Remarking his time working in Pittsburgh not long after the bloodbath that was the crushing of the Homestead steel strike (1892), where Big Business control of the newspapers seems to have been even more repressive than elsewhere, Theodore Dreiser considered the kind of "service . . . my employers craved," which was harder to discern than what they did not. The elephants in the room were numerous and colossal, and for obvious reason. ("We don't touch on labor conditions except through our labor man . . . and he knows what to say," while there was "nothing to be said about the rich or religious in a derogatory sense," the city editor explained, acknowledging that "[t]he big steel men here just about own the place, so we can't.") Gossip ("a wedding . . . in high society," "the visit of a celebrity"), and violence or tragedy of a purely personal-seeming, irrelevant-to-the-"big picture" nature ("[s]uicides, occasional drownings, a brawl in a saloon"), were "the pabulum on which the local readers were fed." If there was some acknowledgement of weightier matters it had to be consistent with the line of the masters ("labor or the unions" spoken of in terms of makers of "unholy anarchistic demands," for example). But above all they wanted "idle feature stuff which they could use in place of news and still interest their readers."
"Idle feature stuff in place of news."
Not news, but a substitute for news intended to be acceptable to the powerful.
"So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!" Dreiser quipped while describing the constraints under which he and his colleagues had to work.
So much for a free press in America, A.D. 2024, one may say today, as the mainstream of that media barrages us with what is less news than a substitute for news, even where it may seem most like it is presenting us with news--helped by the inability or unwillingness of so many of those who would regard themselves as intelligent and educated to tell the difference between the campaign horse-race crapola" the media love so much, and coverage of what really matters in public life, or recognize the muddling of the insight that the personal is political and vice-versa that enables the media to pass off the shabbiest of personal scandal as material worthy of dominating the headlines. Meanwhile the editorial line would not seem to have changed one iota, the news editors groveling before the robber barons of our times just as they did in Dreiser's day.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Theodore Dreiser and How People Really Feel About Work
In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser observes at one point that "after security, nothing seems to be so important or so desirable to the human organism as rest, or at least ease," and acknowledges that "[t]he one thing that the life force seems to desire to escape is work." It is a thing too rarely admitted--because since the beginning of civilization, even as those in power have been distinguished by their freedom from the obligation to work and indeed showing off that freedom, the obligation to toil has traditionally been recognized as something inimical to a dignified and full and truly human existence, and humans not born to that privilege that allows for such an existence have always clawed and struggled after the privilege of not working and looked upon those who did not succeed in that as unworthy (those lacking a "competence" literally "incompetent"), acknowledgment of the desire to not work as natural has been anathema to those in power given that their not working has required having the slaves work for them, the more willingly the better. Indeed, that desire of the individual for ease rather than toil is so contrary to how society has been organized for millennia, and especially to the prevailing "schema of values" in the modern, capitalist, world (which ceaselessly tells those who work most for least that a lifetime of alienated labor and little if anything else is what is right and good for them, and they are scum if they question anything at all about the arrangement), that Dreiser can quip that "[o]ne would think that man had been invented against his will by some malign power" which "harried" the species "along ways and to tasks against which his soul revolted and to which his strength was not equal."
The rare lack of hypocrisy about such things is one of the book's most attractive traits--and I think critical to his ability to produce a masterpiece like An American Tragedy.
Meanwhile the rarity of that lack of hypocrisy is why, almost a century on, that book remains not some musty classic of sole interest to those whose reading list is driven by what was historically important, but strikes many who pick it up now as all too relevant in a world that, contrary to what Dreiser hoped later in life, has changed very little since his day.
The rare lack of hypocrisy about such things is one of the book's most attractive traits--and I think critical to his ability to produce a masterpiece like An American Tragedy.
Meanwhile the rarity of that lack of hypocrisy is why, almost a century on, that book remains not some musty classic of sole interest to those whose reading list is driven by what was historically important, but strikes many who pick it up now as all too relevant in a world that, contrary to what Dreiser hoped later in life, has changed very little since his day.
Theodore Dreiser on Natalism
In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser, reflecting upon his romantic outlook during the courtship of a woman who later became his wife, declares that the "world . . . has trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma," not least "rules . . . all calculated for the guidance of individuals in connection with the propagation and rearing of children, the conquest and development of this planet." Is there no more to life than that? Dreiser asks. What about those of us who are simply not interested in participating in that project, especially on the monogamous terms that he criticizes as possibly repressive ("Is it everybody's business to get married?" he wonders), but perhaps on any terms at all, for ? "[c]annot the world have too much of mere breeding? Are two billion wage slaves . . . more advantageous than one billion, or one billion more than five hundred million?"
Indeed, Dreiser saw in this treatment of reproduction as central in life as devaluing much else--as with the value of "the mere contact of love" that "produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even" as against the "raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes," the sustenance of what we would today call the "prime working age" labor supply and the age cohorts suitable for military service that are really the concern of elites for whom, in an age of democratic hypocrisy, the broad population is merely a means for their ends of profit-making and the success in realpolitik power games crucial to it.
In recent years the matter of natalism has become topical again--but it is reflective of the tenor of today's politics, and especially its "cultural warfare," that few of those questioning the exhortations to have more children in anything like this way, the dialogue as cowardly as it is dumbed down and disoriented by the phantoms of contemporary imagination.
Indeed, Dreiser saw in this treatment of reproduction as central in life as devaluing much else--as with the value of "the mere contact of love" that "produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even" as against the "raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes," the sustenance of what we would today call the "prime working age" labor supply and the age cohorts suitable for military service that are really the concern of elites for whom, in an age of democratic hypocrisy, the broad population is merely a means for their ends of profit-making and the success in realpolitik power games crucial to it.
In recent years the matter of natalism has become topical again--but it is reflective of the tenor of today's politics, and especially its "cultural warfare," that few of those questioning the exhortations to have more children in anything like this way, the dialogue as cowardly as it is dumbed down and disoriented by the phantoms of contemporary imagination.
The Non-Conformist in the Conformist Crowd: Some Thoughts on Theodore Dreiser's Youth
As Theodore Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself draws to its close Dreiser remarks "the professional optimists and yea-sayers, chorus-like in character" who were "constantly engaged in the pleasing task of emphasizing the possibilities of success, progress, strength . . . for all, in America and elsewhere," all while "humbly and sycophantically genuflecting before the strong, the lucky, the prosperous," and how he felt himself constantly oppressed by a sense of being surrounded by apparent believers in that propaganda in which he could not bring himself to believe. Instead of throwing himself into the "fierce contest" of success-striving with the cheer and gusto society demanded of its young men he saw it as a hateful thing and regarded his participation as an unfortunate necessity for which he had no enthusiasm, and fewer hopes, never feeling very good about his chances. Considering the difference he speculated that "certain fortunate circumstances attending their youth and upbringing" made for optimism about the contest and their likely outcome in it--many of them having had more privileged backgrounds than he ("at least a dozen" of his peers at the newspaper where he was working "swaggering about in the best of clothes, their manners those of a graduate of Yale or Harvard or Princeton," which made it the easier for "their minds [to be] stuffed with all the noble maxims of the uplifters"). If with less evident confidence, he wondered, too, if part of the difference lay not in a lack in himself but in a lack in those others, particularly a lack of insight into realities of the world of which he already knew something.
It seems to me that there is a great deal of truth in Dreiser's view--those who have been less privileged less likely than others to "succeed," and generally knowing it; while those who have been less sheltered from life's vicissitudes, and who are the more introspective and questioning of the world around them, are likely to have a harder time accommodating themselves to "the battle" by which the preachers of get-ahead conformism set such great store, the more in as they know the odds are terrible for anyone, and against them that much more. They may have a harder time accommodating themselves to it, too, because they have a clearer idea of what they really want out of life, as against what society tells them to want, and requires them to say to themselves and others they want (the more in as the fittingly named "Rat Race" is such a dehumanizing and ugly thing for all involved). Dreiser knew that he had none of the taste for the contest itself that so many hypocritically affect (again, to themselves as to others), and really desired only the rewards of really grand success in the contest, the attainment of which he knew were an extreme longshot for everyone, but especially someone like him without any head start in the race--position, status, wealth, security, ease.
For such persons that propaganda that, as Lawrence's Willie Struthers had it, endeavors to instill in every donkey the faith that he will be the one donkey in the five thousand to actually get the carrot with which they are all being made to pull capitalism's big cart, that, as Upton Sinclair had it, tells every one of the little fish they will be the one to grow into a pike, does not satisfy and fails to take--making the endurance of the contest that much less bearable. And as it happened, even if Dreiser tells us that as he thought these thoughts he was "not in the mood of one who runs away from a grueling contest," the reality was that he was not long for the newspaper game, his involvement with which terminated just a few pages later. Just as the book begins with the start of Dreiser's career as a journalist, it closes with the end of that career--but also the earliest beginning of that other career for which we really remember him, as a novelist who produced some of the greatest novels of American literary history, above all the justly celebrated An American Tragedy. It seems to me that Dreiser's self-knowledge here, which made his continuing in the path of a newspaperman so difficult, was an enormous asset there, without which he could never have given the world his masterpiece--all as his insights into his own condition seem to me all too relevant in a society where the chorus of the professional optimists and yea-sayers and sycophants of what society so euphemistically calls the "successful" dominate popular thinking as much as ever they did, the more in as, in this era, so many young people seem to be challenging that "conventional wisdom" in a way they have not done in a long time.
It seems to me that there is a great deal of truth in Dreiser's view--those who have been less privileged less likely than others to "succeed," and generally knowing it; while those who have been less sheltered from life's vicissitudes, and who are the more introspective and questioning of the world around them, are likely to have a harder time accommodating themselves to "the battle" by which the preachers of get-ahead conformism set such great store, the more in as they know the odds are terrible for anyone, and against them that much more. They may have a harder time accommodating themselves to it, too, because they have a clearer idea of what they really want out of life, as against what society tells them to want, and requires them to say to themselves and others they want (the more in as the fittingly named "Rat Race" is such a dehumanizing and ugly thing for all involved). Dreiser knew that he had none of the taste for the contest itself that so many hypocritically affect (again, to themselves as to others), and really desired only the rewards of really grand success in the contest, the attainment of which he knew were an extreme longshot for everyone, but especially someone like him without any head start in the race--position, status, wealth, security, ease.
For such persons that propaganda that, as Lawrence's Willie Struthers had it, endeavors to instill in every donkey the faith that he will be the one donkey in the five thousand to actually get the carrot with which they are all being made to pull capitalism's big cart, that, as Upton Sinclair had it, tells every one of the little fish they will be the one to grow into a pike, does not satisfy and fails to take--making the endurance of the contest that much less bearable. And as it happened, even if Dreiser tells us that as he thought these thoughts he was "not in the mood of one who runs away from a grueling contest," the reality was that he was not long for the newspaper game, his involvement with which terminated just a few pages later. Just as the book begins with the start of Dreiser's career as a journalist, it closes with the end of that career--but also the earliest beginning of that other career for which we really remember him, as a novelist who produced some of the greatest novels of American literary history, above all the justly celebrated An American Tragedy. It seems to me that Dreiser's self-knowledge here, which made his continuing in the path of a newspaperman so difficult, was an enormous asset there, without which he could never have given the world his masterpiece--all as his insights into his own condition seem to me all too relevant in a society where the chorus of the professional optimists and yea-sayers and sycophants of what society so euphemistically calls the "successful" dominate popular thinking as much as ever they did, the more in as, in this era, so many young people seem to be challenging that "conventional wisdom" in a way they have not done in a long time.
Book Review: A Book About Myself, by Theodore Dreiser
Presented with a book by Theodore Dreiser titled A Book About Myself published in 1922 one may, especially given its running to over five hundred pages in hardback, expect to read of Dreiser's life up to that point. One may regard that book as thus failing to cover much of what many of those likely to be interested in Dreiser's life might want to read about--the publication of his most important novel, An American Tragedy, still three years away, all as such episodes as his trip to the Soviet Union, investigation of the events of the Harlan County war, and much, much else all came after this time. Still, one might expect the first half century of Dreiser's life (1871-1945) that saw him become established as an important literary figure long before 1922.
Instead the book actually deals with just a very few years of Dreiser's youth--those few years in the early 1890s during which he pursued a career as a journalist, and not incidentally ends at a point at which his literary efforts were still very nascent. I was initially disappointed to find this out, and wondered whether Dreiser could really have to say so very much about his relatively brief journalistic career as to justify the book's length. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dreiser did, that the book indeed had a great deal of interest as a "portrait of the artist as a young man" and of his times precisely because he was a junior reporter in the emergent urban, industrialized, America of the Gilded Age, all as the media world was well on its way to taking on something like the shape we know. The young Dreiser may not have broken or covered any stories of world-historical importance, but reading this book after The Brass Check I was fascinated by just how much his personal story bore out what Sinclair had to say about the newspaper business in that day--how people got into the business that seems astonishingly casual today in our era of pompously "professionalized" journalism, the cynical outlook reporters quickly acquired in part because of the ugliness of what they saw on a day to day basis and in part because of the contrast between what they saw and what got put into the paper, the pettiness of the rivalries between competing papers, the general texture of life inside such an operation. Reporters just plain made things up as a matter of course, and for the most trivial reasons, with the fact quite significant in the author's story when Dreiser, who had taken the job of drama critic at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, finding himself in an untenable position after the reviews of three plays he made up got published--after the performances were canceled, giving the game away! And what the reporters did not simply "make up" was often no better, Dreiser learning early on "the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed," as even the public spirited-seeming exposes of genuine corruption proved part of some sleazy agenda. (Thus did it go with Dreiser's experience on Chicago's Globe, owned by a politician and businessman whose business, significantly, was vice--who used a campaign by that paper against the fake "auction houses" in the city to settle a political score.)
Fascinating, too, was what Dreiser's book revealed about Dreiser's outlook on life in his youth, precisely because of how surprising much of it was at first glance--and then not so very surprising after all. The great naturalist who gave the world An American Tragedy was quite the romantic in his earlier days, looking at the scenes that were to inspire Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and in spite of the undeniable depravity and ugliness in them being taken with the color and vibrancy of the panorama of which they were part (writing of the squalor and luxury, misery and pleasure together as "a great orchestra in a tumult of noble harmonies" that left him "like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of ecstasy.") Still, as he tells us, exposed to the poverty and social ills around him, even before becoming a newspaperman, "the miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion fascinated me." If "Darwin, Spencer, Wallace" were only "within the verge of [his] intuition" rather than his "exact knowledge," what little he knew of them may nonetheless have helped him to the view "that man is the victim of forces over which he has no control." Later Dreiser got to know the work of Spencer (among many, many others) rather more deeply, persuading him the more fully of that in ways that seem to have been increasingly critical to his thinking as time went on.
Striking, too, was how much of the stuff of his life seemed to anticipate the path his characters would walk. Here we have an image of a young man who had a stern, narrow, none too comfortable upbringing under a religious yet ineffectual father amid the luxuries and pleasures of a great modern metropolis, fascinated by and drawn to them and frustrated by his inability to do more than look upon them as others enjoyed them--all while learning how compromising of oneself just getting through the day can be. We see that young man, who had already seen a sister run off with a lover, find his family life increasingly burdensome and oppressive and leave it to pursue his own path as he is tormented by a great yet vague ambition for those things not given to him, and find himself all alone in a different city, and lonely. We see him dream of the company of desirable women, and fancy himself meeting "some gorgeous maiden, rich, beautiful, socially elect, who was to solve all his troubles for him," but also become infatuated with a girl of humbler background and rather conventional views who will not let him have her favors outside of marriage, and find himself losing interest in her but not altogether able to escape the entanglement. We even see him depart one of the great cities of Missouri where it seems to him he can no longer stay for a journey by stages north and east toward New York, where a relative has made good and may be able to help him.
Thus was it all to go with Clyde Griffiths in his most famous tale--though besides the details of his life something else seemed very important, namely how much he wrote of his youthful desires and hopes, his frustrations and even his envies-- with great frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy. ("Other men had money; they need not thus go jerking about the world seeking a career . . . fret about the making of a bare living," he writes at one point, and that "[t]he ugly favoritism of life which piles comforts in the laps of some while snatching the smallest crumb of satisfaction from the lips of others" left him "in a black despair.") Indeed, he admits that when he finally got round to reading Balzac for himself that he could identify with a Eugene de Rastignac, think how very like himself a Lucien de Rubempre.
Such frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy are even rarer now than then in a culture in which not only the apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality are more legion and intolerant than ever, never failing to accuse the have-nots of every moral failing of which they can think when they express the most mild discontent with their lot in a highly unequal order, but those who pretend to be progressive snarl accusations of "entitlement" and "privilege" at every utterance of frustration (the more in as their thoughts, like Dreiser's, are not always chaste in the ways demanded by what that great admirer of Dreiser, David Walsh, has called the "New Puritanism" of our day).
It seems to me that it was all connected. Having early on had his mind broadened by his experiences and what he was able to gain from the intellectual currents of his time Dreiser had something more, much more, than the conventionalities of his upbringing and his culture by which to make sense of the world around him and his life in it--allowing him to be frank and sympathetic and lacking in hypocrisy as he looked at the less pleasant aspects of his world and his life in it. And that, in turn, was what enabled him to make of the stuff of the world around him and his life in it the masterpieces that, in spite of the sneers of orthodoxy-propounding critics, endure as important works a century later, all as those who responded to his truths with moralizing have been deservedly forgotten--as, one may imagine, their heirs too will be another century from now on.
Instead the book actually deals with just a very few years of Dreiser's youth--those few years in the early 1890s during which he pursued a career as a journalist, and not incidentally ends at a point at which his literary efforts were still very nascent. I was initially disappointed to find this out, and wondered whether Dreiser could really have to say so very much about his relatively brief journalistic career as to justify the book's length. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dreiser did, that the book indeed had a great deal of interest as a "portrait of the artist as a young man" and of his times precisely because he was a junior reporter in the emergent urban, industrialized, America of the Gilded Age, all as the media world was well on its way to taking on something like the shape we know. The young Dreiser may not have broken or covered any stories of world-historical importance, but reading this book after The Brass Check I was fascinated by just how much his personal story bore out what Sinclair had to say about the newspaper business in that day--how people got into the business that seems astonishingly casual today in our era of pompously "professionalized" journalism, the cynical outlook reporters quickly acquired in part because of the ugliness of what they saw on a day to day basis and in part because of the contrast between what they saw and what got put into the paper, the pettiness of the rivalries between competing papers, the general texture of life inside such an operation. Reporters just plain made things up as a matter of course, and for the most trivial reasons, with the fact quite significant in the author's story when Dreiser, who had taken the job of drama critic at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, finding himself in an untenable position after the reviews of three plays he made up got published--after the performances were canceled, giving the game away! And what the reporters did not simply "make up" was often no better, Dreiser learning early on "the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed," as even the public spirited-seeming exposes of genuine corruption proved part of some sleazy agenda. (Thus did it go with Dreiser's experience on Chicago's Globe, owned by a politician and businessman whose business, significantly, was vice--who used a campaign by that paper against the fake "auction houses" in the city to settle a political score.)
Fascinating, too, was what Dreiser's book revealed about Dreiser's outlook on life in his youth, precisely because of how surprising much of it was at first glance--and then not so very surprising after all. The great naturalist who gave the world An American Tragedy was quite the romantic in his earlier days, looking at the scenes that were to inspire Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and in spite of the undeniable depravity and ugliness in them being taken with the color and vibrancy of the panorama of which they were part (writing of the squalor and luxury, misery and pleasure together as "a great orchestra in a tumult of noble harmonies" that left him "like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of ecstasy.") Still, as he tells us, exposed to the poverty and social ills around him, even before becoming a newspaperman, "the miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion fascinated me." If "Darwin, Spencer, Wallace" were only "within the verge of [his] intuition" rather than his "exact knowledge," what little he knew of them may nonetheless have helped him to the view "that man is the victim of forces over which he has no control." Later Dreiser got to know the work of Spencer (among many, many others) rather more deeply, persuading him the more fully of that in ways that seem to have been increasingly critical to his thinking as time went on.
Striking, too, was how much of the stuff of his life seemed to anticipate the path his characters would walk. Here we have an image of a young man who had a stern, narrow, none too comfortable upbringing under a religious yet ineffectual father amid the luxuries and pleasures of a great modern metropolis, fascinated by and drawn to them and frustrated by his inability to do more than look upon them as others enjoyed them--all while learning how compromising of oneself just getting through the day can be. We see that young man, who had already seen a sister run off with a lover, find his family life increasingly burdensome and oppressive and leave it to pursue his own path as he is tormented by a great yet vague ambition for those things not given to him, and find himself all alone in a different city, and lonely. We see him dream of the company of desirable women, and fancy himself meeting "some gorgeous maiden, rich, beautiful, socially elect, who was to solve all his troubles for him," but also become infatuated with a girl of humbler background and rather conventional views who will not let him have her favors outside of marriage, and find himself losing interest in her but not altogether able to escape the entanglement. We even see him depart one of the great cities of Missouri where it seems to him he can no longer stay for a journey by stages north and east toward New York, where a relative has made good and may be able to help him.
Thus was it all to go with Clyde Griffiths in his most famous tale--though besides the details of his life something else seemed very important, namely how much he wrote of his youthful desires and hopes, his frustrations and even his envies-- with great frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy. ("Other men had money; they need not thus go jerking about the world seeking a career . . . fret about the making of a bare living," he writes at one point, and that "[t]he ugly favoritism of life which piles comforts in the laps of some while snatching the smallest crumb of satisfaction from the lips of others" left him "in a black despair.") Indeed, he admits that when he finally got round to reading Balzac for himself that he could identify with a Eugene de Rastignac, think how very like himself a Lucien de Rubempre.
Such frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy are even rarer now than then in a culture in which not only the apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality are more legion and intolerant than ever, never failing to accuse the have-nots of every moral failing of which they can think when they express the most mild discontent with their lot in a highly unequal order, but those who pretend to be progressive snarl accusations of "entitlement" and "privilege" at every utterance of frustration (the more in as their thoughts, like Dreiser's, are not always chaste in the ways demanded by what that great admirer of Dreiser, David Walsh, has called the "New Puritanism" of our day).
It seems to me that it was all connected. Having early on had his mind broadened by his experiences and what he was able to gain from the intellectual currents of his time Dreiser had something more, much more, than the conventionalities of his upbringing and his culture by which to make sense of the world around him and his life in it--allowing him to be frank and sympathetic and lacking in hypocrisy as he looked at the less pleasant aspects of his world and his life in it. And that, in turn, was what enabled him to make of the stuff of the world around him and his life in it the masterpieces that, in spite of the sneers of orthodoxy-propounding critics, endure as important works a century later, all as those who responded to his truths with moralizing have been deservedly forgotten--as, one may imagine, their heirs too will be another century from now on.
D.H. Lawrence's Willie Struthers on Aspirationalism
The Modernist D.H. Lawrence, like his colleagues T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, was in politics a man of the far right, and indeed, in his propensity for irrationalism and anti-rationalism, hostility to democracy and freedom, worship of subordination and of "powerful" leaders, essentially a fasicst. Still, if he was against the left through and through there was one time when he had a character rather articulately, even memorably, express some of the ideas of the left--not as the right satirizes them, but as they actually are--in one of his less well-known novels, Kangaroo (1923). The occasion is socialist Willie Struthers' monologue in which he characterizes the working class in a capitalist society as having "been brought up in a kind of fetish worship" ordinarily associated with "tribes of savages," with the latterday equivalent of "witch-doctors" the Establishment's propagandists.
Said witch-doctors "thump on their tom-tom drums and overawe us and tak[ing] us in" with the message of aspirationalism, of individuals lifting themselves up their bootstraps into the ranks of their "betters," which alas "educated men . . . see through," but which "[t]he working man can't see through." As Struthers points out, the reality is that the working class can't all do it because the wealth and privilege of each individual who enjoys wealth and privilege derives them from the exploitation of many others; because, as Struthers puts it, "for every one that gets on, you must have five hundred fresh slavers and toilers to produce" what he calls, very significantly, "the graft," because those who preach aspirationalism themselves know it, and use it to the System's ends. As Struthers explains, "[t]empt all men to get on, and it's like holding a carrot in front of five thousand asses all harnessed to your machine. One ass gets the carrot, and all the others have done your pulling for you." Thus does the whole graft go on and on, with perhaps one out of hundreds, or more, "getting on" and becoming the kind of success story of which the "witch-doctors" love to fuss so much, cynically holding them up as an example to the rest--and ignoring all those who did not get to live out the story of "rags to riches," who began in rags and after much struggle and striving remained in rags, those other four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine donkeys who did not get the carrot, who strained with all their might and as well as any other donnkey and in the process greatly profited their "betters" without receiving the reward, and left leading lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation by the fact.
One may quibble over some of the details, or at least their reelvance to our time. Struthers has college professors in mind when he speaks of the "witch-doctors." Today, if it seems undeniable that many a professor does just this, along with the quasi-professors of the think tanks and "educational foundations" and the rest, I think we might think of a great number of occupational categories before that--like the "self-help gurus" who befoul the bestseller lists with their drivel, or the pseudo-religious hucksters plying the same trade as they promise the success-chasing that, as Elmer Gantry put it, "God'll help you make good!"--and of course politicians who are not all of the tidily labeled right (and not just in America, with a Tony Blair or Keir Starmer of Britain's "New Labour" very much of this type). Still, Struthers' monologue seems to me to otherwise hold up very well as a succinct expression of the critical view of aspirational propaganda that a left-leaning person who actually thinks about the matter much for long can hardly avoid taking.
Said witch-doctors "thump on their tom-tom drums and overawe us and tak[ing] us in" with the message of aspirationalism, of individuals lifting themselves up their bootstraps into the ranks of their "betters," which alas "educated men . . . see through," but which "[t]he working man can't see through." As Struthers points out, the reality is that the working class can't all do it because the wealth and privilege of each individual who enjoys wealth and privilege derives them from the exploitation of many others; because, as Struthers puts it, "for every one that gets on, you must have five hundred fresh slavers and toilers to produce" what he calls, very significantly, "the graft," because those who preach aspirationalism themselves know it, and use it to the System's ends. As Struthers explains, "[t]empt all men to get on, and it's like holding a carrot in front of five thousand asses all harnessed to your machine. One ass gets the carrot, and all the others have done your pulling for you." Thus does the whole graft go on and on, with perhaps one out of hundreds, or more, "getting on" and becoming the kind of success story of which the "witch-doctors" love to fuss so much, cynically holding them up as an example to the rest--and ignoring all those who did not get to live out the story of "rags to riches," who began in rags and after much struggle and striving remained in rags, those other four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine donkeys who did not get the carrot, who strained with all their might and as well as any other donnkey and in the process greatly profited their "betters" without receiving the reward, and left leading lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation by the fact.
One may quibble over some of the details, or at least their reelvance to our time. Struthers has college professors in mind when he speaks of the "witch-doctors." Today, if it seems undeniable that many a professor does just this, along with the quasi-professors of the think tanks and "educational foundations" and the rest, I think we might think of a great number of occupational categories before that--like the "self-help gurus" who befoul the bestseller lists with their drivel, or the pseudo-religious hucksters plying the same trade as they promise the success-chasing that, as Elmer Gantry put it, "God'll help you make good!"--and of course politicians who are not all of the tidily labeled right (and not just in America, with a Tony Blair or Keir Starmer of Britain's "New Labour" very much of this type). Still, Struthers' monologue seems to me to otherwise hold up very well as a succinct expression of the critical view of aspirational propaganda that a left-leaning person who actually thinks about the matter much for long can hardly avoid taking.
The Decline of the Midwest, Again
Some years ago I wrote here about how prominent the Midwest was in American culture in the early twentieth century--as a subject of literature, for example--and how it has been less conspicuous that way since.
Certainly there has been a correlation between the Midwest's representation, and real, material changes. Recently checking the numbers I found that circa 1900 35 percent of the "resident population" of the continental U.S. (the "Lower Forty-Eight") lived in the twelve states the U.S. Census Bureau designates as making up the Midwest. The figure has trended downward since, such that if it was still 30 percent in the 1940s, after 2018 it slipped below the 21 percent mark.
It is a big drop, and one might add, has testified to economic decline. The time series' on Gross Domestic Product by state, alas, do not go back very far, but we do have figures for personal income going back to 1929. From 1929 to 1979 per capita income in the Midwest averaged 101 percent of the U.S. total, with the figure especially high in the 1940s and early 1950s--105 percent in 1947-1953, and still 101 percent in 1977-1979. However, the trend since then has been steadily downward as well, with per capita personal income in the Midwest 94 percent of the U.S. figure in 2016-2023.
In short, the Midwest as a whole went from being relatively rich to being relatively poor, with the shift arguably the greater because it was relatively rich in a time when the country was booming, and relatively poor when the country was stagnating or even declining. One should also note that the average conceals important disparities. The more agricultural states--a Kansas, for example--were historically poorer, and if still poorer than average by this metric, may be said to be less so. However, those states most associated with manufacturing may be said to have suffered especially severe changes of fortune. In 1929-1979 Michigan's per capita personal income was 107 percent that of the national figure, and in 1941-1955 actually 111 percent in 1977-1979 its per capita personal income was still a relatively high 104 percent. However, the state has suffered a long decline since, its figure 88 percent in 2006-2023, and 87 percent in 2021-2023, the state gone from being relatively rich to relatively poor by regional as well as national standards. The situation is comparable in Ohio, which was richer than average until the mid-1960s, with a per capita personal income 106 percent the national figure in 1929-1979, and 107 percent the national figure in 1941-1955, but slipped below the 94 percent mark about the turn of the century, so as to average 90 percent of the national figure in 2006-2023, and 89 percent in 2018-2023.
Indeed, checking the numbers only confirms what many have observed but which many also prefer to deny, namely that the decline of the country's manufacturing base has hit this region, and particularly its more industrialized states, in ways from which they have not recovered, and indeed, which may be getting worse in spite of the "post-industrial" and "New Economy" drivel so beloved of the neoliberal crowd that, in spite of the hopes of some of their critics, still remains in command of the political platforms and still establishes the "conventional wisdom" about economic matters.
Certainly there has been a correlation between the Midwest's representation, and real, material changes. Recently checking the numbers I found that circa 1900 35 percent of the "resident population" of the continental U.S. (the "Lower Forty-Eight") lived in the twelve states the U.S. Census Bureau designates as making up the Midwest. The figure has trended downward since, such that if it was still 30 percent in the 1940s, after 2018 it slipped below the 21 percent mark.
It is a big drop, and one might add, has testified to economic decline. The time series' on Gross Domestic Product by state, alas, do not go back very far, but we do have figures for personal income going back to 1929. From 1929 to 1979 per capita income in the Midwest averaged 101 percent of the U.S. total, with the figure especially high in the 1940s and early 1950s--105 percent in 1947-1953, and still 101 percent in 1977-1979. However, the trend since then has been steadily downward as well, with per capita personal income in the Midwest 94 percent of the U.S. figure in 2016-2023.
In short, the Midwest as a whole went from being relatively rich to being relatively poor, with the shift arguably the greater because it was relatively rich in a time when the country was booming, and relatively poor when the country was stagnating or even declining. One should also note that the average conceals important disparities. The more agricultural states--a Kansas, for example--were historically poorer, and if still poorer than average by this metric, may be said to be less so. However, those states most associated with manufacturing may be said to have suffered especially severe changes of fortune. In 1929-1979 Michigan's per capita personal income was 107 percent that of the national figure, and in 1941-1955 actually 111 percent in 1977-1979 its per capita personal income was still a relatively high 104 percent. However, the state has suffered a long decline since, its figure 88 percent in 2006-2023, and 87 percent in 2021-2023, the state gone from being relatively rich to relatively poor by regional as well as national standards. The situation is comparable in Ohio, which was richer than average until the mid-1960s, with a per capita personal income 106 percent the national figure in 1929-1979, and 107 percent the national figure in 1941-1955, but slipped below the 94 percent mark about the turn of the century, so as to average 90 percent of the national figure in 2006-2023, and 89 percent in 2018-2023.
Indeed, checking the numbers only confirms what many have observed but which many also prefer to deny, namely that the decline of the country's manufacturing base has hit this region, and particularly its more industrialized states, in ways from which they have not recovered, and indeed, which may be getting worse in spite of the "post-industrial" and "New Economy" drivel so beloved of the neoliberal crowd that, in spite of the hopes of some of their critics, still remains in command of the political platforms and still establishes the "conventional wisdom" about economic matters.
What the Propaganda for Silicon Valley is Really All About
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.
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.
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).
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