence of the Group of Seven, and the neoliberal counter-offensive against such visions. Indeed, what really defined relations between the more and less developed nations were the interest rate spike of the "Volcker shock," the Third World debt crisis, the Washington Consensus that, even before the Soviet Union's economic failings left it less and less able to help itself, let alone anyone else, in the ways Snow anticipated, and relegated the '60s and '70s-era visions of a different economic order to the footnotes of history. The result is that his essay appears in this respect a relic not just of Cold War fears, but of the more rationalistic hopes of the mid-twentieth century over which the "zealots of pessimism" had not yet won out .
What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Why Did the Split Happen in the First Place?
However, lately I find myself looking more and more to what Snow did not treat quite so well, like why the divide exists, a question that seems the greater when one considers just how much traffic there once was between science and letters in the past. As Ian Watt explains, the modern novel actually emerged as a quasi-scientific literary form, premised as it was on the objective existence of a physical world knowable through the coordinated use of observation and reason. In the years that followed the great French novelists of the nineteenth century quite consciously drew inspiration from science and scientists--like Balzac, and, acclaiming Balzac the first to have walked that path, the "experimental novelist" Emile Zola, whose naturalism not only made him an immortal of literature, but may be credited with inspiring almost all of the really great American writers of his day, like Frank Norris, and Jack London, and Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, as in England H.G. Wells rose to the rank of literary giant precisely because of his own scientific inclinations and commitments.*
As one may remember from looking at such turns in the past (as in the early nineteenth century, when a triumphant conservatism sought to excise the ghosts of Enlightenment, liberalism, revolution with Counter-Enlightenment, throne and altar, reaction), the supposed menace of Reason was met with weapons of Un-Reason and Anti-Reason. The result was that in the view of those who held power rational thinking had to be abided in the laboratory or the shop floor, but nowhere else, and absolutely not in social life, and the pictures literature paints about it. Indeed, thinking of how Snow presents the literature of "1914-1930" as dominated by Modernist reactionaries, and how this cuts out figures like the then-still very important Wells, I find myself thinking of how the Modernist and postmodernist turn, the way in which literature, led by critics given over body and soul to the Counter-Enlightenment, spoke of reason, progress and humanity only with a sneer, the literary record of the past was revised. Thus did a Balzac or a Zola became a good deal less fashionable, as American letters, certainly, marginalized a Norris or London or Sinclair or Dreiser, and, dispensing with Wells the
* Balzac was inspired by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, Zola by, besides Balzac, Claude Bernard among others.
What Ever Happened to Sinclair Lewis?
It strikes me that Lingeman is entirely correct about Schorer's literary ideas and his application of them. It also strikes me, as it does not strike Lingeman, that in this as in many other ways we never really moved past that time--the damage to reputations like that of Lewis enduring, with the same going for the damage done to our ideas about art. Back in the early twentieth century figures like H.G. Wells or Upton Sinclair criticized the received ideas about the valuation of artistic work, not least the "great lies" that form comes ahead of content, and "politics" has no place in art. In their counter-attack against all that Schorer and company upheld the lies, so that they stand virtually unchallenged in our time, to our cost.
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