If I found E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime a less than wholly satisfying work it still had its points of interest, not least in its portrayal of actress and model Evelyn Nesbit, whom Doctorow describes to us as, as a result of the publicity accorded her in the wake of the murder of a lover by her husband, having become "the inspiration for the concept of the movie star system and every sex goddess from Theda Bara to Marilyn Monroe." What was key here was "a process of magnification [that] established" the individual in question "in the public consciousness as larger than life," with this significantly tied to their "represent[ing] one desirable human characteristic to the exclusion of all others."
As the choice of words indicates--"goddess," "larger than life"--mythmaking is involved, inseparable from the one-dimensionality of a figure seeming to "represent one . . . characteristic to the exclusion of all others" (for such simplification is what myth by definition offers).
Considering the decline of the star and the celebrity in our time it seems to me significant that such mythmaking was easier in a more controlled media world--like that of the old studio system with its contract players--and a culture which was more accommodating of certain forms of one-dimensionality. Many a current in today's cultural politics runs against that. (Certainly the prevailing politics of identity cannot abide any such concept as "the sex goddess," while the idea of an actor embodying such a characteristic as "machismo" or "sophistication" is scarcely less problematic for respecters of that conventional wisdom.) Meanwhile the exaltation of "relatability," at times taken to ridiculous extremes, does so as well, as we see when born-rich actors say nothing about the silver spoons they grew up, just that minimum wage job they worked for a week before they landed the gig that meant they never needed a "real job" again.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Why Are So Many Domestic Box Office Hits Doing So "Poorly" Overseas?
Variety recently published an article noting that a good many recent cinematic hits in North America have underperformed in the international market. It seems to me that the observation is valid (especially when we remember that in cases the underperformance is only relative, the international earnings of the Beetlejuice sequel or Wicked only appearing low relative to their North American success) the analysis, if quite rightly acknowledging the declining access Hollywood enjoys to the hugely important Chinese market (and the Russian market too), and in a cursory way too the reality that there are other film industries out there competing with them for the international audience in a way that they aren't for the North American filmgoer, suffers from the deficiencies one would expect of what is so much an "Establishment" publication in movieland, having about it a great whiff of entitlement that reminds one of just how much Hollywood takes the international audience for granted. For that reason I think it worth raising the following three factors plausibly at work in this situation, the first at best partially acknowledged in the article, the latter two not acknowledged at all.
1. Some genres "travel better" than others. The most obvious case is the big sci-fi action films and animated family spectacles. Entirely consistent with the pattern the examples of the type that did well in North America did well overseas. The year's biggest live-action hit, Deadpool & Wolverine, picked up $700 million internationally atop its $600 million domestic gross--while Dune Part 2, Godzilla, Gladiator 2, Venom 3 and Alien: Romulus considerably bettered their domestic performance in the international market. So did it go with films like Inside Out 2, which broke the billion-dollar barrier internationally (on top of making over $600 million in North America), all as Despicable Me 4 and Moana 2 (and on a lesser scale, Kung Fu Panda 4) have similarly done well by this measure. However, the absolute top ranks of the North American charts this year have been a little thinner on really big action movies this year than usual. The result has been that the kinds of movies that don't travel as well have been more than usually well-represented here--as with those top ten hits Wicked, which in contrast with some musicals that do well globally didn't have a built-in global audience (compare it with the ABBA-based Mama Mia, which did over three-quarters of its business internationally), and the more than usually quirky comedy Beetlejuice 2, a sequel to a movie that, if a good solid hit in North America, made barely any money internationally.
2. Hollywood's unhingedly relentless exploitation of any and every franchise it can get its hands on is far along a path of diminishing returns, working with ever-older, more obscure, less promising material. Consider how this year saw sequels to Beetlejuice, Twister and Gladiator, all of them original films made 36, 28 and 24 years ago, respectively, with none of these films having been structured in such a way that anyone but a studio executive could say "This story must continue!"--with obvious implications for the interest of the public in a follow-up. In spite of that Beetlejuice was a robust performer in North America--but not internationally, where the original didn't make so much of a splash. Meanwhile Twisters was even less promising material internationally (and even as domestic hits go, far from being as successful as the original, such that there has been a fair amount of politicized spin on the part of the media), and Gladiator 2, when compared with the real terms gross of the original or the expectations for a reasonable return on a $250 million+ production, the movie has not been all that might have been hoped for anywhere. Thus has it also gone with, for example, Ghostbusters and Mad Max's further milking of their old franchises.
3. If the more publicly available data about international filmgoing is more limited and fragmentary than that for North America, there are still signs of the contraction and fickleness seen in North America being evident there as well. In North America, pre-Great Recession, Americans "went to the movies" 4-5 times a year, and still 3-4 times a year in the decade after. By contrast in 2022, 2023 and 2024 they went about twice a year--while elsewhere moviegoing had less way to fall. (The average in Germany and Japan was closer to one trip a year than two even before the pandemic.) At the same time it is plausible that just like Americans international audiences are getting tired of seeing the same genres and franchises and material generally over and over again, so that not only is the overall market shrinking, but something a little more idiosyncratic and more deeply appealing is required to bring them to theaters. As we saw last year, just as the Super Mario Bros., Barbie, Oppenheimer, Five Nights at Freddy's brought out filmgoers in North America while the superhero movies (Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2, The Flash) and the spy-fi (Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible) and much else supposedly reliable material disappointed, so did it go across the world (with, indeed, the international success of the weighty and unconventional Oppenheimer especially striking). Alas, the idea that Hollywood may have to get a little more creative, dialing back on the "tentpoles" as it makes smaller bets on smaller projects with a narrower but deeper appeal, is not one that it wants to hear--and thus one its courtiers are disinclined to acknowledge, especially as we head into a 2025 with a release slate in line with "business as usual," and thus very likely to put their preferred way of doing business to a severe test.
1. Some genres "travel better" than others. The most obvious case is the big sci-fi action films and animated family spectacles. Entirely consistent with the pattern the examples of the type that did well in North America did well overseas. The year's biggest live-action hit, Deadpool & Wolverine, picked up $700 million internationally atop its $600 million domestic gross--while Dune Part 2, Godzilla, Gladiator 2, Venom 3 and Alien: Romulus considerably bettered their domestic performance in the international market. So did it go with films like Inside Out 2, which broke the billion-dollar barrier internationally (on top of making over $600 million in North America), all as Despicable Me 4 and Moana 2 (and on a lesser scale, Kung Fu Panda 4) have similarly done well by this measure. However, the absolute top ranks of the North American charts this year have been a little thinner on really big action movies this year than usual. The result has been that the kinds of movies that don't travel as well have been more than usually well-represented here--as with those top ten hits Wicked, which in contrast with some musicals that do well globally didn't have a built-in global audience (compare it with the ABBA-based Mama Mia, which did over three-quarters of its business internationally), and the more than usually quirky comedy Beetlejuice 2, a sequel to a movie that, if a good solid hit in North America, made barely any money internationally.
2. Hollywood's unhingedly relentless exploitation of any and every franchise it can get its hands on is far along a path of diminishing returns, working with ever-older, more obscure, less promising material. Consider how this year saw sequels to Beetlejuice, Twister and Gladiator, all of them original films made 36, 28 and 24 years ago, respectively, with none of these films having been structured in such a way that anyone but a studio executive could say "This story must continue!"--with obvious implications for the interest of the public in a follow-up. In spite of that Beetlejuice was a robust performer in North America--but not internationally, where the original didn't make so much of a splash. Meanwhile Twisters was even less promising material internationally (and even as domestic hits go, far from being as successful as the original, such that there has been a fair amount of politicized spin on the part of the media), and Gladiator 2, when compared with the real terms gross of the original or the expectations for a reasonable return on a $250 million+ production, the movie has not been all that might have been hoped for anywhere. Thus has it also gone with, for example, Ghostbusters and Mad Max's further milking of their old franchises.
3. If the more publicly available data about international filmgoing is more limited and fragmentary than that for North America, there are still signs of the contraction and fickleness seen in North America being evident there as well. In North America, pre-Great Recession, Americans "went to the movies" 4-5 times a year, and still 3-4 times a year in the decade after. By contrast in 2022, 2023 and 2024 they went about twice a year--while elsewhere moviegoing had less way to fall. (The average in Germany and Japan was closer to one trip a year than two even before the pandemic.) At the same time it is plausible that just like Americans international audiences are getting tired of seeing the same genres and franchises and material generally over and over again, so that not only is the overall market shrinking, but something a little more idiosyncratic and more deeply appealing is required to bring them to theaters. As we saw last year, just as the Super Mario Bros., Barbie, Oppenheimer, Five Nights at Freddy's brought out filmgoers in North America while the superhero movies (Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2, The Flash) and the spy-fi (Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible) and much else supposedly reliable material disappointed, so did it go across the world (with, indeed, the international success of the weighty and unconventional Oppenheimer especially striking). Alas, the idea that Hollywood may have to get a little more creative, dialing back on the "tentpoles" as it makes smaller bets on smaller projects with a narrower but deeper appeal, is not one that it wants to hear--and thus one its courtiers are disinclined to acknowledge, especially as we head into a 2025 with a release slate in line with "business as usual," and thus very likely to put their preferred way of doing business to a severe test.
Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament: A Few Thoughts on the Likely Winners
Looking ahead to the Deadline Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament--the magazine's ranking of what movies were not the highest grossing but rather most profitable--it seems to me that in this year when so many movies made so little money it is easy to guess the taker of the #1 spot. That would be Inside Out 2, which grossed almost ten times its big $175 million budget (finishing up its run with just a little under $1.7 billion), with, of course, much more money coming from post-theatrical revenues, where Disney home entertainment tends to do particularly well, such that the net on this one being much under $700 million would be surprising given the way these things tend to go.
Guessing the taker of the #2 spot is a little trickier. Yes, Deadpool & Wolverine, if well behind the Inside Out sequel, was well ahead of everyone else in its box office take--but there are complicating factors. If the movie's combination of a $200 million budget with a $1.3 billion gross likewise guarantees a take far larger than the outlay for production and distribution the fact remains that Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's agents almost certainly demanded, and received, something out of it for their stars. The result is that the studio net might be a lot lower than it would otherwise have been. (Think, for instance, of what getting Tom Cruise back into the air cost Paramount when it made Top Gun 2.) Disney-Marvel has almost certainly done very well out of the movie regardless, but the point is that the margin of profit may be lowered just enough to give the third highest-grosser of the year so far, Despicable Me 4, a shot at edging it out of the #2 position on the list (or Moana 2 doing so, should it overtake Despicable Me before finishing its run, and push that movie down one place).
Past these uppermost spots the guessing game gets harder because in light of the outlays of money and the grosses the margins between success and failure, and between one film and another, get smaller. Still, some of the year's releases seem safe enough bets. The second half of Dune? The first part of Wicked? I'd be surprised if they didn't at least make the top ten, while I would hesitate to rule them out of the top five. Kung Fu Panda 4? Very plausibly. Beetlejuice 2 or Venom 3? Maybe. At the same time there are movies that the media has tended to portray as successes that I really don't expect to see there--like Twisters, given its combination of big budget and weak international earnings, and Gladiator 2, about which it seems that, skeptical as I was of that one from the first, I may still have been overly optimistic (imagining $600 million globally as having been within the range of possibility for the film)--and of course the notorious flop Furiosa. Instead of these I would expect to find some of those movies that between merely robust grosses and lower budgets made the list, with It Ends with Us still seeming to me to have a good chance of at least making the top ten, and Alien: Romulus maybe doing so as well.
Guessing the taker of the #2 spot is a little trickier. Yes, Deadpool & Wolverine, if well behind the Inside Out sequel, was well ahead of everyone else in its box office take--but there are complicating factors. If the movie's combination of a $200 million budget with a $1.3 billion gross likewise guarantees a take far larger than the outlay for production and distribution the fact remains that Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's agents almost certainly demanded, and received, something out of it for their stars. The result is that the studio net might be a lot lower than it would otherwise have been. (Think, for instance, of what getting Tom Cruise back into the air cost Paramount when it made Top Gun 2.) Disney-Marvel has almost certainly done very well out of the movie regardless, but the point is that the margin of profit may be lowered just enough to give the third highest-grosser of the year so far, Despicable Me 4, a shot at edging it out of the #2 position on the list (or Moana 2 doing so, should it overtake Despicable Me before finishing its run, and push that movie down one place).
Past these uppermost spots the guessing game gets harder because in light of the outlays of money and the grosses the margins between success and failure, and between one film and another, get smaller. Still, some of the year's releases seem safe enough bets. The second half of Dune? The first part of Wicked? I'd be surprised if they didn't at least make the top ten, while I would hesitate to rule them out of the top five. Kung Fu Panda 4? Very plausibly. Beetlejuice 2 or Venom 3? Maybe. At the same time there are movies that the media has tended to portray as successes that I really don't expect to see there--like Twisters, given its combination of big budget and weak international earnings, and Gladiator 2, about which it seems that, skeptical as I was of that one from the first, I may still have been overly optimistic (imagining $600 million globally as having been within the range of possibility for the film)--and of course the notorious flop Furiosa. Instead of these I would expect to find some of those movies that between merely robust grosses and lower budgets made the list, with It Ends with Us still seeming to me to have a good chance of at least making the top ten, and Alien: Romulus maybe doing so as well.
The Race for the 2025 Oscars: Some Thoughts
In some years the entertainment press positively buzzes with talk about the chances of film releases in "the Oscars race" from early on.
This was not one of those years.
Just as the year's shrunken slate of films enjoying wide releases was thin on really first-rank blockbusters (as the far from first-rank grosses show) it has been short on critical darlings--even by the standards of recent years that have seen the contenders for the more prestigious (Picture-Director-Actor-Writer) Oscars.
Consider those films from which something might have been hoped. The sequels to Best Picture winner Gladiator and Best Actor winner Joker? No one seems to have any expectations for them in these categories, with the same going for Alex Garland's Civil War. Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? It also seems unlikely to enjoy any recognition here, given how it flopped with critics as well as audiences. Mad Max: Fury Road was a Best Picture nominee, and Furiosa was well-liked by the critics, but this is the kind of movie that gets nominated more as a gesture toward what people actually watch than as a real competitor, and its having been a big flop will rule it out of recognition on those grounds--all as Kevin Costner's much-hyped Horizon saga suffered from both critical disappointment and public disinterest. Dune, Part Two may have a shot at a Best Picture nomination, but more because of the inclination to recognize at least something that made money than because it is a natural (the second half of the epic even less likely than the first to be a real Best Picture contender because it is basically a big action movie). Perhaps something will be offered Inside Out--though it should be remembered that critics liked the sequel less than they did the Best Screenplay-nominated original.
So what's left among the bigger releases of the year? There is that other Timothée Chalamet film A Complete Unknown, which as a musical biopic is more Oscar's speed (and, if scarcely opened at the time of this writing, did debut on over 2,800 screens). And as an adaptation of a successful Broadway musical popular with both critics and moviegoers there is Wicked, which seems to have the best shot out of the whole bunch at Best Picture. But even so it will be another year where "smaller" and little-seen movies dominate, furthering the trend of the Academy Awards looking ever more like the Independent Spirit Awards.
This was not one of those years.
Just as the year's shrunken slate of films enjoying wide releases was thin on really first-rank blockbusters (as the far from first-rank grosses show) it has been short on critical darlings--even by the standards of recent years that have seen the contenders for the more prestigious (Picture-Director-Actor-Writer) Oscars.
Consider those films from which something might have been hoped. The sequels to Best Picture winner Gladiator and Best Actor winner Joker? No one seems to have any expectations for them in these categories, with the same going for Alex Garland's Civil War. Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? It also seems unlikely to enjoy any recognition here, given how it flopped with critics as well as audiences. Mad Max: Fury Road was a Best Picture nominee, and Furiosa was well-liked by the critics, but this is the kind of movie that gets nominated more as a gesture toward what people actually watch than as a real competitor, and its having been a big flop will rule it out of recognition on those grounds--all as Kevin Costner's much-hyped Horizon saga suffered from both critical disappointment and public disinterest. Dune, Part Two may have a shot at a Best Picture nomination, but more because of the inclination to recognize at least something that made money than because it is a natural (the second half of the epic even less likely than the first to be a real Best Picture contender because it is basically a big action movie). Perhaps something will be offered Inside Out--though it should be remembered that critics liked the sequel less than they did the Best Screenplay-nominated original.
So what's left among the bigger releases of the year? There is that other Timothée Chalamet film A Complete Unknown, which as a musical biopic is more Oscar's speed (and, if scarcely opened at the time of this writing, did debut on over 2,800 screens). And as an adaptation of a successful Broadway musical popular with both critics and moviegoers there is Wicked, which seems to have the best shot out of the whole bunch at Best Picture. But even so it will be another year where "smaller" and little-seen movies dominate, furthering the trend of the Academy Awards looking ever more like the Independent Spirit Awards.
The Contradictions of Today's Rhetoric About Natality
In the advanced industrialized world those who like to chalk up "success" to "idealistic," cultural, factors rather than material ones set great store by "middle class" values. These values, which are highly individualistic, include "personal responsibility," not least in the matter of starting a family--particularly the principle that one should not begin one without reasonable expectations of being able to afford that family, which is to say, while meeting a certain standard of what Thorstein Veblen called "pecuniary decency," and with a certain minimum of security, such as that with which we associate the material side of middle class existence .
However, really generalized middle classness was always more a promise than a reality even in the more affluent countries, and if the gap between promise and reality has long been widening it may be that in recent years that gap has simply become too big to paper over. Unsurprisingly, young people are less prone to start families--entirely in line with the middle class values with which they are raised.
This, of course, raises a problem for those who would like to see higher fertility rates--who, of course, tend also to be vehement supporters of those changes in economic life that have eroded the middle class. (Thus is the right delighted with Emmanuel Todd when he attributes American and Western decline with declining religiosity and not enough young people studying engineering, and apparently criticizes the West's promotion of its gender politics in the world at large, but completely ignore what he has to say about neoliberalism.) The result is that they neither repudiate middle class notions of responsibility, nor the neoliberal economic program--and instead, in line with their tendency, lay blame on the individuals who have not got along for failing to get along. (Oh, things aren't so tough out there, they say. It's just that a lot of them would rather play video games in mom's basement than get a job--while the ones who do have money blow it on avocado toast and such.)
From their standpoint this may be the least unacceptable approach intellectually, but the dissonances are massive, and they are likely to find that mere hectoring of the young is not going to produce the changes in society's direction that they so clearly desire--implicitly, that even while remaining committed to middle class values young people reconcile themselves to raising their children in conditions of less and less security, comfort and opportunity in line with traditional lifeways, and the requirements of those whose minds are on business and on realpolitik for an ample labor supply, and large cohorts of military manpower age youth.
However, really generalized middle classness was always more a promise than a reality even in the more affluent countries, and if the gap between promise and reality has long been widening it may be that in recent years that gap has simply become too big to paper over. Unsurprisingly, young people are less prone to start families--entirely in line with the middle class values with which they are raised.
This, of course, raises a problem for those who would like to see higher fertility rates--who, of course, tend also to be vehement supporters of those changes in economic life that have eroded the middle class. (Thus is the right delighted with Emmanuel Todd when he attributes American and Western decline with declining religiosity and not enough young people studying engineering, and apparently criticizes the West's promotion of its gender politics in the world at large, but completely ignore what he has to say about neoliberalism.) The result is that they neither repudiate middle class notions of responsibility, nor the neoliberal economic program--and instead, in line with their tendency, lay blame on the individuals who have not got along for failing to get along. (Oh, things aren't so tough out there, they say. It's just that a lot of them would rather play video games in mom's basement than get a job--while the ones who do have money blow it on avocado toast and such.)
From their standpoint this may be the least unacceptable approach intellectually, but the dissonances are massive, and they are likely to find that mere hectoring of the young is not going to produce the changes in society's direction that they so clearly desire--implicitly, that even while remaining committed to middle class values young people reconcile themselves to raising their children in conditions of less and less security, comfort and opportunity in line with traditional lifeways, and the requirements of those whose minds are on business and on realpolitik for an ample labor supply, and large cohorts of military manpower age youth.
What is Charity to the Rich, Really?
People make much of the "charitable giving" of the rich, which has been seen as a legitimizer of their extreme wealth and privilege. They have much, and so the presumption goes, they give something back.
Alas, it is never that simple. A rich person may well have altruistic impulses. But it is also the case that charitable giving is, at a certain level of that activity open only to the rich, a matter of tax break and tax shelter, good public relations, occasion for "conspicuous" consumption and display of wealth, and opportunity for social networking--while the donations and institutions involved are often levers of power with which to advance more self-interested agendas. (Thus do the "charitable" foundations of a certain "tech billionaire," through their activity, serve to defend the intellectual property regime on which his wealth is based.) They even get from their "charitable" activities an excuse to hang out with the likes of a Jeffrey Epstein (after which the individuals in question say "I went there only for my foundation, I didn't have any idea tthat guy was into all that stuff").
It is all as far from the ideal of selfless giving as one can imagine--in each and every way the conduct of the hypocrites of whom the Apostle Matthew spoke, who here "have their reward" (in extreme abundance). Still, never missing a chance to remind everyone of what they truly are, the commentariat will so insistently call them "philanthropist" for it that the gullible believe it all an expression of their love of humanity.
Alas, it is never that simple. A rich person may well have altruistic impulses. But it is also the case that charitable giving is, at a certain level of that activity open only to the rich, a matter of tax break and tax shelter, good public relations, occasion for "conspicuous" consumption and display of wealth, and opportunity for social networking--while the donations and institutions involved are often levers of power with which to advance more self-interested agendas. (Thus do the "charitable" foundations of a certain "tech billionaire," through their activity, serve to defend the intellectual property regime on which his wealth is based.) They even get from their "charitable" activities an excuse to hang out with the likes of a Jeffrey Epstein (after which the individuals in question say "I went there only for my foundation, I didn't have any idea tthat guy was into all that stuff").
It is all as far from the ideal of selfless giving as one can imagine--in each and every way the conduct of the hypocrites of whom the Apostle Matthew spoke, who here "have their reward" (in extreme abundance). Still, never missing a chance to remind everyone of what they truly are, the commentariat will so insistently call them "philanthropist" for it that the gullible believe it all an expression of their love of humanity.
Clive Ponting's 1940: Myth and Reality--and the Value of Reminding Us of What We Were Supposed to Know, But Don't
Some time ago I discussed here Clive Ponting's handy book 1940: Myth and Reality--and Angus Calder's rather dismissive attitude toward the book as a work not really bringing anything new to light.
Considering the snideness of Calder's objection I now recall the writing of one historian engaged in such a project himself in regard to quite a different historical subject. Owning that he offered little that could be considered new strictly speaking, he points out that some of those admittedly not so new bits he presented had been slighted in one way or another, whether ignored, or simply not fit into the fuller picture--and altogether, if known in part or even substantially by some specialists, never reached the wider public, and still less played their part in the making of a collective memory dominated by an Establishment-approved narrative that serves the agendas of the powerful rather than the public's right and need to know, or the historian's duty to fact and truth. The result was that gathering together the neglected or buried bits, examining them, putting together the Big Picture with those bits included and presenting them to that public never properly exposed to the bits, let alone their collective implications, was a meaningful and important task.
I agree entirely with that outlook--and certainly regard Ponting as having rendered a public service in his doing just that, presenting once more in very convenient form a more truthful version of the past in the face of the endless recitation of the Myth with which those of orthodox mind wittingly and unwittingly work to bury it.
Considering the snideness of Calder's objection I now recall the writing of one historian engaged in such a project himself in regard to quite a different historical subject. Owning that he offered little that could be considered new strictly speaking, he points out that some of those admittedly not so new bits he presented had been slighted in one way or another, whether ignored, or simply not fit into the fuller picture--and altogether, if known in part or even substantially by some specialists, never reached the wider public, and still less played their part in the making of a collective memory dominated by an Establishment-approved narrative that serves the agendas of the powerful rather than the public's right and need to know, or the historian's duty to fact and truth. The result was that gathering together the neglected or buried bits, examining them, putting together the Big Picture with those bits included and presenting them to that public never properly exposed to the bits, let alone their collective implications, was a meaningful and important task.
I agree entirely with that outlook--and certainly regard Ponting as having rendered a public service in his doing just that, presenting once more in very convenient form a more truthful version of the past in the face of the endless recitation of the Myth with which those of orthodox mind wittingly and unwittingly work to bury it.
Saved by the Bell: A Few Thoughts
Saved by the Bell is one of the many, many shows I got to know mainly because of how much it has been rerun in the decades since airing its finale. (Just a few years ago several different channels all likely to be part of your cable package had it as a staple of their morning lineups, so that between them you probably had your choice of Saved by the Bell rerun in the same time slot on many a weekday.)
I can't say that I was terribly impressed by what I saw. Consider how all these years later, we find that its prime time contemporaries Seinfeld and The Simpsons in its glorious golden age each gave us hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits that have endured in pop cultural memory--situations, lines, gags--to the point of their being memorialized in Reddit pages and memes as a great many persons still constantly reference them in any situation where they are at all relevant. By contrast I cannot remember a single bit of Saved by the Bell that I have seen referenced in the same way--or which would deserve to be so.
Of course, as the show's long life in reruns reminds one, Saved by the Bell had, and still has, its fans--but at least as adults even those fans seem to be fairly forthright about the weakness of the material that had such a hold on their affections when they were younger. Indeed, former Entertainment Weekly editor Randall Colburn, for example, penned an interesting piece about that a few years ago in which he acknowledged that the show he so loved as a young adult "is the laziest s--- ever made," not least in its peopling Bayside High School "almost exclusively [with] the stalest, most absurd stereotypes: preppy, jock, cheerleader, brainiac . . . geek." This would seem to have been at its absolute worst in the grotesque caricaturing involved in the conception of the nerds--the show presenting them as "effeminate dorks" who "speak in high-pitched squeaks, waddle like penguins, wear tape over their glasses . . . speak at length about pocket protectors," and make every girl (at least, the non-nerd girls) "recoil every time they're near," all as the writers, treating them with more "disdain . . . than any other subgroup" as they picked on "the nerds" every which way they could (not even allowing them to be the one positive thing that a nerd has conventionally been regarded as being, intelligent), gave every impression of "enjoy[ing] bullying these dorks as much as Zack and the gang did."
All of that aligns exactly with my impressions of the show--while Colburn seems to me entirely correct when he remarks that "The Big Bang Theory . . . is basically what would happen if the Saved By the Bell writers tried to write a show about nerds." Still, Mr. Colburn's own observation would seem to refute what seemed to me the argument he most wanted to make in writing this piece, namely that the nerds are a relic of the era of Saved by the Bell which we have since happily moved past. That The Big Bang Theory not only launched almost two decades after Saved by the Bell, (in 2007) but had a twelve season run (2007-2019) and spawned two successor series' (Young Sheldon, which ran for seven seasons itself in 2017-2024, and hitting the air just this past month, George & Mandy's First Marriage--it just never ends!), is testament to how the cheap (and exceedingly lazy) nerd-bashing of Saved by the Bell remains very much with us--with all its profoundly unfortunate implications, which certainly have their complements in the equally simple-minded "positive" images of nerdishness, and by way of contrast with the nerd, the exaltation of the idiocies that people of conventional mind celebrate as "cool".
I can't say that I was terribly impressed by what I saw. Consider how all these years later, we find that its prime time contemporaries Seinfeld and The Simpsons in its glorious golden age each gave us hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits that have endured in pop cultural memory--situations, lines, gags--to the point of their being memorialized in Reddit pages and memes as a great many persons still constantly reference them in any situation where they are at all relevant. By contrast I cannot remember a single bit of Saved by the Bell that I have seen referenced in the same way--or which would deserve to be so.
Of course, as the show's long life in reruns reminds one, Saved by the Bell had, and still has, its fans--but at least as adults even those fans seem to be fairly forthright about the weakness of the material that had such a hold on their affections when they were younger. Indeed, former Entertainment Weekly editor Randall Colburn, for example, penned an interesting piece about that a few years ago in which he acknowledged that the show he so loved as a young adult "is the laziest s--- ever made," not least in its peopling Bayside High School "almost exclusively [with] the stalest, most absurd stereotypes: preppy, jock, cheerleader, brainiac . . . geek." This would seem to have been at its absolute worst in the grotesque caricaturing involved in the conception of the nerds--the show presenting them as "effeminate dorks" who "speak in high-pitched squeaks, waddle like penguins, wear tape over their glasses . . . speak at length about pocket protectors," and make every girl (at least, the non-nerd girls) "recoil every time they're near," all as the writers, treating them with more "disdain . . . than any other subgroup" as they picked on "the nerds" every which way they could (not even allowing them to be the one positive thing that a nerd has conventionally been regarded as being, intelligent), gave every impression of "enjoy[ing] bullying these dorks as much as Zack and the gang did."
All of that aligns exactly with my impressions of the show--while Colburn seems to me entirely correct when he remarks that "The Big Bang Theory . . . is basically what would happen if the Saved By the Bell writers tried to write a show about nerds." Still, Mr. Colburn's own observation would seem to refute what seemed to me the argument he most wanted to make in writing this piece, namely that the nerds are a relic of the era of Saved by the Bell which we have since happily moved past. That The Big Bang Theory not only launched almost two decades after Saved by the Bell, (in 2007) but had a twelve season run (2007-2019) and spawned two successor series' (Young Sheldon, which ran for seven seasons itself in 2017-2024, and hitting the air just this past month, George & Mandy's First Marriage--it just never ends!), is testament to how the cheap (and exceedingly lazy) nerd-bashing of Saved by the Bell remains very much with us--with all its profoundly unfortunate implications, which certainly have their complements in the equally simple-minded "positive" images of nerdishness, and by way of contrast with the nerd, the exaltation of the idiocies that people of conventional mind celebrate as "cool".
Friday, December 20, 2024
Not Deadpool & Wolverine but Captain America: Brave New World Will be the Real Test of the MCU's Appeal to Movie Audiences
This summer saw the release of the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie since the debacle that was The Marvels back in November 2022, Deadpool vs. Wolverine. It proved a spectacular hit with audiences when it hit theaters, grossing over $600 million in North America and improving on that worldwide--giving it a final take that, even after inflation, was a third higher than that of the original Deadpool way back in 2016.
The courtiers and claqueurs of the press, which had been waiting desperately for something, anything, like Deadpool's success, rushed to seize on it as proof that audiences are as ready to eat up superhero sequels as ever they were in service to the studios' doubling down on announcements of much, much more to come (bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans and who knows who else to the next edition of The Avengers).
It seemed to me that they were, as usual, getting ahead of themselves. While Deadpool vs. Wolverine has unquestionably lived up to (or exceeded) any reasonable expectation for that film it is still an exceedingly idiosyncratic product. Not only is the Deadpool franchise far from being a conventional superhero series--indeed, it is a beat-you-over-the-head-with-its-postmodernism parody of the superhero film whose popularity can suggest the form's creakiness--but gimmicks like pairing up Deadpool with Wolverine are not to be had every time, while the movie went above and beyond in "giving the people what they want," to the point of its bursting with cameos and in-jokes in ways that also are not easily repeated to the same effect.
That people came out in such great numbers for it does not guarantee that they will come out for more conventional (for many, more stereotyped and blander) fare with anything like the same enthusiasm. The result is that the release of Captain America: Brave New World, due out not quite six weeks from now on Valentine's Day weekend, seems to me a far more meaningful test of the salability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand.
That said, how well would Captain America 4 have to do at the box office to "do the job?" Think of the matter this way. Back in 2016 Captain America 3--the first really big release of that summer--pulled in $400 million in North America. Adjusted for inflation this is more like $540 million today.
Deadpool, of course, cleared that mark--by almost $100 million, and this in spite of the handicap of a well-earned R rating. However, no other Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has hit that mark since before the pandemic with the exception of the anomalous Spider-Man: No Way Home (another hard-to-repeat cross-over event), leaving little meaningful precedent, such that I can easily picture the film falling short, perhaps far short, of the half billion dollar mark.
Of course, so high a mark does mean plenty of room for the courtiers and claqueurs to "spin" a lower gross than that as a "win" for Marvel--to, ignoring inflation as they grade on a curve, say that a $300 million gross is great. Alas, the shakiness of Marvel's position after these rough past few years--and the way this movie's production budget exploded (we hear now of an outlay of over $350 million due to reshoots, implying that $300 million won't cut it, especially with ever less to hope for from the Chinese market)--and the fact that there will be two more MCU movies coming out in the next ten months after this (including the Phase Six opener Fantastic Four in July)--mean that Marvel really, really, really needs this one to be a winner which proves "We've still got it!"
The result is that for those interested in the business side of cinema this one is well worth watching--all as the tracking-based estimates should start to make the rounds of the relevant parts of the entertainment media soon.
The courtiers and claqueurs of the press, which had been waiting desperately for something, anything, like Deadpool's success, rushed to seize on it as proof that audiences are as ready to eat up superhero sequels as ever they were in service to the studios' doubling down on announcements of much, much more to come (bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans and who knows who else to the next edition of The Avengers).
It seemed to me that they were, as usual, getting ahead of themselves. While Deadpool vs. Wolverine has unquestionably lived up to (or exceeded) any reasonable expectation for that film it is still an exceedingly idiosyncratic product. Not only is the Deadpool franchise far from being a conventional superhero series--indeed, it is a beat-you-over-the-head-with-its-postmodernism parody of the superhero film whose popularity can suggest the form's creakiness--but gimmicks like pairing up Deadpool with Wolverine are not to be had every time, while the movie went above and beyond in "giving the people what they want," to the point of its bursting with cameos and in-jokes in ways that also are not easily repeated to the same effect.
That people came out in such great numbers for it does not guarantee that they will come out for more conventional (for many, more stereotyped and blander) fare with anything like the same enthusiasm. The result is that the release of Captain America: Brave New World, due out not quite six weeks from now on Valentine's Day weekend, seems to me a far more meaningful test of the salability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand.
That said, how well would Captain America 4 have to do at the box office to "do the job?" Think of the matter this way. Back in 2016 Captain America 3--the first really big release of that summer--pulled in $400 million in North America. Adjusted for inflation this is more like $540 million today.
Deadpool, of course, cleared that mark--by almost $100 million, and this in spite of the handicap of a well-earned R rating. However, no other Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has hit that mark since before the pandemic with the exception of the anomalous Spider-Man: No Way Home (another hard-to-repeat cross-over event), leaving little meaningful precedent, such that I can easily picture the film falling short, perhaps far short, of the half billion dollar mark.
Of course, so high a mark does mean plenty of room for the courtiers and claqueurs to "spin" a lower gross than that as a "win" for Marvel--to, ignoring inflation as they grade on a curve, say that a $300 million gross is great. Alas, the shakiness of Marvel's position after these rough past few years--and the way this movie's production budget exploded (we hear now of an outlay of over $350 million due to reshoots, implying that $300 million won't cut it, especially with ever less to hope for from the Chinese market)--and the fact that there will be two more MCU movies coming out in the next ten months after this (including the Phase Six opener Fantastic Four in July)--mean that Marvel really, really, really needs this one to be a winner which proves "We've still got it!"
The result is that for those interested in the business side of cinema this one is well worth watching--all as the tracking-based estimates should start to make the rounds of the relevant parts of the entertainment media soon.
What Do Ant-Man 3 and the next Fantastic Four Have in Common?
The runners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe took the less than intuitive course of making one of the mega-franchise's weaker links, the Ant-Man series, the launch pad for Phase Five (specifically the third Ant-Man film, Ant-Man: Quantumania).
In hindsight the decision proved to be . . . less than ideal. Many were less than pleased with the third Ant-Man movie, which opened big and then faded fast, ultimately leaving it with an underwhelming gross. Few properly appreciated all the factors that went into this, like the severity of the shortfall of the gross in China (which was decisive for the worldwide take), but even without that fuller view there was no way to present the film as the big success Marvel hoped for, with something of this reflected in the contrast between the $1 billion worldwide gross Screen Rant predicted, and the less than half billion it ended up with. The failure predictably hung heavily over the franchise afterward, which likely did not help the less than triumphant release of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which, again, fell short of expectations on opening weekend and its full run, even if not by so much as to seem an unqualified letdown), or the outright debacle of The Marvels.
Marvel is taking a similar risk in launching Phase Six of the cinematic side of the franchise with the Fantastic Four film coming out next July--Fantastic Four: First Steps.
In contrast with Ant-Man 3 the Fantastic Four film has not been proven a "weaker link," as this will be the MCU's first Fantastic Four film. However, in its premise the Fantastic Four series does entail some of the quirkiness that has probably been a "bit much" for many moviegoers (the stretching abilities of Mr. Fantastic coming off as a bit goofy, for instance, while the depiction of the planet-eating Galactus, who apparently is the villain in this film, entails similar challenges).
The decision to set Fantastic Four on a retro-futuristic Earth also seems risky. The track record of retro-sf at the box office is not great, after all (much as a great many hardcore science fiction fans enjoy them, I suspect they mean a little too much "A-effect" for the general audience), while the implication is of the "multiverse" being important to its premise--not necessarily fatal, but at least implying the possibility of "brain work" for an audience that has sometimes been willing to "go with it" in the past (with Spider-Man, again with Deadpool & Wolverine) but also seems to have regarded the MCU as demanding too much of it for some time now (given its combination of vastness and propensity for self-reference, which is, again, all right for the hardcore fan, not so all right for the more general audience whose liking the movie will be critical to its being a Marvel-caliber success). This is the more the case given that while prior MCU films made use of the multiverse for drawing together familiar, well-received characters, at the core here is a brand new group which have yet to win such acceptance.
And of course, the makers of any new Fantastic Four film also have to contend with the baggage of the less than wholly successful prior attempts to launch a Fantastic Four franchise. (I personally think that the criticism was exaggerated--that the first Fantastic Four especially was entirely satisfactory as the kind of superhero film we still expected back in 2005 however much the "cool" critics sneer at it now, and that the darker 2015 film had a lot of interesting ideas with a lot of potential, some of which Josh Trank did realize in the film we got--but I know that this is not the "conventional wisdom" on either of those movies, and they may well contribute to a sense that any Fantastic Four movie will just not be very good.)
Of course, it may turn out that the "something different" discussed here is exactly what an aging franchise in need of renewal requires--all as the brevity of pop cultural memory that can be so limiting may help here by limiting the significance of any shortfalls of the prior Fantastic Four films for this attempt. Still, it seems to me that there are more than the usual grounds for uncertainty here when we consider its fortunes--even before one considers that the response to Captain America 4 (coming out next Valentine's Day) will matter. The film's winning audiences back to Marvel may boost the brand helpfully, while, alas, the movie's doing poorly may work against it, and in turn have similar implications for a Marvel Phase Six of which we are just beginning to see the faintest outlines.
In hindsight the decision proved to be . . . less than ideal. Many were less than pleased with the third Ant-Man movie, which opened big and then faded fast, ultimately leaving it with an underwhelming gross. Few properly appreciated all the factors that went into this, like the severity of the shortfall of the gross in China (which was decisive for the worldwide take), but even without that fuller view there was no way to present the film as the big success Marvel hoped for, with something of this reflected in the contrast between the $1 billion worldwide gross Screen Rant predicted, and the less than half billion it ended up with. The failure predictably hung heavily over the franchise afterward, which likely did not help the less than triumphant release of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which, again, fell short of expectations on opening weekend and its full run, even if not by so much as to seem an unqualified letdown), or the outright debacle of The Marvels.
Marvel is taking a similar risk in launching Phase Six of the cinematic side of the franchise with the Fantastic Four film coming out next July--Fantastic Four: First Steps.
In contrast with Ant-Man 3 the Fantastic Four film has not been proven a "weaker link," as this will be the MCU's first Fantastic Four film. However, in its premise the Fantastic Four series does entail some of the quirkiness that has probably been a "bit much" for many moviegoers (the stretching abilities of Mr. Fantastic coming off as a bit goofy, for instance, while the depiction of the planet-eating Galactus, who apparently is the villain in this film, entails similar challenges).
The decision to set Fantastic Four on a retro-futuristic Earth also seems risky. The track record of retro-sf at the box office is not great, after all (much as a great many hardcore science fiction fans enjoy them, I suspect they mean a little too much "A-effect" for the general audience), while the implication is of the "multiverse" being important to its premise--not necessarily fatal, but at least implying the possibility of "brain work" for an audience that has sometimes been willing to "go with it" in the past (with Spider-Man, again with Deadpool & Wolverine) but also seems to have regarded the MCU as demanding too much of it for some time now (given its combination of vastness and propensity for self-reference, which is, again, all right for the hardcore fan, not so all right for the more general audience whose liking the movie will be critical to its being a Marvel-caliber success). This is the more the case given that while prior MCU films made use of the multiverse for drawing together familiar, well-received characters, at the core here is a brand new group which have yet to win such acceptance.
And of course, the makers of any new Fantastic Four film also have to contend with the baggage of the less than wholly successful prior attempts to launch a Fantastic Four franchise. (I personally think that the criticism was exaggerated--that the first Fantastic Four especially was entirely satisfactory as the kind of superhero film we still expected back in 2005 however much the "cool" critics sneer at it now, and that the darker 2015 film had a lot of interesting ideas with a lot of potential, some of which Josh Trank did realize in the film we got--but I know that this is not the "conventional wisdom" on either of those movies, and they may well contribute to a sense that any Fantastic Four movie will just not be very good.)
Of course, it may turn out that the "something different" discussed here is exactly what an aging franchise in need of renewal requires--all as the brevity of pop cultural memory that can be so limiting may help here by limiting the significance of any shortfalls of the prior Fantastic Four films for this attempt. Still, it seems to me that there are more than the usual grounds for uncertainty here when we consider its fortunes--even before one considers that the response to Captain America 4 (coming out next Valentine's Day) will matter. The film's winning audiences back to Marvel may boost the brand helpfully, while, alas, the movie's doing poorly may work against it, and in turn have similar implications for a Marvel Phase Six of which we are just beginning to see the faintest outlines.
Celebrity, Fantasy, Identification
In considering the idea of celebrity a while back I mentioned the view some have that the fascination with celebrity is, for some at least, a matter of vicariously living through the rich and famous who at least appear to have everything they do not have--respect, comfort, security, freedom, pleasure and all the rest.
This seems to me to plausibly account for a significant part of the phenomenon--but also that this kind of fantasy is rather a delicate thing, with the arguable decline of celebrity bespeaking people finding it harder than before to do what engaging in such "vicarious living" requires, namely identification with someone they have never met and whose situation is not at all like theirs, precisely because those others have everything they do not.
After all, this is an age in which the distance between the truly privileged and everyone else just keeps growing; and, for all the talk of "social mobility" the way up to that very small space at the top, always so narrow and slippery as to make the struggle to get there an extreme longshot, seems ever more narrow and slippery; while just getting through the day as a "nobody" seems ever tougher, and more painful. Thus is it the case that, between student debt and housing costs and health insurance premiums and the rest the children of people who called themselves "middle class" increasingly realize that anything that can be called middle classness is likely to prove beyond their reach.
All of this makes the feat of imagination required in such identification ever harder--for when even a marginal, pedestrian, middle classness is only a dream, what is the glamour of society's heights?
It doesn't help that the celebrities are endlessly making themselves harder to identify with.
Thus do we see more than the usual attention to something that has never been a secret, namely the way in which Hollywood's upper reaches are the preserve of an "in-marrying caste" of people born into the business (or failing that, from some sort of adjacent privilege that made entrée possible)--and at the same time also see the beneficiaries of such birth, scornful of those who point out such facts, whine in the same unimaginative way as other overprivileged idiots about others not appreciating their "hard work" as if they were merely reaping the conventional rewards of toil (never mind how it compares to that of the people who really make the world go round), and contemptuously fling their advantage in the public's faces (one such actress all but shouting her identification as a beneficiary of nepotism on the red carpet outside one of the awards show which give prizes to people to whom life has already been ridiculously generous).
Thus do we see celebrities who have a reputation for self-absorption, narcissism and snobbery that fans once upon a time took in stride prove more divisive figures--and respond to the criticism by doubling down on their foolishness. ("I am who I am," one Oscar-winning actress said, which meant that the Oscar-winning actress "can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year"--and then as a pandemic was shaking the world to its foundations struck an arrogant pose and smirking smile on the cover of a famously snobbish glossy magazine declaring in text positioned alongside her feet that she accepts our apology, as if we are just supposed to know what the hell they are talking about, and indeed ashamed of whatever it was we supposedly did, rather than see this as a stupid provocation at an absolutely inopportune moment that must have made everyone who had cared enough about her doings to "misjudge" her in the way the magazine claimed they did was really right all along.)
And thus is the highlight of an ever-less watched Oscar night a far-past-his-career-peak performer who, after just publishing a memoir in which he purports to share the "wisdom" he gained in his obscenely cushy life (but, to go by the tidbits with which the media afforded yet another crappy celebrity bio the world doesn't need ample free publicity, mostly leave the impression he hasn't grown one iota as a human being since the days when he began a feud with a certain actress playing a certain aunt), slap the host of the ceremony on live TV.
Identify with these people? It's a wonder that any sane person doesn't look away as soon as they appear in front of them--and indeed, far from doing any wonders for the fascination of celebrity they seem excellent additional reason for anyone who cares for their own sanity to keep their distance from a media that trafficks in gossip about their idiocies as much as ever it did, as if compensating for the declining importance of a stratum whose members so often show themselves to be fools and vulgarians by treating them instead in accord with their self-importance, as devoted courtiers ever do their kings.
This seems to me to plausibly account for a significant part of the phenomenon--but also that this kind of fantasy is rather a delicate thing, with the arguable decline of celebrity bespeaking people finding it harder than before to do what engaging in such "vicarious living" requires, namely identification with someone they have never met and whose situation is not at all like theirs, precisely because those others have everything they do not.
After all, this is an age in which the distance between the truly privileged and everyone else just keeps growing; and, for all the talk of "social mobility" the way up to that very small space at the top, always so narrow and slippery as to make the struggle to get there an extreme longshot, seems ever more narrow and slippery; while just getting through the day as a "nobody" seems ever tougher, and more painful. Thus is it the case that, between student debt and housing costs and health insurance premiums and the rest the children of people who called themselves "middle class" increasingly realize that anything that can be called middle classness is likely to prove beyond their reach.
All of this makes the feat of imagination required in such identification ever harder--for when even a marginal, pedestrian, middle classness is only a dream, what is the glamour of society's heights?
It doesn't help that the celebrities are endlessly making themselves harder to identify with.
Thus do we see more than the usual attention to something that has never been a secret, namely the way in which Hollywood's upper reaches are the preserve of an "in-marrying caste" of people born into the business (or failing that, from some sort of adjacent privilege that made entrée possible)--and at the same time also see the beneficiaries of such birth, scornful of those who point out such facts, whine in the same unimaginative way as other overprivileged idiots about others not appreciating their "hard work" as if they were merely reaping the conventional rewards of toil (never mind how it compares to that of the people who really make the world go round), and contemptuously fling their advantage in the public's faces (one such actress all but shouting her identification as a beneficiary of nepotism on the red carpet outside one of the awards show which give prizes to people to whom life has already been ridiculously generous).
Thus do we see celebrities who have a reputation for self-absorption, narcissism and snobbery that fans once upon a time took in stride prove more divisive figures--and respond to the criticism by doubling down on their foolishness. ("I am who I am," one Oscar-winning actress said, which meant that the Oscar-winning actress "can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year"--and then as a pandemic was shaking the world to its foundations struck an arrogant pose and smirking smile on the cover of a famously snobbish glossy magazine declaring in text positioned alongside her feet that she accepts our apology, as if we are just supposed to know what the hell they are talking about, and indeed ashamed of whatever it was we supposedly did, rather than see this as a stupid provocation at an absolutely inopportune moment that must have made everyone who had cared enough about her doings to "misjudge" her in the way the magazine claimed they did was really right all along.)
And thus is the highlight of an ever-less watched Oscar night a far-past-his-career-peak performer who, after just publishing a memoir in which he purports to share the "wisdom" he gained in his obscenely cushy life (but, to go by the tidbits with which the media afforded yet another crappy celebrity bio the world doesn't need ample free publicity, mostly leave the impression he hasn't grown one iota as a human being since the days when he began a feud with a certain actress playing a certain aunt), slap the host of the ceremony on live TV.
Identify with these people? It's a wonder that any sane person doesn't look away as soon as they appear in front of them--and indeed, far from doing any wonders for the fascination of celebrity they seem excellent additional reason for anyone who cares for their own sanity to keep their distance from a media that trafficks in gossip about their idiocies as much as ever it did, as if compensating for the declining importance of a stratum whose members so often show themselves to be fools and vulgarians by treating them instead in accord with their self-importance, as devoted courtiers ever do their kings.
The Decline of the Sex Symbol
A couple of years ago, perusing a list of the more popular keyword searches, I noticed that those searches for persons, especially those from the world of entertainment, tended to concern people who became famous in the earlier part of the century (or even the last century) rather than more recently--and noticed, too, that they were for the most part women of noted physical attractiveness and appeal.
In that there was a reminder of not just the decline of "household name"-caliber celebrity, but of what may be the even more marked decline of "the sex symbol," an individual with such name recognition who is acknowledged as embodying a particular ideal and fantasy for much of the public.
Considering that it seems relevant that the media universe was more limited, so that household name status was less elusive, but that was not the only thing that was more "limited." The sex symbol belongs to a conceptual world of sex rather than gender, and just two sexes at that, with "heteronormativity" so much taken for granted that the word was scarcely ever spoken, and that particular expectations about how men and women think and feel and act, and of course look, being openly and widely held, such that people could openly and widely hold that particular persons may be regarded as embodying the ideal.
The prevailing view also held that for granted that, just as women's ideals and fantasies are not always pleasing to men, the opposite also holds true (Lee Major's song the "Unknown Stuntman" sums it up, the leading man and not the stuntman getting the girl, while men long for those famed sex symbols Farrah and Bo and Cheryl and Raquel), and that the appropriate response for both men and women is a measure of, if not urbanity, then at least tolerance, regarding the matter.
However one feels about this "traditionalist" view of these matters and their pop cultural implications, there is no question that it is more challenged than ever, and that the challenge has complicated what a sex symbol needs beyond name recognition such that they could not be a "symbol" without it--that broad acknowledgment of their having exactly this kind of appeal, precisely because even those who may not feel very good about, for example, conventional standards of beauty, are at least ready to admit that, yes, they indeed exist, and yes, a particular actress is by that standard extraordinary, because those who admire the beauty in question feel free to express it publicly.
Anything like that is less likely to be seen in the relevant parts of the media these days, especially insofar as tolerance and urbanity are cast to the wind as it tends toward a more open sex-negativity and hostility to the "male gaze," and challenges to the existence of "gender norms" as such, and insistence upon "inclusiveness" and "body positivity" in media imagery, and anyone desirous of mainstream media respectability required to adhere to the associated rules. Indeed, looking at the media's products these days--film, TV, advertising across the media spectrum--it can often seem as if the acknowledgment of any conventional ideals or fantasies is purely negative in nature, evident in decisions regarding script or casting refusing them, as if saying "We know exactly what you expect to see here, what you want to see here, and we're making a point of giving you the diametrical opposite! In your face! Ha!"--and this so relentlessly that Sydney Sweeney's merely showing a bit of cleavage on Saturday Night Live sufficed to whip up a storm of intensely politicized online chatter in a way that makes a contrast with the reaction to that undisputed sex symbol of the day (to go by the prominence of her name in the search result list, our day too) Pamela Anderson getting naked during the monologue she gave when she was the guest host in 1997.
Such rancor only underlines the fact of the old-fashioned sex symbol as having been a casualty of the culture war-ization of everything.
In turn, I suspect, the decline of the sex symbol has probably taken its toll on the institution of celebrity as such--ideals and fantasy, after all, being what a significant part of celebrity has always been about.
In that there was a reminder of not just the decline of "household name"-caliber celebrity, but of what may be the even more marked decline of "the sex symbol," an individual with such name recognition who is acknowledged as embodying a particular ideal and fantasy for much of the public.
Considering that it seems relevant that the media universe was more limited, so that household name status was less elusive, but that was not the only thing that was more "limited." The sex symbol belongs to a conceptual world of sex rather than gender, and just two sexes at that, with "heteronormativity" so much taken for granted that the word was scarcely ever spoken, and that particular expectations about how men and women think and feel and act, and of course look, being openly and widely held, such that people could openly and widely hold that particular persons may be regarded as embodying the ideal.
The prevailing view also held that for granted that, just as women's ideals and fantasies are not always pleasing to men, the opposite also holds true (Lee Major's song the "Unknown Stuntman" sums it up, the leading man and not the stuntman getting the girl, while men long for those famed sex symbols Farrah and Bo and Cheryl and Raquel), and that the appropriate response for both men and women is a measure of, if not urbanity, then at least tolerance, regarding the matter.
However one feels about this "traditionalist" view of these matters and their pop cultural implications, there is no question that it is more challenged than ever, and that the challenge has complicated what a sex symbol needs beyond name recognition such that they could not be a "symbol" without it--that broad acknowledgment of their having exactly this kind of appeal, precisely because even those who may not feel very good about, for example, conventional standards of beauty, are at least ready to admit that, yes, they indeed exist, and yes, a particular actress is by that standard extraordinary, because those who admire the beauty in question feel free to express it publicly.
Anything like that is less likely to be seen in the relevant parts of the media these days, especially insofar as tolerance and urbanity are cast to the wind as it tends toward a more open sex-negativity and hostility to the "male gaze," and challenges to the existence of "gender norms" as such, and insistence upon "inclusiveness" and "body positivity" in media imagery, and anyone desirous of mainstream media respectability required to adhere to the associated rules. Indeed, looking at the media's products these days--film, TV, advertising across the media spectrum--it can often seem as if the acknowledgment of any conventional ideals or fantasies is purely negative in nature, evident in decisions regarding script or casting refusing them, as if saying "We know exactly what you expect to see here, what you want to see here, and we're making a point of giving you the diametrical opposite! In your face! Ha!"--and this so relentlessly that Sydney Sweeney's merely showing a bit of cleavage on Saturday Night Live sufficed to whip up a storm of intensely politicized online chatter in a way that makes a contrast with the reaction to that undisputed sex symbol of the day (to go by the prominence of her name in the search result list, our day too) Pamela Anderson getting naked during the monologue she gave when she was the guest host in 1997.
Such rancor only underlines the fact of the old-fashioned sex symbol as having been a casualty of the culture war-ization of everything.
In turn, I suspect, the decline of the sex symbol has probably taken its toll on the institution of celebrity as such--ideals and fantasy, after all, being what a significant part of celebrity has always been about.
Can the Democratic Party Really Move Left?
Another presidential election, another appallingly blundered campaign, another debacle for the Democratic Party--and now calls for the party to reform itself, to be more mindful of the working class, to in a word move leftwards in its stance.
Can the Democratic Party reform do so? Certainly the historical record is unpromising that way--the party leadership having consistently treated the calls to move left that are not at all novel now but a constant since the '80s with complete contempt, as they blamed the many defeats they suffered in taking this course on anything and everything else for the outcome, including not just the Electoral College system, the luring away of Democratic Party voters by the siren songs of candidates outside the two-party system, the politics of gender and race, "foreign interference," etc., but their party supposedly having gone too far left in its appeals as it was, suggesting that they should in fact tack right as they promise that "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia" et. al.. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that their reaction to 2024 has been identical to their behavior of the past four decades.
Given such a record any intelligent observer must wonder as to why the party's leaders have been so resistant for so long to any such tacking, and if they are serious about an answer easily get one because so many, many, persons, a number of whom even had decent access to the mainstream, have explained the matter over and over again in terms that the most simple-minded should be able to understand if they are at all sincere about doing so. Consider, for example, Gore Vidal's quip about the two-party system in the U.S.: that "[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party" with the Democratic Party one of its "two right wings," with the difference between them that the Republicans were "more rigid and doctrinaire" in regard to "laissez-faire" economic pieties and historically less "willing . . . to make [the] small adjustments" required "when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand."
If one takes this view of the Democratic Party then one cannot hope for very much from it in this way--the more in as Vidal's much-quoted remark, which appeared in an article he published in Esquire in 1975, describes the Democratic Party in a time in which even a relatively conservative Democratic candidate for the Presidency could promise universal health care and a jobs guarantee and still land his party's nomination, then in office embark on an ambitious government program of intervention in the energy sector, including state-owned enterprise. One can rather less credit the Democratic Party with being "less rigid and doctrinaire" about "laissez-faire" or more "willing . . . to make small adjustments" to accommodate the marginalized or dissenting today than it was then, but rather the opposite in an age in which they have embraced neoliberalism and neoconservatism in economic, social, foreign policy (which leaves only a Bernie Sanders-type talking of such things as universal health care and jobs guarantees, and as a result the party leaders determined to do whatever it takes to stop his getting anywhere near the nomination).
Indeed, taking up the view of the Democratic Party as "one of the right wings of the Property Party" with an eye to its place on the political spectrum then one is apt to find it situated not in the portion identified with "liberalism", and certainly not on "the left," but rather in the position we identify with the "center," with centrism understood as a deep conservatism distinguished from that of "the other right wing" by that greater willingness to make small adjustments lest assorted "malcontent" elements "get out of hand," and a greater concern with blocking the left than anything else (with what would not so long ago have been thought center-left now to be included here). That is to say that if winning elections requires the Democratic Party to move left its centrist commitment means that it would rather lose elections than do so--at least, so long as it makes sure that the left does not win them--and indeed see it as its ideological mission to suffer the defeat if that is the price of keeping the left and indeed even those who might actually rate the label "liberal" marginalized. All this implies that the defeat of 2024, just like all the past defeats by the Republicans cannot be expected to budge it leftward from its Clinton-Obama-Biden-era position toward even the "small adjustment"-minded centrism of the mid-century period (never mind the fuller realization of the social democratic policies that many Democratic voters would like to see, like actual universal health care instead of just promises of such care). But of course anyone remotely approaching the standing of an official spokesperson for the party is not going to spell it out for the public, while the media's own political orientation, and what may be least offensively described as its courtier-like attitude toward people "in high places," are such that it does not even try to explain the truth behind the bland palaver they so delight in retailing to the people they demand turn off their ad blockers and buy subscriptions for what they have the gall to call "good journalism."
Can the Democratic Party reform do so? Certainly the historical record is unpromising that way--the party leadership having consistently treated the calls to move left that are not at all novel now but a constant since the '80s with complete contempt, as they blamed the many defeats they suffered in taking this course on anything and everything else for the outcome, including not just the Electoral College system, the luring away of Democratic Party voters by the siren songs of candidates outside the two-party system, the politics of gender and race, "foreign interference," etc., but their party supposedly having gone too far left in its appeals as it was, suggesting that they should in fact tack right as they promise that "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia" et. al.. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that their reaction to 2024 has been identical to their behavior of the past four decades.
Given such a record any intelligent observer must wonder as to why the party's leaders have been so resistant for so long to any such tacking, and if they are serious about an answer easily get one because so many, many, persons, a number of whom even had decent access to the mainstream, have explained the matter over and over again in terms that the most simple-minded should be able to understand if they are at all sincere about doing so. Consider, for example, Gore Vidal's quip about the two-party system in the U.S.: that "[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party" with the Democratic Party one of its "two right wings," with the difference between them that the Republicans were "more rigid and doctrinaire" in regard to "laissez-faire" economic pieties and historically less "willing . . . to make [the] small adjustments" required "when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand."
If one takes this view of the Democratic Party then one cannot hope for very much from it in this way--the more in as Vidal's much-quoted remark, which appeared in an article he published in Esquire in 1975, describes the Democratic Party in a time in which even a relatively conservative Democratic candidate for the Presidency could promise universal health care and a jobs guarantee and still land his party's nomination, then in office embark on an ambitious government program of intervention in the energy sector, including state-owned enterprise. One can rather less credit the Democratic Party with being "less rigid and doctrinaire" about "laissez-faire" or more "willing . . . to make small adjustments" to accommodate the marginalized or dissenting today than it was then, but rather the opposite in an age in which they have embraced neoliberalism and neoconservatism in economic, social, foreign policy (which leaves only a Bernie Sanders-type talking of such things as universal health care and jobs guarantees, and as a result the party leaders determined to do whatever it takes to stop his getting anywhere near the nomination).
Indeed, taking up the view of the Democratic Party as "one of the right wings of the Property Party" with an eye to its place on the political spectrum then one is apt to find it situated not in the portion identified with "liberalism", and certainly not on "the left," but rather in the position we identify with the "center," with centrism understood as a deep conservatism distinguished from that of "the other right wing" by that greater willingness to make small adjustments lest assorted "malcontent" elements "get out of hand," and a greater concern with blocking the left than anything else (with what would not so long ago have been thought center-left now to be included here). That is to say that if winning elections requires the Democratic Party to move left its centrist commitment means that it would rather lose elections than do so--at least, so long as it makes sure that the left does not win them--and indeed see it as its ideological mission to suffer the defeat if that is the price of keeping the left and indeed even those who might actually rate the label "liberal" marginalized. All this implies that the defeat of 2024, just like all the past defeats by the Republicans cannot be expected to budge it leftward from its Clinton-Obama-Biden-era position toward even the "small adjustment"-minded centrism of the mid-century period (never mind the fuller realization of the social democratic policies that many Democratic voters would like to see, like actual universal health care instead of just promises of such care). But of course anyone remotely approaching the standing of an official spokesperson for the party is not going to spell it out for the public, while the media's own political orientation, and what may be least offensively described as its courtier-like attitude toward people "in high places," are such that it does not even try to explain the truth behind the bland palaver they so delight in retailing to the people they demand turn off their ad blockers and buy subscriptions for what they have the gall to call "good journalism."
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
The Rise and Decline of the Supermodel
The claim that the institution of the movie star has faded away has now been heard for rather a long time (at least, insofar as we mean an actor who is not simply well-known or well-liked or well-respected but a Personage so popular that their being the lead of a movie will serve to bring an appreciable number of people to the theater when it makes its debut). However, the claim does not go wholly unchallenged. Thus do we time and again hear that some newcomer nobody ever heard of, because (when one looks them up they see that) they haven't actually been in many movies let alone headlined a hit movie, has somehow "proven" that stardom still exists. Those who claim this may simply be engaged in so much claquing, but that they take this particular line in their claquing still says something of the readiness to believe that actors still do become movie stars.
By contrast I have not noticed anyone denying that the heyday of the supermodel is past--that we are a long way from that moment when the top models enjoyed the broad stardom of Cindy and Claudia and Christy (especially if you are of a certain generation you likely knew instantly who I was talking about just from the mention of the first name), when it could seem as if the faces of those at the top of the modeling profession were "everywhere," when the Buti brothers founded the Fashion Cafe, and JFK Jr.'s political magazine George featured supermodels like Claudia and Christy in memorable tableaus on its covers. Indeed, a fairly commonplace narrative holds that with Hollywood becoming less glamorous than before in the "New Hollywood" era, fashion filled the gap--and held its place in pop culture until the supermodels seemed to be getting too pleased with themselves (a moment purveyors of the narrative identify with Linda Evangelista's offhand remark that "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"), after which backlash set in, and pop culture was never the same again (with recent revisitation of the remarks by the press, of course, giving the hacks of the press an excuse to go over it all again).
I can't say that I ever found that explanation satisfying. (For me these "One line blew it all" explanations never are.) Rather more was going on. Some of it seems fairly obvious--like that fragmentation of media culture that lets media hacks get away with pretending that somebody who has barely appeared in any movies is a movie star because no one person has any sort of handle on all that's going on anymore, which reflects how much less likely one is to feel that a particular face is "everywhere." There is also the reality that the celebration of physical beauty inextricable from the status of the supermodel has sat uneasily with those insistent on "inclusion," "body positivity" and the merciless thwarting and disciplining of the "male gaze" in media imagery getting so much influence in this cultural arena. (Indeed, if you had ever wondered what commercials for Revlon and Victoria's Secret would look like if the columnists at the Guardian had a say in their making, well, these past few years you didn't need to wonder any more.)
Still, it seems to me that rather more significant than the cultural warfare were the larger and more consequential developments in the world that exacerbated that warfare--not least globalization's wreck after the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, which seems to me the most important thing of all. The supermodel's natural habitat was a world of exuberant fantasy of luxurious, jet-setting glamour befitting an age of globalizing boom, or at least its appearance, which lost whatever credibility it may ever have had in these years. After all, the super-rich may be super-richer than ever before, but, despite the talking heads' fixation on this as if it were the measure of everything, the broad public is ever more alert to the fact that they are not super-rich, that indeed in many ways they are less rich than they were just a short while ago--all as the centibillionaires themselves seem uneasy, thinking less than before of the jet-setting good life and more the hope that, as Douglas Rushkoff had it, "as long [as] they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making" in the way the plebs cannot.
By contrast I have not noticed anyone denying that the heyday of the supermodel is past--that we are a long way from that moment when the top models enjoyed the broad stardom of Cindy and Claudia and Christy (especially if you are of a certain generation you likely knew instantly who I was talking about just from the mention of the first name), when it could seem as if the faces of those at the top of the modeling profession were "everywhere," when the Buti brothers founded the Fashion Cafe, and JFK Jr.'s political magazine George featured supermodels like Claudia and Christy in memorable tableaus on its covers. Indeed, a fairly commonplace narrative holds that with Hollywood becoming less glamorous than before in the "New Hollywood" era, fashion filled the gap--and held its place in pop culture until the supermodels seemed to be getting too pleased with themselves (a moment purveyors of the narrative identify with Linda Evangelista's offhand remark that "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"), after which backlash set in, and pop culture was never the same again (with recent revisitation of the remarks by the press, of course, giving the hacks of the press an excuse to go over it all again).
I can't say that I ever found that explanation satisfying. (For me these "One line blew it all" explanations never are.) Rather more was going on. Some of it seems fairly obvious--like that fragmentation of media culture that lets media hacks get away with pretending that somebody who has barely appeared in any movies is a movie star because no one person has any sort of handle on all that's going on anymore, which reflects how much less likely one is to feel that a particular face is "everywhere." There is also the reality that the celebration of physical beauty inextricable from the status of the supermodel has sat uneasily with those insistent on "inclusion," "body positivity" and the merciless thwarting and disciplining of the "male gaze" in media imagery getting so much influence in this cultural arena. (Indeed, if you had ever wondered what commercials for Revlon and Victoria's Secret would look like if the columnists at the Guardian had a say in their making, well, these past few years you didn't need to wonder any more.)
Still, it seems to me that rather more significant than the cultural warfare were the larger and more consequential developments in the world that exacerbated that warfare--not least globalization's wreck after the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, which seems to me the most important thing of all. The supermodel's natural habitat was a world of exuberant fantasy of luxurious, jet-setting glamour befitting an age of globalizing boom, or at least its appearance, which lost whatever credibility it may ever have had in these years. After all, the super-rich may be super-richer than ever before, but, despite the talking heads' fixation on this as if it were the measure of everything, the broad public is ever more alert to the fact that they are not super-rich, that indeed in many ways they are less rich than they were just a short while ago--all as the centibillionaires themselves seem uneasy, thinking less than before of the jet-setting good life and more the hope that, as Douglas Rushkoff had it, "as long [as] they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making" in the way the plebs cannot.
What Does the Decline of the Supermodel Have to do with Globalization?
In considering the decline of celebrity I have had something to say of the decline of the movie star, and the decline of the sports star.
However, one can also speak of the decline of the supermodel. One can see that decline as due to some of the same factors as the decline of celebrity generally--the broadly more fragmented and conflicted popular culture, for example. Still, just like the decline of the movie star and the sports star the decline of the supermodel has had its own, more distinct, features.
After all, consider those things with which we tend to associate supermodels. We think of prestigious brands of clothing and cosmetics, in lushly produced ads playing on your screen. We think of world capitals like New York, and Paris, and Milan, and the tropical getaways of the rich and famous that are the backdrops to so many swimsuit shoots, and other much-romanticized world capital/getaway locations like these, and jet-setting among them all.
Consider also the era in which the fascination with the supermodel emerged and really flourished--the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and after its arguable peak in the last decade of the century, the 2000s.
These decades together comprise the era of what it became fashionable to call "globalization" and what the more politically and economically literate recognize as "neoliberalism," with the peak of the supermodel phenomenon also the period in which globalization's champions' promises of opulence were most extravagant and widely heeded, not least in a "New Economy," dot-com bubble-era America singing global anthems to multinational corporations. These same decades also saw the digitalization of media we now take so much for granted, which saw the screens through which we took in the world beyond our immediate surroundings ever bigger and more ubiquitous, with, again, those same years in which the supermodel and globalization were at their peaks a watershed here with the Internet exploding into wide use at the very same time, all as an edgier, "extreme," aesthetic which had as one of its aspects a less restrained and sexier pop culture emerged, with advertising one level at which this was especially evident.
Within this context what the supermodel represented and what she helped sell was the fantasy of a free, cosmopolitan, gracious, graceful, aesthetic, sensual, luxurious life in the unprecedentedly exuberant, borderless world that unleashed markets and surging "innovation" were supposed to be making, coming at you through those screens bringing you the world as never before.
Indeed, looking back the then-novel and much-commented upon web-streaming of the 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show, the images of the show playing on that giant TV screen over that crossroads of the world in global fashion capital New York's Times Square, seem a perfect symbol of the moment.
Of course, however crisply rendered through those larger and higher-definition displays, the fantasy was always just that, a fantasy, and indeed a fantasy built on top of another fantasy--the fantasy of neoliberalism, in spite of all logic and the lessons to be drawn from all of economic history, actually working as promised by its claqueurs. However, that more foundational fantasy has withered in the years since the Great Recession. And I suspect that in the wake of that event whether people think so consciously or not the glamorous fantasy described here has just moved too far out of reach for a critical mass of them in an age that feels ever more limited and stifling as they struggle ever harder to make it through the day, and that the painful reality of being at the bottom of the heap or close to it counts for more with them than the practical impossibility of their ever experiencing life "at the top" as what they see through their ever-higher quality and more inescapable screens increasingly leaves them overwhelmed rather than exhilarated in a profoundly un-sexy time. Indeed, amid the "We're all in this together" claptrap that filled the media as the COVID-19 pandemic struck a world that was already coming apart, and began killing tens of millions of people, damaging the bodies and minds of hundreds of millions more and traumatizing and otherwise upending the lives of many more still as it cut a swath among the least fortunate and able to protect themselves, even the courtiers of the elite were prepared to acknowledge the measure of alienation among the many. If they did so in only a limited way, for a brief moment, what now in media years seems a whole lifetime ago, still they did it, providing a rare public recognition of the reality well worth remembering for how it has endured beyond that short-lived readiness to even make the admission that such a thing as the pandemic exists at all.
However, one can also speak of the decline of the supermodel. One can see that decline as due to some of the same factors as the decline of celebrity generally--the broadly more fragmented and conflicted popular culture, for example. Still, just like the decline of the movie star and the sports star the decline of the supermodel has had its own, more distinct, features.
After all, consider those things with which we tend to associate supermodels. We think of prestigious brands of clothing and cosmetics, in lushly produced ads playing on your screen. We think of world capitals like New York, and Paris, and Milan, and the tropical getaways of the rich and famous that are the backdrops to so many swimsuit shoots, and other much-romanticized world capital/getaway locations like these, and jet-setting among them all.
Consider also the era in which the fascination with the supermodel emerged and really flourished--the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and after its arguable peak in the last decade of the century, the 2000s.
These decades together comprise the era of what it became fashionable to call "globalization" and what the more politically and economically literate recognize as "neoliberalism," with the peak of the supermodel phenomenon also the period in which globalization's champions' promises of opulence were most extravagant and widely heeded, not least in a "New Economy," dot-com bubble-era America singing global anthems to multinational corporations. These same decades also saw the digitalization of media we now take so much for granted, which saw the screens through which we took in the world beyond our immediate surroundings ever bigger and more ubiquitous, with, again, those same years in which the supermodel and globalization were at their peaks a watershed here with the Internet exploding into wide use at the very same time, all as an edgier, "extreme," aesthetic which had as one of its aspects a less restrained and sexier pop culture emerged, with advertising one level at which this was especially evident.
Within this context what the supermodel represented and what she helped sell was the fantasy of a free, cosmopolitan, gracious, graceful, aesthetic, sensual, luxurious life in the unprecedentedly exuberant, borderless world that unleashed markets and surging "innovation" were supposed to be making, coming at you through those screens bringing you the world as never before.
Indeed, looking back the then-novel and much-commented upon web-streaming of the 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show, the images of the show playing on that giant TV screen over that crossroads of the world in global fashion capital New York's Times Square, seem a perfect symbol of the moment.
Of course, however crisply rendered through those larger and higher-definition displays, the fantasy was always just that, a fantasy, and indeed a fantasy built on top of another fantasy--the fantasy of neoliberalism, in spite of all logic and the lessons to be drawn from all of economic history, actually working as promised by its claqueurs. However, that more foundational fantasy has withered in the years since the Great Recession. And I suspect that in the wake of that event whether people think so consciously or not the glamorous fantasy described here has just moved too far out of reach for a critical mass of them in an age that feels ever more limited and stifling as they struggle ever harder to make it through the day, and that the painful reality of being at the bottom of the heap or close to it counts for more with them than the practical impossibility of their ever experiencing life "at the top" as what they see through their ever-higher quality and more inescapable screens increasingly leaves them overwhelmed rather than exhilarated in a profoundly un-sexy time. Indeed, amid the "We're all in this together" claptrap that filled the media as the COVID-19 pandemic struck a world that was already coming apart, and began killing tens of millions of people, damaging the bodies and minds of hundreds of millions more and traumatizing and otherwise upending the lives of many more still as it cut a swath among the least fortunate and able to protect themselves, even the courtiers of the elite were prepared to acknowledge the measure of alienation among the many. If they did so in only a limited way, for a brief moment, what now in media years seems a whole lifetime ago, still they did it, providing a rare public recognition of the reality well worth remembering for how it has endured beyond that short-lived readiness to even make the admission that such a thing as the pandemic exists at all.
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