Facing Hard Times is Hollywood Going to Rein in its Film Budgets?

Recent decades have seen film production budgets explode--and with them promotional budgets as well, which have, if anything, grown faster. (Previously a fraction of what it cost to make a movie, promotional budgets are now comparable to the production budgets which swelled in size so much.)

What led to those burgeoning costs? There is, of course, Hollywood's famously wastefulness with money, from the pre-production process forward. There is the ever greater reliance on intellectual properties, which come with big bills (not least, in legal fees). There is the explosion of the compensation for people bringing Big Names to a project. (All of this, you will notice, has nothing to do with the actual film production process.) And there is the fact that Hollywood has become so reliant on lavishly staged action films.

In considering the expense those projects involved one has to consider that Hollywood might lay out only a small fraction of the advertised budget. The figures may be overstated for tax purposes, for example, or to diminish the portion of the profit to be shared by others to whom the studio may have commitments. (Remember how Forrest Gump, after almost $700 million banked, had officially not yet turned a profit?) And of course, there is the place of product placement, and government subsidy (with Heineken paying $45 million for Bond to drink its beer in Skyfall, and Mexican officials offering a $20 million tax credit for the makers of Spectre to shoot the pre-credits scene the way they wanted). And while there is a tendency to emphasize the highly publicized theatrical earnings, much of the money comes from less publicized revenue streams, like video, TV rights and merchandising (which easily turn flops into profitable ventures).

Still, it is hard to picture the blockbusters we now take for granted being made without the expectation of billion dollar grosses. And the pandemic has seen such grosses become harder to earn, when they were already getting tougher to score in an age of ever-multiplying entertainment options and intensifying media noise (hence those aggressive promotional budgets). While I have certainly underestimated how long the studios can keep selling superhero movies, audience fatigue with the same themes, the same franchises, seems bound to set in eventually. Meanwhile the Chinese market on which Hollywood has set such hopes has proven a harder one than is generally admitted with movies like Crazy Rich Asians, the live-action Mulan and the latest installments of the Star Wars failing to take; with rising great power tensions perhaps forcing American filmmakers to be more cautious; with the last two entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which usually does pretty well in China, failing to even get into Chinese theaters (likely because of such politics), potentially costing each of those productions hundreds of millions of badly needed dollars. (Pre-pandemic Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would each have had a good shot at the billion dollar club. As it is the two combined have not even pulled in $800 million so far, which can hardly be making Disney happy--any more than the sputtering out of their once grand ambitions with Star Wars have.)

One possible response is Hollywood's spending its money more carefully. I am not convinced it can become much less wasteful, because its practice is so entrenched, but it may be that it will give us shorter running times and tone down the overfamiliar bombast in its action movies--while, perhaps, opening the door at least a little wider to creativity in moviemaking, giving us something at least a little fresher than the stultifying sameness of recent years. Still, modest as such modifications sound I find myself thinking they are far beyond the pack which humiliates itself so thoroughly when its reality gets a little media exposure--with their inability and unwillingness to adapt the greater because there is, in the press as elsewhere, never a shortage of sycophants telling them they are all wonderful geniuses and that everything is just fine, the same as they do with the powerful in every area of life.

Superhero Films, James Bond and the Avoidance of Franchise Fatigue

As those who have followed the scene are well aware the boom in superhero films is about two decades old, certainly if one goes by the then-surprising success of Bryan Singer's first X-Men film in the summer of 2000. Naturally there has been considerable speculation about whether the audience is getting tired of superheroes--on which I have been getting my two cents for at least a decade now, with a piece by Brandon Katz in the Observer getting me thinking about it again, the more in as it cited former vice chairman of the motion picture group at Paramount Pictures Barr London's remark that "Every franchise with the exception of James Bond gets people tired."

The fact that almost six decades later the latest Bond movie looks like a hit--and indeed, a hit to which some are looking as at the very least a sign of the salvation of the whole industry--would seem to confirm London's assessment of the situation. Still, I would argue that Bond has been no exception to the pattern--that a glance at his long history shows that, yes, it, too, has experienced fatigue over the years.

The enthusiasm for the franchise may be said to have peaked with Thunderball, with "Bondmania" starting to pass not too long after. You Only Live Twice cost more and, if still a huge hit by any measure, took in a lot less money. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a comparative letdown, after which The Man with the Golden Gun distinctly underperformed--while the increasing tendency to parody was, if not necessarily a barrier to decent earnings, not looked on happily by all, and many quick to declare the series weary, and the fans if not the mass market weary with it, though that too followed. The '80s were a time of declining grosses in an increasingly crowded market, with A View to a Kill seen as at the least an artistic low point (to say nothing of uncompetitive with the likes of Rambo that same summer), while Licence to Kill proved a particular disappointment in the U.S., contributing to the fact that there was not another Bond film in theaters for six and a half long years.

All of this was in spite of the fact that big-budget action movies were comparatively few until the '80s (by which time the franchise really was showing signs of fatigue), and that flamboyantly high-living, globetrotting spy-fi did not even begin to become a Hollywood staple for another decade after that (with True Lies, Mission: Impossible, etc.). It was also in spite of the fact that the series' runners went to enormous lengths to keep audiences, shamelessly seizing on any and every fashionable trend, no matter how questionable (Blaxploitation, Star Wars), while constantly shifting tone and feel (more or less serious, more or less nostalgic or novel), and that the conditions were such that it was able to get away with this strategy (at least so far as the general audience was concerned) because, again, the action movie market was not so brutally competitive as it has since become.

In short, the makers of the Bond movies had things comparatively easy for most of the franchise's history, while more recently it has probably helped that Hollywood puts out a good deal less spy-fi than it does superhero films, and that the output of Bond films has been limited. (Since 1989 we have had a grand total of only nine Bond films, and since 2002 just five of them--one every four years, on average.)

The superhero film has no such advantage today--and I would argue that this is less because of anything really special about it than the fact that the makers of the more successful such movies have gone to such lengths to fight off fatigue. There is the way in which Marvel got audiences wrapped up in a multimedia "Cinematic Universe." There has been the late shift to edgier, antiheroic, often R-rated material (with Logan and Venom and above all Deadpool). And there has been the leveraging of cultural politics (with Wonder Woman, with Black Panther, with Captain Marvel). I myself have not been particularly impressed with the results as anything but "more of the same," really, while not everyone found their tweaks to the familiar to their liking, myself included. (I found Deadpool's metafictional aspects and flippancy and edgelordism all awfully stale stuff, while Wonder Woman was, for all its woke pretensions, awfully conventional and nationalistic in its treatment of World War I, among other things, etc..) But they did get people into theaters--for a while. The approach may still be working, to go by the earnings of Black Widow and Shang-Chi and Venom 2 (so far), perhaps helped by the long stretch in which people have been going to theaters less and so many big movies of the type have had their releases bumped, audiences are feeling less saturated, less worn out, than they would have felt at the same point had things proceeded normally. Still, I suspect that before much longer the industry will have to think up something else if it is to keep the boom from going bust.

Revisiting Umberto Eco's "The Myth of Superman"

The idea of the hero is, I suppose, found in just about every culture in one form or another, and with it superheroes in the broad sense of people whose abilities and achievements were in some way more than merely human. Yet the idea of the superhero as we know it, the DC/Marvel Comics-type superhero--the superhero with a colorful public persona apart from their private identity, existent not in some mythic, settled past but as a figure whose adventures are ongoing in the present day, etc.--is more distinctly American (if, in a global age in which American pop culture is received everywhere, enjoyed everywhere, as the box office receipts demonstrate).

In considering that possibility I find myself thinking of Umberto Eco's essay "The Myth of Superman." The piece offers a great many ideas on the subject, some of which seem to me rather plausible, others less so. Perhaps the most significant is his idea that the superhero is a response to the experience people have in modern times of being powerless, and feeling that they are mediocre, and hoping that somehow they will transcend their ordinary human limitations to redeem that.

Of course, individual powerlessness, and the sense of being a mediocrity, are unpleasant features of human social life generally for the vast majority of people, given the scale and complexity of that life, the constraints on us and the demands on us, the standards by which we judge ourselves in an age of mass media, and there is nothing uniquely American about them. But all the same I wonder if the pain of them is felt as severely everywhere--if being powerless and "mediocre" is experienced as so much of a humiliating defeat as in a society which makes so much of the rhetoric of freedom and choice and empowerment, which incessantly tells its members that they and no one else are in control of their lives; as in a society so given to the worship of the powerful individual, and enthralled with their exercise of their power for even the stupidest and most selfish ends; as in a society which so fervently sings the ideal of meritocracy, and its claim to actually living by it; as in a society where life is lived on "winner take all" terms; and in light of all of the foregoing, as in a society where the "losers," left with that much less than they otherwise might be, are on the basis of the foregoing told every moment of every day that they have absolutely no one to blame but themselves for their unhappiness.

I wonder, too, if the response to that unhappiness with fantasies of somehow going from "zero to hero," from powerless mediocrity to super-empowered superlativeness, is so great in a society where the value system is less vehement about this particular brand of "loser-humiliating" individualism; where people less often cope, or fail to cope, with their frustrations and miseries in intensely private ways.

And I wonder if it is not relevant that all this took off as it did in recent decades, in a neoliberal, neoconservative era in which those deemed losers are told to not even dream of other worlds.

The Reading We Don't Do in School

I have previously had occasion to mention on this blog my reading Graham Greene's brief but valuable essay about "our literary friends"--by which Greene meant those writers who may not "do us credit" in the eyes of the world but whom we truly enjoyed reading when we were young.

Considering the eternal debate about whether or not literacy is declining, it seems to me that the fact that fewer young people have such friends is probably part of the problem. We talk a great deal about how the schools may be failing in their educational mission (in part because their role is the more obvious, in part because teacher-bashing and school-bashing serves the agenda of the "privatize everything" crowd), but overlook how the schools never carried the whole burden. If people on average read better in the past than they do now, this was at least partly because they did more free reading, and likely got more than is appreciated out of material that, to the eyes of the skeptical middlebrow, looked unpromising.

Certainly looking back I think reading such fiction helped me in that way. My reading, admittedly, was not wholly unvaried, but as you may recall John le Carré was way too "literary" for me. (Indeed, even Ian Fleming was too literary for me in those days.) Rather what I went for were the jet-setting shoot 'em up spy novels, the military techno-thrillers, the big summertime blockbusters on paper generally. I inclined, in particular, to Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy (and Larry Bond, and Dale Brown, and Eric Van Lustbader, etcetera, etcetera).

Were the books those authors produced "great literature?" No, not by the standards of "the ancients," or the Medievals, or Franco-Jamesian realism, or Zolaesque naturalism, or Modernism or postmodernism or any other "high cultural" standard with which I am familiar. Nevertheless, taking up those books I was not just practicing my reading comprehension skills, but doing so on material that still had me coping with long, information-heavy, sometimes complexly and intricately structured and detailed narratives (lots of subplots, lots of narrative threads, lots of viewpoint characters). Material that, because of its subject matter, made demands on, and sometimes expanded, my vocabulary and my general knowledge. Material that, while not doing so in the more artistically striking ways, or for the sake of exploring important or understanding of lived life, demanded close attention, and patience, and a readiness to puzzle things out here and there (if only for the sake of following what was going on in some action sequence).

I might add that as one who not only enjoyed reading such fiction but was already aspiring to write it I was more attentive to the books than most. Where the conventionally "dutiful" student of creative writing spends their time trying to write "beautiful" sentences, I went so far as to outline many of these books in detail, trying to work out how one development led to the next, how one scene led to the next; how one fleshed out a narrative so that what might have been boiled down into a summary of a few pages was a whole book; how they distinguished between what was worth conveying and not worth conveying to the reader, and how best it might be conveyed so that the reader would be able to follow along, and preferably, enthusiastic about doing so.

Soon enough my interests as reader and writer changed, and I spent less time with those friends than I did before. But looking back I can see that it was a training nonetheless, a broader one than even that to which I was aspiring as a would-be novelist.

21st Century Hollywood: A Cheat Sheet

I doubt anyone would say that the twenty-first century has been Hollywood's most glorious era artistically. It did not and arguably could not see the fundamental innovation of the era of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin. It was not the "golden age of movies" in which the MGM lion roared, or the scene of the kind of innovative, challenging work produced by the "New Hollywood" of the 1970s. Still, if the era could seem one of stagnation artistically, the business has certainly seen a great deal of change, in cases extending prior trends (the long-increasing competition from the small screen and import of the foreign box office, the rise of "high concept" in the 1970s, for example, or the resurgence of big-screen animation in the 1990s), in others reflecting more fundamental technological change (as the Internet's development permitted sufficiently convenient streaming of kind to make this preferable to the purchase or rental of physical media--one thing about which Ray Kurzweil was right). Eight developments seem to stand out above all:

1. The rise of China. (The foreign markets have always been important--as anyone familiar with Hollywood's sheer groveling before Nazi Germany in the '30s recalls--but never has a single foreign market had so much dollars-and-cents significance.)

2. The ascent of TV rather than the feature film as the scene for such drama as we get in this day and age (in the new "golden age of television").

3. The rise and fall of DVD--the latter, as yet another technology, the streaming of content, edged it out the way it had edged out the video cassette (e.g. Netflix went from mailing us discs to delivering content straight to our devices).

4. The collapse of the (movie) star system. (People went to the movies to see franchises, not stars.)

5. The intensification of franchising. This extended, of course, to
a. The haste we saw in the rebooting of recently exploited properties (a mere five years later after Spiderman 3 we had Spiderman's origin story all over again in The Amazing Spider-man); and
b. The development of shared universes (like Marvel achieved, and like Warner tried to have with DC, and Disney tried to have with Star Wars).

6. The demise of the mid-budget movie, decline of standalone movies of all types, and for that matter, anything that did not lend itself to an internationally appealing, colossally merchandisable franchise. (Goodbye, romantic comedy. Goodbye adult drama, no matter how much the suck-ups in the entertainment press sneer at and straw man those who say those kinds of movies "don't get made anymore.")

7. The increasing dominance of the market by exactly two genres, precisely because they lend themselves so well to the creation of internationally appealing, colossally merchandisable franchises--action-adventure (in the main big-budget science fiction and fantasy CGI-fests, with a sprinkling of spy-fi), and big, usually musical comedy-oriented family animated features (to the point that they would account for at least eight of the top ten movies of the year).

8.The rise of Disney from not even being one of the "majors" to being king of Hollywood (precisely because no one was more shameless about playing by these rules).

Altogether it really does seem quite extraordinary--with the extent to which this was the case underscored by how little many of the participants understood it. (Certainly Ben Fritz gives the impression that Sony CEO Amy Pascal did not "get it" until very late, and Sony suffered for it.) Considering it all I find myself wondering what the next twenty years might bring--and find myself not coming up with much, precisely because in all of the above I get the sense that the history of the "movie as we know it" is drawing to a close.

What Does it Mean if We Look at Life as a Game?

It seems to have become something of a commonplace over the years to draw an analogy between life and a poorly designed video game. The lists of problematic features of said game typically mention such things as: the lack of a satisfactory tutorial, the fact that you don't get to design your character or choose your difficulty setting (with the randomness often massively and painfully disadvantageous), the abundance of minigames that are both mandatory and extremely dull (e.g. school, work, chores), the lack of a pause or save feature, and the player's getting only one life without reset being an option--with all this just for a start. (After all that come the incessant and frequently unwelcome updates, the profoundly unfair leveling system, the "pay-to-win" terms . . . and the lack of cheat codes for surmounting these innumerable annoyances.)

All this, of course, has mostly been a matter of humorous or ironic remark, but it seems worth remembering when we see yet another of those pieces about how young people are playing video games rather than working that the (exaggerated but still real) preference for video games is not just a matter of games getting more satisfying--but arguably the sense that the "game of life," bad enough as games go to begin with, has been getting worse, with the tutorial still less satisfactory, the difficulty setting ever harder, the leveling system less fair.

Indeed, if it does not make for quite so catchy a sound bite, the real story is far, far bigger--and in fact I found myself recently taking up a bit of it here.

On the (Alleged) Obsession With People's "Net Worth"

One of my (many) causes for annoyance with the results Google's search engine spews out these days is that whenever I type in a name--any name--its autocomplete adds the words "net worth" to the end of it.

Let us, for the moment, not concern ourselves with the way that word "worth" reduces a human being to the net market valuation of their financial assets in perverse inversion of the parable of the "Good Samaritan," and the associated linguistic stupidity attendant on it--much the same as with words like "deserve" and "entitlement." Instead let us focus on what the search engine's suggestion relentless appearance implies--that this is an extremely common search query for anybody even remotely close to being a public figure.

Is it really the case that all those idiots tapping away on their little devices are so monomaniacally Googling away in quest of the market valuation of the net assets of every last pseudo-celebrity?

I suspect that it isn't, and that "net worth" comes up so relentlessly bespeaks some profound failing of the algorithms generating the results--or the side effect of some hardly less profound tinkering with them.

The End of Self-Consciousness? (Remembering the 1990s)

Looking back at the 1990s from a generation on I find myself thinking that it may have been the last time when Americans had a sense of how ridiculous, and gross, contemporary culture was becoming. I think, for instance, of how films like The Truman Show and EdTV treated the idea of "reality television," and the idea of American society becoming obsessed with such a thing, as over-the-top satire--just before American society became obsessed with it to a degree that makes EdTV, at least, look like nothing, with scarcely a word uttered about the matter as such, and indeed the sycophantic entertainment press breathlessly cheerleading for the garbage. Indeed, two decades later the book and film The Circle, which shows this sort of pop culture-ified voyeurism in hyper-intensified form--with everyone the star of their own Truman Show and EdTV, watched by all the other Truman Show and EdTV stars comprising the rest of the population of the planet, the original concept multiplied by billions and billions--was regarded as already stale stuff by underwhelmed critics who did not give much sign of thinking about what its looking stale to their eyes said about the reality they were living in.

Still less did they seem to give any thought to how media business hucksters such as themselves were contributing to that reality.

Remembering "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures"

I remember how back when writing for The Fix I penned a piece titled "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures." As the title implies, it drew on C.P. Snow's famous lecture about the division of intellectual life in the modern Western world between "letters," and "sciences," and the disconnects, misunderstandings and other consequences of that division.

As I learned then (the forums at The Fix were rather lively in those days), and have never had much chance to forget when going anywhere near Snow's work, a great many people not only disagree with Snow, but even seem to bitterly resent his argument, vehemently contesting even what seem to me his most indisputable observations about the matter. This seemed to me to especially be the case with what Snow said about the differences in valuation and status between those intellectuals who work in letters, and those who work in the sciences, and specifically his observations about the latter being more remunerated and more highly esteemed.

After all, we hear endlessly about the importance of STEM--not the importance of the humanities, which are more likely to be the target of political attack (not least, for being "soft" and "useless" subjects, especially from those quarters which regard anything not obviously, directly, indisputably maximizing short-term corporate profits as a complete waste of time). Certainly the data on the earnings that a four year degree brings confirms that, in spite of the pious remarks of businessmen that they would like to have more "well-rounded employees" of the kind the humanities help make (an old game--William Whyte was writing about it back in the '50s), and even here and there the suggestion that the STEM workers would be more productive if they had a bit more of such subjects (if, for example, the people conducting and overseeing scientific research actually understood the philosophical underpinnings of, you know, science), their real hiring choices make it clear that the salary-minded (and who can afford not to be?) would be far better off majoring in engineering than in, for example, philosophy (so much such that while the right is more notorious for bashing the liberal arts a Democratic President not ordinarily regarded as a lowbrow was not above publicly deriding the value of an art history degree). And of course when people today speak (glibly, but they do it all the same) of the most intellectually demanding activities, and (foolishly) of the "icons" of intelligence at its most outstanding, they do not, as Thomas Malthus did in his day, even think of a Shakespeare or a Locke, but only a Newton--of the hardest of hard sciences, nothing else worthy.

Naturally, all those contesting this point had to say on behalf of their position was that stupid "Nuh-uh!" that I regard as a sadly unavoidable abuse of freedom of speech--while since that time the hard facts of austerity have made the conclusion far more difficult to escape. As Boris Johnson, Gavin Williamson and the rest of their vulgarian company mount the latest round in the longstanding Thatcherite assault on British higher education, they remind all and sundry that where unworthiness of the state's educational resources are concerned they regard the humanities as Public Enemy Number One.

Looking Back at "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television," Again

Some time ago I revisited the kind of writing I used to do for IROSF, in particular the big summary-type pieces toward which I tended--like the one I did regarding the early-'90s-through-early-00s "golden age of science fiction television"--and considered how much more difficult it would be for anyone to do anything like that these days.

At the time the main thing seemed to me to be the sheer mass of the output--and the colossal fragmentation of our viewing by the larger number of channels, the still larger number of streaming services. Already tough enough back in the '90s (I admit that even then there were big chunks of the landscape I scarcely bothered with--like Buffy the Vampire Slayer), it was all too much for anyone to even try to keep up with in a general way.

Still, there was also a more personal side to the sense that I, at least, would not think of attempting anything like that now. As I acknowledged at the time I was getting weary of the same franchises telling the same stories over and over and over again--and in particular, the kinds of stories they opted to tell and retell. I was weary of apocalypses, and disaster, and dystopias; of Luddism and Frankenstein complexes and survivalism. I was weary of how so much of this stuff relentlessly "stacked the deck" in favor of the fascist's view of the world, where the right choice is invariably the bigoted, suspicious, violent choice, the brutal and cruel choice. I was weary, too, of the long arcs promising to go somewhere which again and again ended with a whimper. (I count among the multitude of sins of both BattleStar Galactica and Lost their exhausting what little readiness I had left to go along with such such promises.) And . . .

I could go on, but I think this will do for now. What matters is that the weariness has gone so far that, rather than no longer bothering to keep up with the general scene, I find myself not bothering with the scene much at all now as Hollywood goes on serving up more of the same dreck.

Am I alone in thinking all this?

On Genres That Never Happened: The Blockbuster Superhero Novel

Looking back on the history of paramilitary action-adventure it seemed to me that one of the reasons why the genre declined in the 1990s as it did was that the associated themes had lost their salience in a changing world. Putting it simply, Vietnam receded into the past, the Cold War ended, and crime rates went down as those who once fantasized about Dirty Harry and Rambo saw their governments acting ever more like Dirty Harry and Rambo.

Certainly what has happened since, in media besides print, has only confirmed that for me. The Taken trilogy's Bryan Mills has his fans, not least because of the franchise's politics ("the film adaptation of an email forward from your uptight uncle who watches too much Fox News")--but as sheer pop culture phenomenon, his success paled next to that of Dirty Harry, or Rambo, as audiences by and large thrilled to the adventures of costumed, secret identity-possessing superheroes instead (certainly if one goes by the box office receipts).

Still, as I also acknowledged part of what was going on was the shift of action-adventure from print to other media. Action fans simply preferred to watch a TV show or a movie or play a video game rather than read a book--and now there was far more of that content conveniently available, streamable from any number of services to devices they were likely to take with them everywhere.

And the very success of the superhero genre seems to confirm that--with the same going for the exceptions to that success. While superhero movies again and again set new records at the box office, and if a less formidable presence on TV are quite evident there nonetheless, we do not see "superhero novels" on our bestseller lists to anything like the same degree. Novels about the Avengers, for example, do exist, and find audiences, but they are simply not chart-toppers here--so that in that sense the superhero phenomenon so evident elsewhere never happened in print.

Revisiting Middlebrowness

Those who discuss the idea of the middlebrow commonly trace it back to a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to the New Statesman deriding it, posthumously published in the 1942 collection Death of the Moth. Woolf's explanation was far from tidy and straightforward--or for that matter, fair-minded. Her crashing snobbery (with which her ostentatiously "woke" fans are, of course, entirely comfortable) was extravagantly on display as she hailed the lowbrow--when in their proper place--and the highbrow in theirs, but thoroughly disliked those who were a bit of each and somewhere in between. And equally obvious was her determination to defend her prejudices above all.

Still, one can salvage something from the muddle of her words. Taking the works of William Shakespeare as a point of reference, one can characterize the lowbrow, the middlebrow and the highbrow as follows:

The lowbrow knows little or nothing of Shakespeare and does not care to find out more because all that "culture stuff" is not for the "likes of them."

The middlebrow reads Shakespeare, but cannot give an intelligent answer as to why they do so. They just know that cultured people are "supposed" to read Shakespeare, because they have been told it is important by people whose claim to cultural authority they have accepted for reasons they also cannot explain. When they actually do read Shakespeare for themselves they do not get much out of it, but they still repeat what they are told about Shakespeare being the greatest writer the English-speaking world ever produced because that is what everyone is supposed to say.

The highbrow likely, but not necessarily, knows something of Shakespeare. Perhaps they read him and perhaps they do not. Perhaps they say they like him and perhaps they say they do not like him. What is more important than their exact position on Shakespeare is their reason for that position. They are neither categorically dismissive of higher culture like the plays and poetry of Shakespeare in the manner of the lowbrow, nor uncomprehendingly pious about it in the manner of the middlebrow. Rather they are capable of forming a considered opinion of their own.

Considering the matter in these terms my suspicion is that there are very few true highbrows in the world--most supposed highbrows actually just middlebrows practicing imposture upon the gullible. Otherwise the purveyors of the "Midcult" would not enjoy the status that they do.

Are More People Trying to Sell Books Than Buy Them?

The eternal whine of editors, agents and others whose business has them dealing with aspiring writers (usually, dealing with them as little as they can possibly get away with) is that there are more people writing books than reading them, and trying to sell them than buying them.

Of course, this is just a whine. But it does seem plausible that the ratio of would-be writers to would-be readers has shifted dramatically in the direction of more writers and less readers this past century, and especially these past few decades.

Not long ago I suggested two reasons for this:

1. People are reading much, much less, preferring other media for their entertainment.
2. Even sticking with the strictly legal they have more, and more convenient, options for accessing reading material totally free than ever before, from everything ever published up to the early twentieth century on Gutenberg (thank you public domain!), to self-published fiction on sites like Wattpad and Inkitt.

However, I think there is a third reason worth adding, namely that a great many people whose creative inclinations have little to do with fiction as such are writing short stories, novellas, etc., because this is easier than working in the medium they really want to be working in. Fan fiction is an obvious case. (They might prefer to make a Harry Potter fan film--but settle for writing a story instead because they lack the needed resources.) Still, it is not the only case. (Your chances of seeing your idea for a big-budget action movie come to $300 million life on the big screen are so slight that even traditional publishing looks plausible by comparison--and so what might have been a screenplay is rendered as a novel instead.)

Of course, such material has had its audience, but it is a residue of excitement over other media, and for the creator second-best, while perhaps not even that for the audience. While the frustrated filmmaker is so driven to create that they will do so in another medium when their first choice is unavailable, the audience does not necessarily share the impulse--especially with so much other such content out there, skewing the ratio of creator to audience again.

Remembering Jack London's The Sea-Wolf: What Passed for Argument on the Ghost

I have had occasion in the past to remark that Jack London, while not forgotten (Harrison Ford starred in a major feature film version of The Call of the Wild just last year) seems to be remembered as a writer of adventure stories about animals, and not much else--and that, as has generally been the case when prominent writers of yesteryear were downgraded by the Jamesian-Modernist-postmodernist critics ill-disposed by their prejudices to appreciate their virtues, we are the poorer for it. Contrary to what some may imagine given the portion of his work that gets the most attention these days, much of London's most important writing was actually about the specifically human animal, and that not merely out in the wilderness, but in the social world--as seen in his important early dystopia The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, or The Sea-Wolf, even incidental bits of which prove memorable.

In the particular bit I have in mind at the moment, the hero of The Sea-Wolf, literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden, who through an unexpected twist of fate finds himself stuck aboard a ship of seal hunters headed out to the northwest Pacific, has occasion to think about how his shipmates look at the world, and discuss it among themselves. Typically arguing over "childish and immaterial" topics, their manner of arguing "was still more childish and immaterial," not least in that there was "very little reasoning or none at all" to speak of in their dialogue. Rather there was only "assertion, assumption, and denunciation." For instance, they would "prove" whether or not a seal pup was born able to swim simply "by stating the proposition very bellicosely," then in the face of any opposition, apt to take the form of a similarly bellicose counter-assertion, respond with "attack on the . . . judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history" of the person who disagreed, with a back and forth continuing in this fashion ad nauseam.

Of course, it is worth noting that the seal hunters as described here were the most marginalized of people, utterly deprived of education and culture. Alas, in this supposedly most educated age in history, social media, and the media generally, consists of little but such "assertion, assumption, and denunciation," usually on topics far sillier than any Van Weyden was likely to hear of during his sea voyage.

What are we to make of that?

The Reputations of Military Thinkers: Wells, Tukhachevsky, Triandafillov

Back in the interwar era figures like J.F.C. Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart and Giuilio Douhet envisioned small, high-tech forces (small mechanized armies, small air forces) delivering swift knockbout blows to the enemy, making interstate warfare cheap and painless compared to the horrifically costly, prolonged, grinding-to-the-breaking point total mobilization-mass army-campaign of attrition experience of World War I.

Their expectations could scarcely have been further from reality, but they have never ceased to be hailed as the giants of their era, and their theorizing about mechanized and aerial warfare still referenced and consulted today.

By contrast other contemporary observers saw the matter much more clearly. H.G. Wells, for example, saw that the little high-tech forces could not, would not, be instruments of decision. Instead air war, while massively destructive, also proved totally indecisive in his classic future history The Shape of Things to Come--an insight for which he is given virtually no credit. Even more far-sighted were the major Soviet interwar theorists, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vladimir Triandafillov. Both realized that the next war would be both high-tech and massive in scale--and were completely correct on that score, while again getting no credit for the fact.

Why are the theorists who were so wrong put on a pedestal, while those who got it right have been nearly ignored? I suppose one reason is that mainstream opinion slights H.G. Wells as anything but the producer of a few of his early science fiction novels--mostly because it cannot abide the rationalistic, socialist ideas he espoused, with this likely contributing to the eagerness some seem to display in ruining what remains to him of his reputation. Where the Russians were concerned access to their ideas seems to have been limited by the vagaries of the Stalin era, the scarcity of Russian-language skills in the Anglophone world (don't believe the crappy movies telling you the world is full of polyglot geniuses--it's not, by a long shot), and the contempt for all things Soviet (and Marxist) do not seem to have helped, with all this reinforced by the reality that by the time the ideas of these writers were better known the familiar history had become well-established. However, it seems that there is something more here--namely the fact that where Fuller and Hart and Douhet held and fostered in others the hope that technological advance could make industrial-age war an economical, viable enterprise for policymakers, Wells, Tukhachevsky, Triandafillov called out such thinking (Triandfaillov criticizes Fuller by name in his book), with the offense the more keenly felt because that notion of "winnable" major war has not lost its hold on the minds of theorists, even as the illusion of cheap and easy war is shown up again and again.

In an age of regionally catastrophic conflicts and intensifying great power enmity, there is no exaggerating the danger of that illusion, and the pernicious idiocy of its indefatigable promoters.