On the Latest Crisis of the French Fifth Republic

Last year, amid the protests against French President Emmanuel Macron's constitutionally dubious abuse of his emergency powers to force through a raising of the retirement age, the French magazine Marianne published a long interview with Emmanuel Todd, which I discussed at some length. As always, Todd had much to say of interest about the matter, displaying a good deal of insight into the character of neoliberalism (especially as it looks from the demographic angle), and the politics it had produced.

However, Todd struck me as less impressive in his discussion of what to do about the issue, calling as he did for an alliance between Marine Le Pen's far right National Rally (RN) and Jean-Luc Melenchon's center-left Unsubmissive France (Nupes) to save French democracy from Macron's dictatorial conduct. As I wrote at the time, "Being somewhere between 'faint' and 'facade' the two parties' supposed common opposition to neoliberalism is . . . no foundation for overcoming their perhaps irreconcilable differences," all as, far from their seeking to change the system in the manner Todd prescribed—pushing for the alteration of the voting system from the current "winner-take-all" version to proportional representation,

representation is the last thing that Le Pen and the RN want, precisely because of how, in 2002 and more significantly in 2017 and 2022, the lack of such representation lifted this party with a mere 15 percent of the seats in the National Assembly to that second round of voting in the presidential election—where in 2022 it got over 40 percent of the vote. Putting it bluntly, the RN's best hope for winning in 2027 may be that disgust with Macron, and the blocking of any alternatives to Macron but themselves, push them over the top and put Le Pen in the Élysée Palace.

Continuing I wrote,

Indeed, in making his call Todd can seem to be calling on Le Pen and the RN to link hands with their center-left rivals to help save France from . . . Le Pen and the RN.

As I had expected there was no such alliance, as, in the resulting circumstances, the electoral position of the RN has waxed, as seen in its advances in the recent European election.

The surprising bit is that Macron responded to the results of the European election by dissolving France's National Assembly (the lower, directly elected, house of its parliament), calling for a new election whose first round will be on June 30. Those insistent on seeing reason in Macron's conduct hold that this is a bold gamble intended to force a showdown with the far right that Macron hopes to win--but this course seems at least equally likely to stick Macron with a far-right-dominated National Assembly, and Prime Minister, via an RN enjoying a much larger share of the seats, in combination with smaller parties of the right and even parties of the center-right (Eric Ciotti, leader of the Gaullist LR, in a display of how in France as elsewhere the center has been moving rightward, calling for alliance with the National Rally).

I had taken it for granted that Macron's conduct would continue to provide opportunity for the far right to advance--but I had never imagined that he would give them so much opportunity so soon. But then again Macron is hardly the only head of a West European government calling for an election at a time profoundly inopportune for his party in conditions all too likely to see the far right make historic advances at his party's expense, in what seems a sign of the chaotic times.

Just How Big Will Deadpool & Wolverine Open?

Until just a couple of days ago I had no expectation of writing about Deadpool & Wolverine until after Boxoffice Pro came out with its projection later this month.

However the entertainment press has been buzzing with tracking-based anticipations of a $200-$239 million domestic opening for the film, and it seems worthwhile to say something of that.

Extrapolating from this using a 2.5 multiplier (reasonable for massively front-loaded blockbusters) one gets a North American gross in the $500-$600 million range. Assuming the film does relatively as well overseas as the first two Deadpool films did, one gets from this a global gross in the $1.1-$1.4 billion range. Should the film have the kind of international response some of the X-Men films enjoyed (Wolverine's inclusion is a big part of the interest, after all), one could see a doubling of the North American gross internationally, and a commensurately higher take.*

By pre-pandemic standards this would have been spectacular. By today's standards the figures are mind-boggling. (Even a month and a half ago I was still having a hard time picturing much more than $700 million for this one.) Even given how the media is these days setting the bar for commercial success very low it will have good grounds to make a fuss if Deadpool & Wolverine hit, let alone vault over, the billion-dollar mark--though it will not necessarily do so in an intelligent way. (Remember how the courtiers of the industry were insisting that Top Gun 2 "brought back" the star-driven film?) Especially coming on top of the success of Inside Out 2 (over which they are predictably crowing already) they will rush to tell us that not only is Hollywood back, but so is the precise kind of movie it has come to specialize in making, and which it badly wants to go on making, while also telling us that Disney, as the studio most committed to such films for a long time, is also back after its disastrous 2023, and what had up to the time of this writing been a mostly disastrous 2024.

Still, it takes more than two hits, however big, to rescue an industry, or even a studio. (Paramount had a box office-crushing success with Top Gun 2. Where is it now?) And so we will just have to wait and see how the rest of the year goes before daring to say too much about that.

* The R-rated Logan, notably, made 64 percent of its money outside North America. Other X-Men films making a comparable proportion of their money internationally include The Wolverine (68 percent), X-Men: Days of Future Past (69 percent) and X-Men: Apocalypse (71 percent). In fairness the numbers were boosted by relatively modest domestic earnings that made the international earnings the more impressive-looking, and in the cases of the latter two films, and Logan, $100 million+ grosses in China, which will not be factors with Deadpool 3 as discussed here.

On Inside Out 2's Surprisingly Strong Opening

Just in case you think it unreasonable to consider Inside Out 2's domestic opening to $62 million on Friday and "surprisingly strong" as I put it in this post's title, remember: in past weeks Boxoffice Pro's estimate of that weekend's likely range had fallen to the $70-$100 million range--at the low end, less than half of what the movie ended up making in its first three days.

That said, there is the matter not just of how the movie did in relation to the prediction and how the movie ended up doing it is worth noting how well the film did in relation to the first Inside Out. The 2015 original opened to a respectable $90 million--which even after adjustment for inflation comes to not much more than $120 million in today's terms. The result is that this is a sequel that outdid an original by a significant margin, and a performance that, while not record-crushing (check out what we used to take for granted), would have been very, very respectable indeed even by pre-pandemic standards, never mind the standard of 2023-2024.

Of course, Inside Out 2's stronger opening is suggestive of the kind of more front-loaded gross to which sequels tend--the movie making so much up front making it unlikely that it will quadruple its first three day take over its longer domestic run the way the first film did. Still, even with a mere 2.5 multiplier of the kind common for front-loaded blockbusters the movie will end up with a North American gross in the $350-$400 million range. Should the film do only as well overseas relative to that it would end up with a global gross in the $850 million to $1 billion range. And it is not entirely out of the question that it will do better. (If my projection was probably more restrained than others I have seen, the $1.1 billion that was the absolute upper end I discussed does not seem so unlikely now, or for that matter, even the absolute upper end of what it could eventually take in, with, for what it is worth, Deadline reporting that "this sequel is being projected by rival distribution bosses to easily exceed half billion" domestically "in the end.")

The result is that the movie seems very likely to end up on Deadline's list of the Most Valuable Blockbusters of this year come next spring--all as those inclined to think so will tell us that not only is Pixar "back" (indeed, the New York Times is already doing that) but so is Disney, and the big-budget brand franchise film, especially should Deadpool & Wolverine (the prospects of which are exploding right now in another hot story) live up to its incredible commercial buzz. Of course, whether this is really the case, or whether it is merely a matter of Hollywood's courtiers telling those who run the business what they want to hear, is something to be determined not by the performance of one or two movies, but by how the bigger slate of films does over the coming months. Should Moana 2, and the prequel to The Lion King rack up similar success then there might be grounds to think it is the late '10s all over again at that studio--all as it will take a lot more than that to create a broader image of recovery for Hollywood as a whole, with this ultimately a matter of how much moviegoers in North America and elsewhere as a whole actually spend at the box office between now and December 31.

Hollywood's Great Contraction, and the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.