Today one would have to be very old to remember a time when Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry for which the term "Silicon Valley" is often used as a shorthand did not receive a share of the attention of the news media and popular culture far out of proportion to its actual share in economic life, as measured by the capitalization and revenues and profits of its major firms, the number of people who work in it, the place of its products in daily life, or anything else.
Those who attend to the image may also note that depiction of Silicon Valley presents it as an entrepreneur-driven scene where the gale of creative destruction is always blowing, laying low the big and clearing the way for the small to emerge and grow (as against a scene in which the visible hand of oligopolistic corporate technostructures have largely sheltered themselves from market forces, leaving small business, consumers, workers, to twist in the wind as they reap the benefits of a privileged position). Where "disruptive" innovation is always "bringing good things to life" (as against it being a scene of minor, trivial, "sustaining" or even nonexistent technological change depending on the case, or worse, the "enshittification" of yesteryear's technological achievements). Where the big fortunes are generally New, and Self-Made, and the product of individual technological genius of world-historical caliber befitting a Great Man theory of economy history (as against Old Money, inherited privilege and billions made from rent-seeking and speculation rather than "real" productive activities, as against individuals reaping the personal benefits of public research and an innovative machine irreducible to single institutions, never mind individuals). And which because of all of the foregoing is, within its line, a center of excellence unparalleled anywhere else in a world which can only envy it (as against an increasingly hollow economy in relative and perhaps absolute decline).
In short, the image of Silicon Valley reflects and reinforces the image of capitalism and especially of the U.S. economy that the orthodox and especially the neoliberal ardently promotes--and the opposite of what those of other economics views, from the conservative economic nationalist to the thoroughgoing leftist, have long analyzed it as being. At best Silicon Valley has resembled their ideal a bit more than the rest of the economy--such that presenting it this way has always entailed a good deal of violence to the facts--and as time has gone on (as the upstart startups turned into Big Tech, for example) it has resembled that ideal less and less. Still, even as the law may be beginning to catch up to what everyone has known for decades (like the fact that Facebook does not sit well with the principles of "antitrust"), the propaganda goes on as movies and TV continue to shower us with flattering images of tech billionaires that remind me of what Upton Sinclair wrote a century ago in Mammonart: that the artist "feels a real awe for authority," "thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body" believes themselves "acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth," with the irony that "the smaller . . . in reality" the sovereign is "the more rigid the art convention that he is big."
As it goes with the lords of old, so it goes with those latterday lords of capital, all part of the "snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition . . . bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms" that makes pop culture the idiocy that it is--and the slaves of conventional wisdom snarl at anyone who points to any of the facts calling into question the truthiness of the Establishment-sanctioned view.
Monday, November 4, 2024
What Do We Mean by "Nihilism?"
When reading Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons I was struck by the discussion of Eugene Barazov's "nihilism" by himself and his friend Arkady Kirsanov with Kirsanov's father Nikolai and uncle Pavel. Nikolai, never having heard the term before but having enough Classical education to recognize the Latin root "nihil," "presume[s]" that it means "a man who declines to accept anything."* Arkady, however, corrects him by saying that he "treats things . . . from the critical point of view"; that a nihilist "declines to bow to authority, or to accept any principle on trust."
There is a world of difference between the two concepts--the "acceptance" of or believing in nothing, and the refusal to accept simply on the basis of authority rather than form one's own judgments, a position that has been a foundation for a socially critical perspective, which is, after all, what Barazov espouses. (As Barazov himself says, the nihilists condemn the corruption, oppression and superstition they saw as both unjust and holding back societal progress--a socially critical, materialist, position, but not nihilistic in the sense of "believing in nothing.")
Still, few understand the distinction, and of those who do understand it those who set great store by authority while taking a dim view of individual reason and judgment it is common to see the second tendency leading to the first, the rejection of authority in favor of individual discernment ultimately leading to a belief in nothing (whether rightly or wrongly). And unsurprisingly given the predominance of that conservative viewpoint it is that view of nihilism as a denial of all values that has prevailed.
Still, how often does one encounter people who really "believe in nothing," when push comes to shove? It seems to me that those who talk as if they do so are generally doing one of two things, or both of them:
1. Engaging in pseudo-macho, "Look what a tough guy I am!" posturing, like we get from the characters in Shintaro Ishihara's scribblings.
2. Showing themselves to be selfish to the point of idiotic, clueless, unhingedness. They treat everyone and everything as of no meaning--except themselves. When it comes to their personal interests, well-being, standing, comfort, they are never nihilists, instead believing in that totally and deeply.
Both the posturing and the selfishness deserve only contempt.
* I quote the Hogarth translation of the classic.
There is a world of difference between the two concepts--the "acceptance" of or believing in nothing, and the refusal to accept simply on the basis of authority rather than form one's own judgments, a position that has been a foundation for a socially critical perspective, which is, after all, what Barazov espouses. (As Barazov himself says, the nihilists condemn the corruption, oppression and superstition they saw as both unjust and holding back societal progress--a socially critical, materialist, position, but not nihilistic in the sense of "believing in nothing.")
Still, few understand the distinction, and of those who do understand it those who set great store by authority while taking a dim view of individual reason and judgment it is common to see the second tendency leading to the first, the rejection of authority in favor of individual discernment ultimately leading to a belief in nothing (whether rightly or wrongly). And unsurprisingly given the predominance of that conservative viewpoint it is that view of nihilism as a denial of all values that has prevailed.
Still, how often does one encounter people who really "believe in nothing," when push comes to shove? It seems to me that those who talk as if they do so are generally doing one of two things, or both of them:
1. Engaging in pseudo-macho, "Look what a tough guy I am!" posturing, like we get from the characters in Shintaro Ishihara's scribblings.
2. Showing themselves to be selfish to the point of idiotic, clueless, unhingedness. They treat everyone and everything as of no meaning--except themselves. When it comes to their personal interests, well-being, standing, comfort, they are never nihilists, instead believing in that totally and deeply.
Both the posturing and the selfishness deserve only contempt.
* I quote the Hogarth translation of the classic.
The Dead Internet Theory: A Few Thoughts
You may have heard of the "dead Internet theory" holding that most of the activity we see online is not human-originated, and indeed being used for the purposes of controlling the public by way of its perceptions.
I think it easy enough to understand why people believe it. Certainly there is an enormous amount of "bot"-generated and related content and traffic online (perhaps half of it is such by this point), while much else is indeed deliberately manipulated (for what difference is there between a bot and a professional human troll in the end from this standpoint?). Meanwhile the more prolific and active users of the Internet (the kind who comment in fora, etc.) who are actual humans who are not playing games may not be really representative of the population as a whole (on the whole more affluent, and inclining more toward certain politics than others), while the black-boxed algorithms fulfilling purposes concealed from the public but obviously influenced by ad money, manipulation, flak and the commercial and political imperatives of the masters of the online platforms indisputably amplify some voices and mute others as those searching the web find themselves less and less satisfied with their search results, which seem less and less what they are actually looking for and more and more what someone else wants them to see.
By and large it works in favor of the opinions that the powerful want the public to have, which is not necessarily the same thing as what the public is thinking. At the same lots of people who are active online are finding contact with people they can feel reasonably sure are actual humans rarer and rarer--partly because the "action" keeps deserting once popular fora for others (goodbye Facebook, hello TikTok, as Myspace is no longer even a memory for many), partly because people's ways of behaving online keep changing (with the switch from desktops to smart phones making them incline toward less involved engagement), but also because the Internet has grown ever more fragmented and enclosed, a wasteland of garbage-filled search results pages, and unbelievably obnoxious demands that people log in and turn off their adblock and prove they are not a robot, inhibiting their movement and their participation, and making people give up "free-range" Internet search in favor of other ways of getting information, and certainly other pastimes (continuing the long decline of "web surfing" to the point that the term itself may be falling into disuse, in part, I suppose, because the fun that the word "surf" evoked is no longer part of the activity, and we do it only when we really have to do so). Those who are competing in the ever more brutal attention economy are especially attentive to the fact--especially those among them who find it harder and harder to get an actual, human, audience. (Thus have those who began blogging in an earlier era, and remember having readers who found them and left comments before there was much bot activity online, been left wondering what happened to that--even as they see their page views and other metrics of traffic surging.) The result is that there really are fewer humans about in the places that they know, and which are what matter to them.
All that makes the dead Internet theory at worst an exaggeration of much that is indisputably happening online, rather than some completely baseless fantasy--all as pretending otherwise the way self-satisfied and endlessly condescending centrist types who love to toss around terms like "conspiracy theorist" would have us do gets in the way of what is always the really important question, "Where do we go from here?"
I think it easy enough to understand why people believe it. Certainly there is an enormous amount of "bot"-generated and related content and traffic online (perhaps half of it is such by this point), while much else is indeed deliberately manipulated (for what difference is there between a bot and a professional human troll in the end from this standpoint?). Meanwhile the more prolific and active users of the Internet (the kind who comment in fora, etc.) who are actual humans who are not playing games may not be really representative of the population as a whole (on the whole more affluent, and inclining more toward certain politics than others), while the black-boxed algorithms fulfilling purposes concealed from the public but obviously influenced by ad money, manipulation, flak and the commercial and political imperatives of the masters of the online platforms indisputably amplify some voices and mute others as those searching the web find themselves less and less satisfied with their search results, which seem less and less what they are actually looking for and more and more what someone else wants them to see.
By and large it works in favor of the opinions that the powerful want the public to have, which is not necessarily the same thing as what the public is thinking. At the same lots of people who are active online are finding contact with people they can feel reasonably sure are actual humans rarer and rarer--partly because the "action" keeps deserting once popular fora for others (goodbye Facebook, hello TikTok, as Myspace is no longer even a memory for many), partly because people's ways of behaving online keep changing (with the switch from desktops to smart phones making them incline toward less involved engagement), but also because the Internet has grown ever more fragmented and enclosed, a wasteland of garbage-filled search results pages, and unbelievably obnoxious demands that people log in and turn off their adblock and prove they are not a robot, inhibiting their movement and their participation, and making people give up "free-range" Internet search in favor of other ways of getting information, and certainly other pastimes (continuing the long decline of "web surfing" to the point that the term itself may be falling into disuse, in part, I suppose, because the fun that the word "surf" evoked is no longer part of the activity, and we do it only when we really have to do so). Those who are competing in the ever more brutal attention economy are especially attentive to the fact--especially those among them who find it harder and harder to get an actual, human, audience. (Thus have those who began blogging in an earlier era, and remember having readers who found them and left comments before there was much bot activity online, been left wondering what happened to that--even as they see their page views and other metrics of traffic surging.) The result is that there really are fewer humans about in the places that they know, and which are what matter to them.
All that makes the dead Internet theory at worst an exaggeration of much that is indisputably happening online, rather than some completely baseless fantasy--all as pretending otherwise the way self-satisfied and endlessly condescending centrist types who love to toss around terms like "conspiracy theorist" would have us do gets in the way of what is always the really important question, "Where do we go from here?"
Friday, October 11, 2024
What Do Megalopolis and Joker 2 Have in Common?
Todd Phillips' Joker 2, which one month before its release Boxoffice Pro predicted would open to $115-$145 million, took in a mere $37 million in North America in its opening weekend--or about 30 percent of the low end of the range, and considerably less than even the $50-$60 million the publication predicted the Wednesday of the week of release.
As I said in my prior comment, as collapses went this one was even quicker and harder than what we saw for The Flash. (That movie, the early tracking-based projections for which had indicated an opening comparable to the one once predicted for Joker 2, still took in $55 million in that opening weekend.)
Right now there seems little to no chance of the film being saved by good holds at the box office. As a result there does not seem very much worth saying about the film's box office prospects beyond that. In fact it already seems to me rather more interesting to consider the film's life beyond that--considering which it seems worth mentioning a film that came out just the week before, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. Similarly a big-budget event that mostly put off critics and failed to attract audiences in part because of its maker's bucking expectations, the reaction to Megalopolis can seem to recall prior experiences Coppola had in the past, not least with Apocalypse Now. That movie, which was treated as far from being a success on release, was, along with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, bashed by critics in a fashion that killed its maker's career, and helped kill the more auteur-driven "New Hollywood," in large part because the studios wanted this done, and their courtiers in the press deferentially did their part.
Could something like that be going on here?
Consider the situation as it really stands now. In spite of much crowing by its courtiers over the occasional hit Hollywood is now in the fifth year of perhaps the most profound period of crisis in its history as a result of the coronavirus pandemic dealing its business, already in a fragile and declining state, an unprecedented shock. This seemed all the more the case as 2023, if the best year for business since before the pandemic, saw the kinds of hits Hollywood conventionally mass-produces (franchise-based big-budget sci-fi action spectacles and splashy family animation) flop again and again, implying the end of a model of filmmaking it cannot easily replace. At the same time what successes the studio had were largely a matter of more idiosyncratic films--some of them, notably, readable as (love or hate them) "visionary" auteur films, like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig's Barbie.
Amid all this it did not seem impossible that the Suits, desperate for movies that would sell tickets, would find themselves having to loosen their grip on the filmmakers who actually deliver what the crass Wall Street henchmen disrespectfully call "content," New Hollywood-style, a prospect they of course find loathsome. The result was that the courtiers were ecstatic when Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine seemed to demonstrate the continued viability of their accustomed way of doing things--while few shed any tears for the failure of Megalopolis (the more in as the business has never forgiven him for how he once fought the studio system), all as, if Warner Bros.' can hardly be happy with losing money on Joker 2, the industry as a whole may not be displeased to see an auteurial oddity like that fail (with this going double for those of their courtiers who hated the first Joker, and must be getting satisfaction from the sequel's failure).
Indeed, the comment regarding these films, particularly Joker 2, would seem to be hewing to the standard script used in hatchet jobs on New Hollywood auteurs targeted for purging. The moaning about the movie's budget. The predictable bad reviews. And then in the wake of (given how this is the kind of film that can really be helped or hurt by the reviewers) a predictable commercial failure a likewise predictable laying of all the blame for the problem on the director, not least through a portrayal of the film's helmer as an egomaniac trading on past success to get his way on everything and using that latitude to supposedly "pursue a vision" but really just hubristically making a muck of things without the "adults in the room" to supervise him.
Of course, as the examples of Apocalypse Now and Heaven's Gate show, such movies sometimes gain in esteem, both films now esteemed as masterpieces. Will Coppola's new movie eventually redeemed the way Apocalypse Now was? And Joker 2 as well? I think it far too early to say--though the more positive appraisals of both those films at least hint at that possibility.
As I said in my prior comment, as collapses went this one was even quicker and harder than what we saw for The Flash. (That movie, the early tracking-based projections for which had indicated an opening comparable to the one once predicted for Joker 2, still took in $55 million in that opening weekend.)
Right now there seems little to no chance of the film being saved by good holds at the box office. As a result there does not seem very much worth saying about the film's box office prospects beyond that. In fact it already seems to me rather more interesting to consider the film's life beyond that--considering which it seems worth mentioning a film that came out just the week before, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. Similarly a big-budget event that mostly put off critics and failed to attract audiences in part because of its maker's bucking expectations, the reaction to Megalopolis can seem to recall prior experiences Coppola had in the past, not least with Apocalypse Now. That movie, which was treated as far from being a success on release, was, along with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, bashed by critics in a fashion that killed its maker's career, and helped kill the more auteur-driven "New Hollywood," in large part because the studios wanted this done, and their courtiers in the press deferentially did their part.
Could something like that be going on here?
Consider the situation as it really stands now. In spite of much crowing by its courtiers over the occasional hit Hollywood is now in the fifth year of perhaps the most profound period of crisis in its history as a result of the coronavirus pandemic dealing its business, already in a fragile and declining state, an unprecedented shock. This seemed all the more the case as 2023, if the best year for business since before the pandemic, saw the kinds of hits Hollywood conventionally mass-produces (franchise-based big-budget sci-fi action spectacles and splashy family animation) flop again and again, implying the end of a model of filmmaking it cannot easily replace. At the same time what successes the studio had were largely a matter of more idiosyncratic films--some of them, notably, readable as (love or hate them) "visionary" auteur films, like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig's Barbie.
Amid all this it did not seem impossible that the Suits, desperate for movies that would sell tickets, would find themselves having to loosen their grip on the filmmakers who actually deliver what the crass Wall Street henchmen disrespectfully call "content," New Hollywood-style, a prospect they of course find loathsome. The result was that the courtiers were ecstatic when Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine seemed to demonstrate the continued viability of their accustomed way of doing things--while few shed any tears for the failure of Megalopolis (the more in as the business has never forgiven him for how he once fought the studio system), all as, if Warner Bros.' can hardly be happy with losing money on Joker 2, the industry as a whole may not be displeased to see an auteurial oddity like that fail (with this going double for those of their courtiers who hated the first Joker, and must be getting satisfaction from the sequel's failure).
Indeed, the comment regarding these films, particularly Joker 2, would seem to be hewing to the standard script used in hatchet jobs on New Hollywood auteurs targeted for purging. The moaning about the movie's budget. The predictable bad reviews. And then in the wake of (given how this is the kind of film that can really be helped or hurt by the reviewers) a predictable commercial failure a likewise predictable laying of all the blame for the problem on the director, not least through a portrayal of the film's helmer as an egomaniac trading on past success to get his way on everything and using that latitude to supposedly "pursue a vision" but really just hubristically making a muck of things without the "adults in the room" to supervise him.
Of course, as the examples of Apocalypse Now and Heaven's Gate show, such movies sometimes gain in esteem, both films now esteemed as masterpieces. Will Coppola's new movie eventually redeemed the way Apocalypse Now was? And Joker 2 as well? I think it far too early to say--though the more positive appraisals of both those films at least hint at that possibility.
Why Writers Hate Summarizing Their Work
It is a notorious fact that writers--especially writers of fiction--hate summarizing their work. However, there is less discussion of why this is the case, with certain idiots seeing writers' distaste for the activity as simply another reason to mock at the sensibility of "creative" types.
Nevertheless, considering the writing of summaries for works like novels it is actually very easy to understand why writers so dislike going about this task, with three reasons especially worth discussing.
1. When a Writer is Finished with a Work They are Likely to be Desperate to be Done with it--and Writing a Summary Forces Them to Go Back to it Instead.
Consider the situation of someone who has written a long work like a novel. The sheer length of the work all but guarantees a long process, and therefore an exhausting one, the more in as the stages of a writing process are not all the same, with the beginning apt to be easier than the end--the bits that come naturally, easily, pleasurably concentrated at the start, getting fewer as they go along, and the later part of the process a slog as they complete the bits that they may not actually care to write at all if given the choice, but which they regard themselves as forced to write for the sake of completing the project. (They liked writing that scene, and that scene, but not so much this scene they needed to connect the two so that it all coheres.) This is all the more the case if they are the kind of writer who finds themselves compelled to rewrite a great deal, and especially rewrite as they go along--finding themselves fleshing out earlier material, making changes in the course of their writing that force them to go back and make alterations, etc., spending hours and hours working arduously on something they thought (or at least, hoped) was done, and in doing so giving a very great deal to achieve what may on the page look like a very little improvement (and might, on later reflection, seem no improvement at all). Indeed, it has seemed to me that the "80/20 principle" applies in writing fiction and nonfiction just as it does in writing code.
Contrary to what those who love to preach puritanical homilies would have you believe, the exhaustion that comes with the hard work does not make finishing the job more satisfying, but less so, apt to befoul their mood, all as they likely face disappointment in how things turned out--the gap between their Platonic image of how they wanted the thing to be, and what they actually have (no matter how good it may actually be). A writer's being in such a state of weltschmerz is all the more reason for them to not want to think about the thing anymore--the more in as they may be the kind who have a tough time "letting go"--but no, they have to go back and write the summary, which task entails its own miseries.
2. Writing a Summary Means a Writer's Taking a Cold, Hard, Look at Their Work--and Sucking Everything Interesting Out of It.
In considering the task of writing a good summary one ought to contrast that particular writing process with what writers tend to really enjoy about the writing process--its spontaneous, unconscious, intuitive aspect in which, as their brain fires on all cylinders and they feel themselves in a "flow state," the words just pouring out of them.
By contrast writing a summary of anything is likely to be a very deliberate, conscious process--and the writing of a summary of their own work require them to be not just conscious but self-conscious about their own writing. A painful and often inhibiting thing, touching their every insecurity (writers do need a capacity of self-criticism, but I think a writer's enduring too much self-criticism hurts their creativity, and very often squashes it altogether), it is, again, likely to be coming at a moment when they would least like to look at it or think about it, that period of weltschmerz after a long project, with all this does to worsen the experience.
Moreover, the act of summarizing itself is apt to make them feel worse rather than better about what they have written--because the summary is apt to strip away everything of which they were proud to leave something simple and dry and banal on the page. Consider, for example, what David Walsh has accounted the greatest work of American literature ever produced, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Even Dreiser's greatest admirers will not attempt to persuade anyone that he deserves renown as a stylist (indeed, literary snobs sniff at his "journalistic" prose), but there is no question that the interest of his story of a murder is all in the telling--the way in which Dreiser tells the tale of Clyde Griffiths up to the point of the crime, "painstakingly and painfully buil[ding] up" to it "inexorable incident by inexorable incident," and in the process makes what can appear a very ordinary (if also horrible and ugly) crime an indictment of a whole society. But in the summary you won't get any sense of that buildup or that indictment, or the "frightening power" it all has for many a reader, just that commonplace-seeming crime--a grave injustice to the work, with, in a writer's producing the summary themselves, they the one committing the injustice, again at this emotional low point, with this all the more problematic because of why they are doing so in the first place.
3. Writers Aren't All Natural-Born Salesmen (Often They are the Extreme Opposite)--and Being a Salesman for Their Own Work is Especially Painful.
Why is a writer apt to be summarizing their work? The most likely reason is that they are trying to interest others in it--with the principal reason for subjecting themselves to that particular bit of wretchedness the desire to make a career of their writing, most likely by sending blind submissions to the slush piles of the few publishing houses and literary agencies that even go through the hypocrisy of claiming to be willing to look at such things, a process that commonly requires the writing of summaries. They are "selling" their work--an activity that is not the same for everyone. Selling is an outgoing, aggressive, often rejection-filled and emotionally bruising activity. Even the extroverted and thick-skinned get their fill of this, burning out on the job, while in spite of society's demand that its members all be extroverted and thick-skinned in this way and its attempts to induce them to all be so (hammering the square peg into the round hole from the start of their schooling, if not earlier), people commonly grow up to be the very opposite in temperament, introverted and thin-skinned--while I dare say that these traits are even more common among writers than they are among the generality of the public. (After all, someone who hates being alone isn't likely to get much writing done, and likely wouldn't bother to try to write much if they didn't have some sensitivity to the world around them, while at least one attraction of a career as a writer for many is that they will be able to in at least some measure retreat from the world and its brutalities.)
Making matters worse is the fact that, in a state in which the writer may be feeling disappointed in and insecure about their work, as they are apt to feel at the end of a project, the thought of their career compels them to go and sell that work, often as quickly as possible after getting the work into passable shape. Greatly amplifying the unpleasantness of it all is the fact that a writer in so marginal a position relative to their market that they have to send blind submissions to slush piles is likely to quickly amass a mountain of dispiriting experiences of the kind that Jack London wrote about so frankly and illuminatingly in Martin Eden, endured without support or sympathy from anyone. The misery of the attempts accumulates with each try, the more in as they have again and again seen no reward, the hard work not paying off, so that an increasing sense of futility sets in--that emotional baggage apt to be part of the experience of summarizing what they have written, giving them that much more reason to hate the task. Indeed, I suspect that the misery of the sales process, of which summary-writing is a part, has probably killed off a very great number of literary careers before they ever properly began, and at least some of those murders have surely left world culture the poorer--not that the Dauriats of Park Avenue, or the lickspittles who fly to their defense on hearing the slightest criticism of them, will ever admit such a thing.
Nevertheless, considering the writing of summaries for works like novels it is actually very easy to understand why writers so dislike going about this task, with three reasons especially worth discussing.
1. When a Writer is Finished with a Work They are Likely to be Desperate to be Done with it--and Writing a Summary Forces Them to Go Back to it Instead.
Consider the situation of someone who has written a long work like a novel. The sheer length of the work all but guarantees a long process, and therefore an exhausting one, the more in as the stages of a writing process are not all the same, with the beginning apt to be easier than the end--the bits that come naturally, easily, pleasurably concentrated at the start, getting fewer as they go along, and the later part of the process a slog as they complete the bits that they may not actually care to write at all if given the choice, but which they regard themselves as forced to write for the sake of completing the project. (They liked writing that scene, and that scene, but not so much this scene they needed to connect the two so that it all coheres.) This is all the more the case if they are the kind of writer who finds themselves compelled to rewrite a great deal, and especially rewrite as they go along--finding themselves fleshing out earlier material, making changes in the course of their writing that force them to go back and make alterations, etc., spending hours and hours working arduously on something they thought (or at least, hoped) was done, and in doing so giving a very great deal to achieve what may on the page look like a very little improvement (and might, on later reflection, seem no improvement at all). Indeed, it has seemed to me that the "80/20 principle" applies in writing fiction and nonfiction just as it does in writing code.
Contrary to what those who love to preach puritanical homilies would have you believe, the exhaustion that comes with the hard work does not make finishing the job more satisfying, but less so, apt to befoul their mood, all as they likely face disappointment in how things turned out--the gap between their Platonic image of how they wanted the thing to be, and what they actually have (no matter how good it may actually be). A writer's being in such a state of weltschmerz is all the more reason for them to not want to think about the thing anymore--the more in as they may be the kind who have a tough time "letting go"--but no, they have to go back and write the summary, which task entails its own miseries.
2. Writing a Summary Means a Writer's Taking a Cold, Hard, Look at Their Work--and Sucking Everything Interesting Out of It.
In considering the task of writing a good summary one ought to contrast that particular writing process with what writers tend to really enjoy about the writing process--its spontaneous, unconscious, intuitive aspect in which, as their brain fires on all cylinders and they feel themselves in a "flow state," the words just pouring out of them.
By contrast writing a summary of anything is likely to be a very deliberate, conscious process--and the writing of a summary of their own work require them to be not just conscious but self-conscious about their own writing. A painful and often inhibiting thing, touching their every insecurity (writers do need a capacity of self-criticism, but I think a writer's enduring too much self-criticism hurts their creativity, and very often squashes it altogether), it is, again, likely to be coming at a moment when they would least like to look at it or think about it, that period of weltschmerz after a long project, with all this does to worsen the experience.
Moreover, the act of summarizing itself is apt to make them feel worse rather than better about what they have written--because the summary is apt to strip away everything of which they were proud to leave something simple and dry and banal on the page. Consider, for example, what David Walsh has accounted the greatest work of American literature ever produced, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Even Dreiser's greatest admirers will not attempt to persuade anyone that he deserves renown as a stylist (indeed, literary snobs sniff at his "journalistic" prose), but there is no question that the interest of his story of a murder is all in the telling--the way in which Dreiser tells the tale of Clyde Griffiths up to the point of the crime, "painstakingly and painfully buil[ding] up" to it "inexorable incident by inexorable incident," and in the process makes what can appear a very ordinary (if also horrible and ugly) crime an indictment of a whole society. But in the summary you won't get any sense of that buildup or that indictment, or the "frightening power" it all has for many a reader, just that commonplace-seeming crime--a grave injustice to the work, with, in a writer's producing the summary themselves, they the one committing the injustice, again at this emotional low point, with this all the more problematic because of why they are doing so in the first place.
3. Writers Aren't All Natural-Born Salesmen (Often They are the Extreme Opposite)--and Being a Salesman for Their Own Work is Especially Painful.
Why is a writer apt to be summarizing their work? The most likely reason is that they are trying to interest others in it--with the principal reason for subjecting themselves to that particular bit of wretchedness the desire to make a career of their writing, most likely by sending blind submissions to the slush piles of the few publishing houses and literary agencies that even go through the hypocrisy of claiming to be willing to look at such things, a process that commonly requires the writing of summaries. They are "selling" their work--an activity that is not the same for everyone. Selling is an outgoing, aggressive, often rejection-filled and emotionally bruising activity. Even the extroverted and thick-skinned get their fill of this, burning out on the job, while in spite of society's demand that its members all be extroverted and thick-skinned in this way and its attempts to induce them to all be so (hammering the square peg into the round hole from the start of their schooling, if not earlier), people commonly grow up to be the very opposite in temperament, introverted and thin-skinned--while I dare say that these traits are even more common among writers than they are among the generality of the public. (After all, someone who hates being alone isn't likely to get much writing done, and likely wouldn't bother to try to write much if they didn't have some sensitivity to the world around them, while at least one attraction of a career as a writer for many is that they will be able to in at least some measure retreat from the world and its brutalities.)
Making matters worse is the fact that, in a state in which the writer may be feeling disappointed in and insecure about their work, as they are apt to feel at the end of a project, the thought of their career compels them to go and sell that work, often as quickly as possible after getting the work into passable shape. Greatly amplifying the unpleasantness of it all is the fact that a writer in so marginal a position relative to their market that they have to send blind submissions to slush piles is likely to quickly amass a mountain of dispiriting experiences of the kind that Jack London wrote about so frankly and illuminatingly in Martin Eden, endured without support or sympathy from anyone. The misery of the attempts accumulates with each try, the more in as they have again and again seen no reward, the hard work not paying off, so that an increasing sense of futility sets in--that emotional baggage apt to be part of the experience of summarizing what they have written, giving them that much more reason to hate the task. Indeed, I suspect that the misery of the sales process, of which summary-writing is a part, has probably killed off a very great number of literary careers before they ever properly began, and at least some of those murders have surely left world culture the poorer--not that the Dauriats of Park Avenue, or the lickspittles who fly to their defense on hearing the slightest criticism of them, will ever admit such a thing.
If the Horse Race isn't a Nail-Biter the News Media Will Say That's What it is Anyway
The news media's propensity for presenting elections as "horse races" is notorious--and rightly so. The attitude reflects that media's operatives' preference for politics over policy, and personalities over issues--and for that matter, the nuts and bolts of governance that confront any elected official with profound limits to their power. The same attitude also reflects their susceptibility to being dazzled by "showbusiness for ugly people" (let us make that "showbusiness for ugly, talentless and uncharismatic people"), and their delusion that the broad public is similarly susceptible to being dazzled--which is yet another reminder of how remote from that public and its actual concerns they really are, and one might add, how profoundly irresponsible they are given what the stakes of elections are supposed to be.
Of course, as the notoriety of the tendency would lead one to expect, many have criticized this specific aspect of the news media's conduct over the years--to absolutely no effect on its behavior whatsoever, as tends to be the case with criticisms of the media and other institutions by anyone with a modicum of intelligence. The result was that when Robert Reich recently wrote in the Guardian about what seems to him the surprisingly close character of the year's "race" for the White House, and he dismissed the idea that "the media is intentionally creating a nail-bitingly close race in order to sell more ads" I thought him overly hasty in doing so. After all, faced with the possibility that their audience is losing interest those in showbusiness, for ugly people or the regular kind, seem to mainly think of doing the same thing they were doing before, but BIGGER! Thus does a media which favors the narrative of the "nail-bitingly close" race push that narrative even when it has no basis in reality whatsoever.
Does that mean that this is actually the case now, that the media is only making the race look "nail-bitingly close?" I do not know that. What I do mean to say is that this is what they have been known to do when such races have not conformed to their preferred style of campaign coverage, and what they can be expected to go on doing when that is the case, such that the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand the way Reich dismisses it--and that people of all political persuasions should think long and hard about this bit of media idiocy when considering what and what not to believe.
Of course, as the notoriety of the tendency would lead one to expect, many have criticized this specific aspect of the news media's conduct over the years--to absolutely no effect on its behavior whatsoever, as tends to be the case with criticisms of the media and other institutions by anyone with a modicum of intelligence. The result was that when Robert Reich recently wrote in the Guardian about what seems to him the surprisingly close character of the year's "race" for the White House, and he dismissed the idea that "the media is intentionally creating a nail-bitingly close race in order to sell more ads" I thought him overly hasty in doing so. After all, faced with the possibility that their audience is losing interest those in showbusiness, for ugly people or the regular kind, seem to mainly think of doing the same thing they were doing before, but BIGGER! Thus does a media which favors the narrative of the "nail-bitingly close" race push that narrative even when it has no basis in reality whatsoever.
Does that mean that this is actually the case now, that the media is only making the race look "nail-bitingly close?" I do not know that. What I do mean to say is that this is what they have been known to do when such races have not conformed to their preferred style of campaign coverage, and what they can be expected to go on doing when that is the case, such that the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand the way Reich dismisses it--and that people of all political persuasions should think long and hard about this bit of media idiocy when considering what and what not to believe.
The Densha Otoko Controversy of Two Decades Ago, and the Culture Wars of Tomorrow
Back in 2004 there were (we are given to understand) a series of postings in an Internet forum by an individual telling the (supposedly) real-life story of a twentysomething "otaku" who becomes romantically involved with a woman he rescued from a groper on the train, over the course of which postings sympathetic readers helped him with advice along a path that led him to put otakuish things behind him and join the mainstream in order to be with here. Novelized as Densha Otoko (translatable as Train Man), the book became a bestseller that quickly launched a popular multimedia franchise that included a TV series, a feature film, and several manga adaptations.
All this may sound innocuous enough to Americans hearing about it, the man who has "failed to grow up" (which is how the "geeky" and "nerdy" tend to be seen in America) but finds love, puts away "childish things" and remakes himself according to mainstream standards (getting a "good" job if he doesn't already have one, getting a "makeover," just like that somehow) is a standard plot formula, and indeed well-worn cliché, as a result of its use as the basis of any number of independent films, Judd Apatow comedies, etc.. However, it was not received that way by Japanese otaku, who unlike their counterparts in supposedly less conformist America attacked the conformist message of this narrative formula--the view that otaku are not what they ought to be, that they can, should and must abandon their interests and pleasures and join the mainstream in any and every way, "because reasons." Indeed, the furor was sufficient that a previously obscure man named Toru Honda became famous on the basis of his version of the critique (apparently, a bestseller as these things go), which held that like everything else love had dissolved in capitalism's cash nexus, which also devalued human beings who do not meet its standards and serve its purposes (those without money and other desired traits)--and that it was entirely valid for those who had no place in that order (who did not, because they could not, work and have children) to find their satisfaction in those "childish things," and even take "2-D love" with fictional characters in place of a "3-D" relationship with another human being that, even when it was attainable, was not necessarily more "real," and perhaps less so, certainly less pure. (In spite of his references to capitalism his taste in philosophical reference--Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc.--is suggestive of an inclination toward an idealist-subjectivist ontology, and the individual's "getting along" as best they can in society as they find it, rather than any project of social change, with his one hazy reference to Marxism as "in decline" implying that he is dismissive of such notions.)
All of this has had little attention in the West, both Densha Otoko, and the outpouring of writing that followed it, even his best-known works remaining without any authorized translation, and secondhand discussion slight. (Indeed, a handful of translated interviews apart--the highest-profile of which was with the Asahi Shimbun in 2005--most of what there is to read about Honda and his ideas in English is to be found on comparatively obscure blogs referencing at best a portion of his work.) This is, I think, partly because of the extreme disinterest of American cultural commentators in social life in other countries (i.e. save when they can use it to show the "badness" of some state policy elites want to designate as an enemy), but also because his ideas offend against those of the mainstream in multiple ways, and even seem too "bizarre" for them to take seriously. Indeed, looking at the comment threads on blogs discussing Honda's ideas I constantly found Honda dismissed as a "pseduointellectual" wrapping up retrograde thinking in "first year philosophy student" references--with the fact that this reading was asserted rather than argued, and rarely challenged, confirming the ease with which many incline to this view. Still, given how many of the relevant issues--growing questioning of a vision of adulthood that seems less attainable and perhaps less desirable to young people in the straitened times, the country's fraught gender politics, and even advances in artificial intelligence that may well make it a source of companionship for many--we may yet see argument for views like Honda's become part of cultural controversy in America.
All this may sound innocuous enough to Americans hearing about it, the man who has "failed to grow up" (which is how the "geeky" and "nerdy" tend to be seen in America) but finds love, puts away "childish things" and remakes himself according to mainstream standards (getting a "good" job if he doesn't already have one, getting a "makeover," just like that somehow) is a standard plot formula, and indeed well-worn cliché, as a result of its use as the basis of any number of independent films, Judd Apatow comedies, etc.. However, it was not received that way by Japanese otaku, who unlike their counterparts in supposedly less conformist America attacked the conformist message of this narrative formula--the view that otaku are not what they ought to be, that they can, should and must abandon their interests and pleasures and join the mainstream in any and every way, "because reasons." Indeed, the furor was sufficient that a previously obscure man named Toru Honda became famous on the basis of his version of the critique (apparently, a bestseller as these things go), which held that like everything else love had dissolved in capitalism's cash nexus, which also devalued human beings who do not meet its standards and serve its purposes (those without money and other desired traits)--and that it was entirely valid for those who had no place in that order (who did not, because they could not, work and have children) to find their satisfaction in those "childish things," and even take "2-D love" with fictional characters in place of a "3-D" relationship with another human being that, even when it was attainable, was not necessarily more "real," and perhaps less so, certainly less pure. (In spite of his references to capitalism his taste in philosophical reference--Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc.--is suggestive of an inclination toward an idealist-subjectivist ontology, and the individual's "getting along" as best they can in society as they find it, rather than any project of social change, with his one hazy reference to Marxism as "in decline" implying that he is dismissive of such notions.)
All of this has had little attention in the West, both Densha Otoko, and the outpouring of writing that followed it, even his best-known works remaining without any authorized translation, and secondhand discussion slight. (Indeed, a handful of translated interviews apart--the highest-profile of which was with the Asahi Shimbun in 2005--most of what there is to read about Honda and his ideas in English is to be found on comparatively obscure blogs referencing at best a portion of his work.) This is, I think, partly because of the extreme disinterest of American cultural commentators in social life in other countries (i.e. save when they can use it to show the "badness" of some state policy elites want to designate as an enemy), but also because his ideas offend against those of the mainstream in multiple ways, and even seem too "bizarre" for them to take seriously. Indeed, looking at the comment threads on blogs discussing Honda's ideas I constantly found Honda dismissed as a "pseduointellectual" wrapping up retrograde thinking in "first year philosophy student" references--with the fact that this reading was asserted rather than argued, and rarely challenged, confirming the ease with which many incline to this view. Still, given how many of the relevant issues--growing questioning of a vision of adulthood that seems less attainable and perhaps less desirable to young people in the straitened times, the country's fraught gender politics, and even advances in artificial intelligence that may well make it a source of companionship for many--we may yet see argument for views like Honda's become part of cultural controversy in America.
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
The Collapse of Joker 2's Box Office Prospects: Do We Have Another The Flash On Our Hands?
I have, I think, been less bullish on Joker 2 than others since I started following the news about it. While acknowledging the colossal success of the original and the factors that may make a follow-up similarly successful (indeed, last year the film seemed to me the year's best chance for a billion-dollar hit), I have also remarked again and again all it had going against it. Not the least of this was the extent to which the first film was a beneficiary of a rare moral panic-fed barrage of hype, and it increasingly seems, a bait-and-switch selling the story of Arthur Fleck as a Joker origin story--neither of which will be as helpful this time, all as the media may not be terribly friendly (a lot of the opinion-makers feared and hated the film and may be looking for revenge this time around), while there is an undeniable gamble in making what looks less like Joker 2 than Arthur Fleck II: The Musical (All talking! All singing!), with the precedent of Joker producer Martin Scorsese's following up Taxi Driver with New York, New York inauspicious. Indeed, if I saw the first Boxoffice Pro forecast for the film's opening ($115-$145 million) as portending the film's possibly matching its predecessor, I wrote that
About 40 percent of what the forecasters expected a mere month earlier, this is a faster, farther drop to a lower point than was even seen with The Flash, for which the same publication anticipated a very similar $115-$140 million initially, and then watched the prediction decline to $72-$105 million by the last, long-range, forecast, all as the forecast from the Wednesday before opening day predicted, at worst, $69 million.
Of course, a movie may disappoint on opening weekend and be rescued by "good legs," and/or the international market, but the opposite seems more likely to be the case when there is such a trend. Certainly it didn't happen for The Flash. That movie opened to $55 million, and did not quite manage to double that domestically (finishing out at $108 million), while if it did a bit better overseas this was only in the sense that there was a relatively decent foreign take relative to the domestic one, which worked out to a global total of $271 million. The result was almost certainly a nine figure loss for the studio, and possibly the biggest flop of the year (my math indicating at least the possibility that The Flash and not the even lower-grossing, couldn't-make-it-to-the-$100-million-mark-in-North-America Captain Marvel 2 registered the biggest net loss for its backer).
In the worst-case scenario Joker 2 seems to me now in danger of making no more than The Flash did, all while having a $200 million production budget (triple the original Joker's, and approximately what The Flash was at least initially reported as running its backers). The result is that this movie, which such a short while ago looked as if it could be one of the saviors of the weak 2024 box office, could instead serve as yet another reminder that even if they can still score big (as the dynamic duo of Deadpool and Wolverine did this past summer) big sequels like this one are less reliable performers than they used to be in today's shrunken North American and global film market, as it not only makes its way onto Deadline's list of the biggest flops next year, but very possibly goes to the very top of that list. Possibly, I say, because it may yet have some competition for the dubious honor of that list's #1 spot given the number of high-risk big releases due out this fall in the present, rather finite, market (not least Gladiator 2, the first forecasts for which we may start to hear about very soon).
the question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it.The following week, alas, we saw the range collapse, from $115-$145 million to just $60-$100 million, and then $60-$90 million the week after that. And things got worse still over the following two weeks, with the just published forecast of the week of release presenting a range of just $50-$60 million for the opening weekend.
About 40 percent of what the forecasters expected a mere month earlier, this is a faster, farther drop to a lower point than was even seen with The Flash, for which the same publication anticipated a very similar $115-$140 million initially, and then watched the prediction decline to $72-$105 million by the last, long-range, forecast, all as the forecast from the Wednesday before opening day predicted, at worst, $69 million.
Of course, a movie may disappoint on opening weekend and be rescued by "good legs," and/or the international market, but the opposite seems more likely to be the case when there is such a trend. Certainly it didn't happen for The Flash. That movie opened to $55 million, and did not quite manage to double that domestically (finishing out at $108 million), while if it did a bit better overseas this was only in the sense that there was a relatively decent foreign take relative to the domestic one, which worked out to a global total of $271 million. The result was almost certainly a nine figure loss for the studio, and possibly the biggest flop of the year (my math indicating at least the possibility that The Flash and not the even lower-grossing, couldn't-make-it-to-the-$100-million-mark-in-North-America Captain Marvel 2 registered the biggest net loss for its backer).
In the worst-case scenario Joker 2 seems to me now in danger of making no more than The Flash did, all while having a $200 million production budget (triple the original Joker's, and approximately what The Flash was at least initially reported as running its backers). The result is that this movie, which such a short while ago looked as if it could be one of the saviors of the weak 2024 box office, could instead serve as yet another reminder that even if they can still score big (as the dynamic duo of Deadpool and Wolverine did this past summer) big sequels like this one are less reliable performers than they used to be in today's shrunken North American and global film market, as it not only makes its way onto Deadline's list of the biggest flops next year, but very possibly goes to the very top of that list. Possibly, I say, because it may yet have some competition for the dubious honor of that list's #1 spot given the number of high-risk big releases due out this fall in the present, rather finite, market (not least Gladiator 2, the first forecasts for which we may start to hear about very soon).
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
How Big a Profit Might It Ends with Us Turn in the End?
As I remarked after seeing last year's list of the most profitable films, we may increasingly see the biggest profit-makers prove to not be the bigger-budgeted and higher-grossing "tentpoles," but the lower-cost films aimed at a narrower market that proves just big enough to, between the limited budget and the gross, produce a bigger margin than its higher-profile rivals.
Where this summer and this year are concerned I think the stand-out that way is It Ends With Us. Not even a top ten hit of the year, it is still the case that on its budget of $25 million it has grossed $325 million so far in theaters, before beginning what is almost certain to be a lucrative post-theatrical career.
What might the profit margin look like?
For comparison purposes let us consider Where the Crawdads Sing--also a bestselling book aimed at a not dissimilar audience, which was also similarly budgeted. That movie made $140 million gross and $80 million net in theaters, then netted almost twice as much from the post-theatrical revenue streams (as smaller films often do). Counting in the final costs (prints and ads, residuals and participations, etc.) the final bill came to about five times the production budget--$123 million. The result was that in the end the "studio net" was $75 million.
With It Ends with Us taking in well over twice that much on a similar production budget, much more money will be coming in--but more likely going out as some of the non-production expenses take a bigger bite out of the gross. (Higher grosses mean more "participations and residuals," in particular.) Still, as one can expect the movie to net $150 million+ in theaters, and make as much if not more post-theatrically, it seems a safe bet that in spite of the added toll the profit will break the $100 million barrier, while $150 million or more would not be out of the question. Last year that would have got the movie onto Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbusters" list, and it may well suffice to do that for the movie this year--while failing that it is virtually guaranteed a spot on the accompanying list for smaller films with high returns.
Where this summer and this year are concerned I think the stand-out that way is It Ends With Us. Not even a top ten hit of the year, it is still the case that on its budget of $25 million it has grossed $325 million so far in theaters, before beginning what is almost certain to be a lucrative post-theatrical career.
What might the profit margin look like?
For comparison purposes let us consider Where the Crawdads Sing--also a bestselling book aimed at a not dissimilar audience, which was also similarly budgeted. That movie made $140 million gross and $80 million net in theaters, then netted almost twice as much from the post-theatrical revenue streams (as smaller films often do). Counting in the final costs (prints and ads, residuals and participations, etc.) the final bill came to about five times the production budget--$123 million. The result was that in the end the "studio net" was $75 million.
With It Ends with Us taking in well over twice that much on a similar production budget, much more money will be coming in--but more likely going out as some of the non-production expenses take a bigger bite out of the gross. (Higher grosses mean more "participations and residuals," in particular.) Still, as one can expect the movie to net $150 million+ in theaters, and make as much if not more post-theatrically, it seems a safe bet that in spite of the added toll the profit will break the $100 million barrier, while $150 million or more would not be out of the question. Last year that would have got the movie onto Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbusters" list, and it may well suffice to do that for the movie this year--while failing that it is virtually guaranteed a spot on the accompanying list for smaller films with high returns.
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Declining Movie Ticket Sales and the Decline of the Middle Class
In the decade after the onset of the Great Recession North American movie ticket sales dropped from 4-5 a year per capita to 3-4 a year--and then after the pandemic dropped to more like 2 a year (certainly to go by the evidence of 2022, and 2023, and 2024 so far).
There can seem any number of reasons for that--like the staleness of the product that studio executives dementedly foist on the public, or the competition from a small screen both more convenient and offering more varied and frequently more intelligent fare, but one factor we should not overlook is that a public that has seen itself financially very pressed in recent years (never has the pretense of generalized "middle classness" looked more threadbare) simply has less time and disposable income for entertainments such as a night out. After all, going out for a movie is rarely just about the price of a ticket (or several of them), while we are seeing drops in the consumption of everything from meals out to live concerts.
Of course, don't expect to hear the entertainment press make too much of that, the more in as pseudo-intellectuals who keep calling themselves "economists" at every opportunity are telling the public that it's doing JUST FINE!
There can seem any number of reasons for that--like the staleness of the product that studio executives dementedly foist on the public, or the competition from a small screen both more convenient and offering more varied and frequently more intelligent fare, but one factor we should not overlook is that a public that has seen itself financially very pressed in recent years (never has the pretense of generalized "middle classness" looked more threadbare) simply has less time and disposable income for entertainments such as a night out. After all, going out for a movie is rarely just about the price of a ticket (or several of them), while we are seeing drops in the consumption of everything from meals out to live concerts.
Of course, don't expect to hear the entertainment press make too much of that, the more in as pseudo-intellectuals who keep calling themselves "economists" at every opportunity are telling the public that it's doing JUST FINE!
How Will the News Media Cover the Last Weeks of the Presidential Campaign of 2024?
Last year the Columbia Journalism Review published an article discussing a quantitative examination of the last two months of the coverage of the mid-term election of 2022 by the New York Times and Washington Post. That study's authors found that their front-page stories, at least, almost entirely disregarded questions of policy--what the candidates promise, and what they might do in office--in favor of the palace intrigue and campaign horse-race crapola that the addicts to "showbusiness for ugly people" who staff the media think the general public love as much as they do.
I cannot see how any intelligent person can regard this as anything but an execrable performance on their part.
Will they do any better in 2024?
As it happens, this campaign season has offered much, much more fodder for palace intrigue and horse-race crapola than most, and in spite of the self-important proclamations of the editorial boards about "how much is at stake," they absolutely lived down to my lowest expectations as they made the most of the opportunities it gave them to be on their absolute worst behavior. I see no reason to expect that they will suddenly start acting like the "professionals" they pretend to be where this election is concerned--though of course whatever happens they will congratulate themselves on having did a wonderful job, because that is what they always do.
I cannot see how any intelligent person can regard this as anything but an execrable performance on their part.
Will they do any better in 2024?
As it happens, this campaign season has offered much, much more fodder for palace intrigue and horse-race crapola than most, and in spite of the self-important proclamations of the editorial boards about "how much is at stake," they absolutely lived down to my lowest expectations as they made the most of the opportunities it gave them to be on their absolute worst behavior. I see no reason to expect that they will suddenly start acting like the "professionals" they pretend to be where this election is concerned--though of course whatever happens they will congratulate themselves on having did a wonderful job, because that is what they always do.
Of the Word "Upset"
It seems common to define the word "upset," when used in the sense of a person's emotional state, as a synonym for "unhappy," "disappointed" or "worried." These are three quite different terms, the result is that the word comes across as vague and mild, and as is often the case with words that seem a bit vague and mild, used to soften an account of the state of the person being described--a person who may be miserable rather than unhappy, outraged rather than disappointed, or frightened rather than worried, described as merely "upset."
Perhaps unsurprisingly given all that the use of the word "upset" to describe a person's emotional state seems to me less than respectful of the person being described in a great many cases. It always makes me think of a parent speaking of a child, with a child's presumably limited mental faculties and understanding of the world in mind--the "adult in the room" telling others that they have an "upset" child with which they must deal. Few adults, I think, would care to be thought of in such terms--especially in any matter of great importance.
As a result Rebecca Solnit, while making an important statement in a recent piece in the Guardian, seemed to me to have made an unfortunate choice in writing its title: "The Mainstream Press is Failing America--and People are Understandably Upset."
For many of them, upset doesn't even begin to describe it--as we find when we read the item for ourselves.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given all that the use of the word "upset" to describe a person's emotional state seems to me less than respectful of the person being described in a great many cases. It always makes me think of a parent speaking of a child, with a child's presumably limited mental faculties and understanding of the world in mind--the "adult in the room" telling others that they have an "upset" child with which they must deal. Few adults, I think, would care to be thought of in such terms--especially in any matter of great importance.
As a result Rebecca Solnit, while making an important statement in a recent piece in the Guardian, seemed to me to have made an unfortunate choice in writing its title: "The Mainstream Press is Failing America--and People are Understandably Upset."
For many of them, upset doesn't even begin to describe it--as we find when we read the item for ourselves.
Monday, September 9, 2024
Boxoffice Pro Has Put Out its Estimate for Joker's Opening
Boxoffice Pro has put out its estimate for Joker's opening weekend gross.
Their forecast currently stands at $115-$145 million--which means that not only before but even after inflation Joker 2 could make considerably more than that earlier movie's $96 million (that figure equal to $117 million in July 2024 terms).
I am not shocked by this forecast, but did not count on it either--as I remembered what it took to make the first Joker a hit. There was what some saw as the bait and switch involved in making a movie about Arthur Fleck appear as if it were the Joker's origin story. There was the atmosphere of moral panic cultivated around the film, which made many prominent film critics disgrace themselves with calls for censorship. All of this helped make the movie's release an event of a kind very hard to repeat, while it seemed to me far from clear whether five years later a sequel to the rather idiosyncratic movie, without that kind of atmosphere surrounding it—whether, with less and less pretense that Fleck is the Joker, with the critics having done a one-eighty and trivialized the movie that made them briefly show their totalitarian true colors and no moral panic in evidence this time, a Joker movie would still be of interest to a wide audience. (Indeed, especially hearing about the sequel's musical aspect I thought of how Martin Scorsese followed up his triumph with Taxi Driver with his flop New York, New York, and how history might unhappily repeat itself.)
This forecast seems to settle the matter to that extent, evidence apparently existing that a sizable audience does want to continue following the Saga of Arthur Fleck. The question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it. Even after its big opening the first Joker made three-and-a-half times its first three-day gross ($335 million). It is not wholly out of the question that this movie could do the same--and supplement its domestic take with a robust foreign gross. (The first Joker more than doubled its domestic gross internationally.) The result is that the movie might not just plausibly match the billion-dollar take of the original, but do so in real, inflation-adjusted terms--a feat requiring $1.3 billion at the box office at late 2024 prices.
Their forecast currently stands at $115-$145 million--which means that not only before but even after inflation Joker 2 could make considerably more than that earlier movie's $96 million (that figure equal to $117 million in July 2024 terms).
I am not shocked by this forecast, but did not count on it either--as I remembered what it took to make the first Joker a hit. There was what some saw as the bait and switch involved in making a movie about Arthur Fleck appear as if it were the Joker's origin story. There was the atmosphere of moral panic cultivated around the film, which made many prominent film critics disgrace themselves with calls for censorship. All of this helped make the movie's release an event of a kind very hard to repeat, while it seemed to me far from clear whether five years later a sequel to the rather idiosyncratic movie, without that kind of atmosphere surrounding it—whether, with less and less pretense that Fleck is the Joker, with the critics having done a one-eighty and trivialized the movie that made them briefly show their totalitarian true colors and no moral panic in evidence this time, a Joker movie would still be of interest to a wide audience. (Indeed, especially hearing about the sequel's musical aspect I thought of how Martin Scorsese followed up his triumph with Taxi Driver with his flop New York, New York, and how history might unhappily repeat itself.)
This forecast seems to settle the matter to that extent, evidence apparently existing that a sizable audience does want to continue following the Saga of Arthur Fleck. The question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it. Even after its big opening the first Joker made three-and-a-half times its first three-day gross ($335 million). It is not wholly out of the question that this movie could do the same--and supplement its domestic take with a robust foreign gross. (The first Joker more than doubled its domestic gross internationally.) The result is that the movie might not just plausibly match the billion-dollar take of the original, but do so in real, inflation-adjusted terms--a feat requiring $1.3 billion at the box office at late 2024 prices.
Does it Change Anything if Arthur Fleck isn't the Real Joker?
Considering the possibility, or even likelihood, that we are not supposed to take Arthur Fleck as the "real" Joker, it seems natural to ask what that means for the 2019 film--especially if we take it as a Joker origin story, and find it wanting that way, as I admittedly did. Indeed, I saw in the gap between Fleck and what we would expect of the Joker a failure of imagination on the part of the film's makers in their making Fleck such a pathetic figure; in their apparent inability to imagine that a marginalized, ill-treated working-class man might nonetheless be a figure of intelligence and force, rather than just a "clown" who because of his own inherent personal limitations and nothing else failed to make something of his life the way the stupid and repugnant patrician Thomas Wayne makes out the discontented working class to be.
Thinking of Fleck as other than the Joker we knew renders that criticism moot (if Fleck isn't the Joker anyway then it doesn't matter if he doesn't convince us as the Joker)--but it still seems to me plausible that the makers of the movie, reflecting the prejudices of our time, could not imagine anyone living the way Fleck did as anything but a "born loser," in line with the prevailing tendency to dismiss those who have not "got on" as undeserving of success, and by the same token, as equally undeserving of interest or sympathy from anyone else, all as challenge to this attitude is rarer than before. After all, in the early twentieth century the idea that the American Dream as epitomized by Horatio Alger is a cruel lie was one of the great themes of literature, producing figures from Jay Gatsby to Clyde Griffiths to Willy Loman. What compares with that today?
Apparently not Joker's Arthur Fleck.
Thinking of Fleck as other than the Joker we knew renders that criticism moot (if Fleck isn't the Joker anyway then it doesn't matter if he doesn't convince us as the Joker)--but it still seems to me plausible that the makers of the movie, reflecting the prejudices of our time, could not imagine anyone living the way Fleck did as anything but a "born loser," in line with the prevailing tendency to dismiss those who have not "got on" as undeserving of success, and by the same token, as equally undeserving of interest or sympathy from anyone else, all as challenge to this attitude is rarer than before. After all, in the early twentieth century the idea that the American Dream as epitomized by Horatio Alger is a cruel lie was one of the great themes of literature, producing figures from Jay Gatsby to Clyde Griffiths to Willy Loman. What compares with that today?
Apparently not Joker's Arthur Fleck.
Why Do "We" Care About How Much Movies Cost?
Apparently the budget of Joker 2 has been the subject of some critical comment--specifically because it was (reportedly) much larger than the budget for the first film.
Apparently Todd Phillips has had something to say in reply, remarking that reading the items in the press "[i]t seems like they're on the side of the multinational corporations," and indeed "sound like studio executives."
The reason for that, of course is that the entertainment press does significantly represent the views of the corporations, and the studio executives, just as the business press and the press generally represents the views of corporations, executives and the rest--as, of course, social commentators going back at least to Upton Sinclair have explained to the public over and over again. And negatively remarking a big budget has been part of their repertoire for pushing an agenda--specifically attacking a movie and its makers as "out of control" in that way we saw so much of when the studio bosses were out to crush the New Hollywood.
Of course, the desire to see New Hollywood crushed extended far beyond studio bosses looking to regain control of the industry to include those on the right ideologically hostile to the movies Hollywood had started making (and has rarely dared to make since).
Is there something like that afoot in the case of Phillips and Joker 2? Given how uncomfortable the first Joker made the elite stratum from which those who write for the upmarket review pages derive (not least because of those aspects of it that were what we think of as "New Hollywood") it does not seem wholly inconceivable that there would be. If this is a matter of what is actually in the second Joker movie, rather than just a residue of the critical hostility to the first film, then the movie may well have more bite than I suspected.
Apparently Todd Phillips has had something to say in reply, remarking that reading the items in the press "[i]t seems like they're on the side of the multinational corporations," and indeed "sound like studio executives."
The reason for that, of course is that the entertainment press does significantly represent the views of the corporations, and the studio executives, just as the business press and the press generally represents the views of corporations, executives and the rest--as, of course, social commentators going back at least to Upton Sinclair have explained to the public over and over again. And negatively remarking a big budget has been part of their repertoire for pushing an agenda--specifically attacking a movie and its makers as "out of control" in that way we saw so much of when the studio bosses were out to crush the New Hollywood.
Of course, the desire to see New Hollywood crushed extended far beyond studio bosses looking to regain control of the industry to include those on the right ideologically hostile to the movies Hollywood had started making (and has rarely dared to make since).
Is there something like that afoot in the case of Phillips and Joker 2? Given how uncomfortable the first Joker made the elite stratum from which those who write for the upmarket review pages derive (not least because of those aspects of it that were what we think of as "New Hollywood") it does not seem wholly inconceivable that there would be. If this is a matter of what is actually in the second Joker movie, rather than just a residue of the critical hostility to the first film, then the movie may well have more bite than I suspected.
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