David Walsh Reviews Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: Some Reflections

In recent years film and culture critic David Walsh and his colleagues have attended to fewer and fewer major Hollywood releases, frequently going for months without reviewing a single such movie--while their publishing a review of a big "blockbuster" has become especially rare. This year has been no exception. There was a more than five month gap between their review of Alex Garland's Civil War back in April, and their belated publication of their only review of a major Hollywood film of the summer, Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters, at the start of October.

This may seem just as well given that there has been a very great deal else for them to write about in this era of "polycrisis," during which the arts have reflected the troubles in the larger world--with the institutions of the art world facing existential crisis (prominent museums, symphonies, schools withering and dying for lack of funding, and even megabuck film studios floundering) amid post-pandemic economic stress, government austerity, culture war; with artists and members of associated occupational groups finding it ever harder to make a living and being driven to strike action the same way so many other workers are (most recently, in the video game industry); with the horrific events of our times driving artists to take public stands, and those conventional wisdom flatters by calling "leaders" once more showing their colossal hypocrisy in the battles over free speech that rage in their wake; among much, much else. Indeed, if their review page covered previous Mad Max and Planet of the Apes and Deadpool films, their sequels could hardly seem worth the trouble amid all that, making their taking a pass on writing about them quite natural--the more in as from a critical standpoint such as their own there is often not very much to say about them. Indeed, it seems telling of their feeling about the poverty of American filmmaking today that Walsh and his colleagues recently had time for a series of articles to the movies of 1974.

Still, North American audiences do every now and then get a really big-budget, highly-publicized wide release made by people who are at least aspiring to present them with something more than another Big Dumb Blockbuster, at the very least a Big But Not So Dumb Blockbuster (whether successfully or unsuccessfully). Dealing with these Walsh and company usually do rise to the occasion--with Josh Varlin's appraisal of both parts of Denis Villeneuve's Dune outstanding, and Jacob Crosse and Patrick Martin's coverage of Civil War one of the rather small portion of the outpouring of reviews of that film that seemed to me truly worthwhile.

Francis Ford Coppola's Neo-Roman science fiction epic Megalopolis is another such film, and after its release last month Walsh undertook its review. Alas, his assessment was not positive--but certainly more interesting than most of what I have seen of the outpouring of negative comment, not least for what the film seems to say about a whole epoch in the history of filmmaking.

Announcement: This Blog Has Nothing to Do with Fake Countries

Apparently one of the many hobbies people pursue together on the Internet is make up fake countries with fake histories. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the similarity of the name to Anthony Hope's famous "Ruritania" and all that has been associated with it (and to "Raritan," a river, bay and borough in northeastern New Jersey within the New York Tri-State Area) "Raritania" seems a popular choice of name for such countries, profiles of at least two of them cropping up high in the search rankings when I type in this blog's name.

I hereby announce as officially as anything can be announced here that this blog, which was established in and has been continually operating since 2008, has no connection whatsoever with any of those imaginary countries. It is simply the personal blog of an individual, its owner and sole writer--myself.

How Much Money Might Joker 2 Lose?

Joker 2 opened in North America with a mere 30 percent of even the low end of the figure at the bottom end of the range in the forecast that Boxoffice Pro issued a mere month before the movie's release (just $37 million, against the $115 million that had been the "floor" of their expectation). After that no one seems to have thought "legs" might save the movie, but the movie's first-to-second weekend drop confirmed the expectation of the collapse continuing--the figure a rarely seen 81 percent--with the third weekend seeing another drop almost as bad (68 percent). Thus after ten days in release the movie had made a mere $52 million, after seventeen days just $56 million. (By contrast even that likely biggest loser of last year, the similarly DC debacle The Flash, managed $55 million in its first three day period, and had just under $100 million when its third weekend take was in.)

At this rate Joker 2 may not even reach the $60 million mark domestically, while it is hard to picture it getting very far over the $200 million mark globally. Assuming the studio keeps half of that it will end up with $100 million or so net, while (barring this being one of those movies that fails in theaters but explodes in post-theatrical venues) doing only as well in streaming and the other post-theatrical arenas, leaving it with a net not much above $200 million, against outlays that may have been in the $300 million+ range. That works out to a $100 million+ gap, with a recent Variety report indicating the loss as possibly twice that ($150-$200 million).

The worst loss posited for any movie so far this year (even the commercial catastrophe of Furiosa, the loss on which was reportedly in the $75-$95 million range), this makes it a very strong candidate for the top of Deadline's list of the year's biggest losers next spring. However, that is far from the whole story, the film's performance also a reminder of the prospect that the entertainment press does not want to talk about, namely that the theatrical market has changed structurally. On average the public goes to the movies twice a year now instead of the 3-4 times they went in the 2010s and the 4-5 times they went before, all of which has made them pickier about what they give those trips to the theater over to--all as the old blockbuster model may be failing in getting them to do that. Admittedly Joker did not fit that model very closely, and the sequel may have been even further removed from that model still (with its distance from the pretense of being an origin story for a supervillain, its sharp generic shifts from the original, etc.), but the expectation that people would show up for Number Two because they responded to Number One is very much part of that model, and part of what the backers were counting on, and did not work this time--though I doubt anyone who counts for very much in the film world will take the lesson. Instead they will cleave to the old saws about keeping the creatives under tight control rather than letting them chase visions, as, drawing confidence from Deadpool's delivering the boffo b.o. they were so desperate to see a franchise film make (the $1.3 billion they might have hoped the Joker would make), they go on trying to shamelessly milk any and every franchise they can for generic material--and then make excuses for people not showing up irrelevant to the real issue.

Joker 2's Fortunes: An Analogy

A relatively low-budgeted, noirish, drama of a marginal, lonely, man losing his shaky grip on reality who crosses paths with a candidate seeking office in a decaying "Gotham" in post-post-war boom America culminating in chaotic violence becomes a critical darling (Best Picture nominee!), and good-sized box office hit. Flush with success the movie's now lionized director brought back its star for his next film, which is a musical with a way bigger budget--and the movie fails catastrophically with critics and audiences alike, as the entertainment press reported that the "auteur," misusing the considerable good will his prior success had won him, was out of control and made a horrible mess of things.

That description could be of Martin Scorsese going from Taxi Driver to New York, New York. However, it could also be of Todd Phillips going from (the Martin Scorsese-inspired and Martin Scorsese-produced and, I thought, Martin Scorsese-imitating-to-a-fault) Joker to its recently released sequel, an analogy that has been on my mind ever since I heard Joker 2 would have a musical element, but which only a few seem to have drawn, and that only recently.

Perhaps this is because the movie was something of a low point for the still highly lionized Scorsese, all as that particular film, in spite of the fact that Scorsese's productivity and good repute have outlasted those of so many of his contemporaries, contrasts with how many of the less successful films of the stars of the Hollywood new era (most obviously Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, but also others like William Friedkin's Sorcerer) never enjoyed redemption in the eyes of the critics, and has lapsed into obscurity.

Or perhaps they thought of the analogy, but didn't speak up about it in public, because citing the notorious flop would have been at odds with their role as Les Claqueurs du Cinema. (Granted, King of Comedy was a commercial failure at the time, but it is at least pretty well respected as the gap in the Rotten Tomatoes score shows--King having an 89 percent fresh rating against the 57 percent rotten rating of the poorly regarded New York, New York.)

In either case it just did not come up much, but will probably come up more in the years ahead when people talk about the film--especially if Joker 2, like New York, New York, does not find its way to the kind of redemption for which those few who have spoken in praise of the film might regard as its rightful due.

Finding Interest in the Quotidian

It has been the longstanding view in modern times that really serious artistic work is "realistic," with work that conspicuously departs from reality justly marginal--better-suited to, for example, children than adults, and people who are less than totally adult in some sense (the "nerd" who likes cartoons and video games, certainly, seen as less fully adult than their peers, and the inverse of the "cool" kid who appears more autonomous and sophisticated and grown-up than their peers). There have always been exceptions, of course, but the point is that they have been exceptions, this very much the rule.

Much of this may seem a matter of the general silliness that we get when people of conventional mind try to make distinctions about what is proper and what is not--which produce such absurdities as the idea that Fantasy Football is a pastime worthy of adults, but not playing football on a video game console. But it may be that there are more substantial factors inclining the young more toward the fantastic, the not so young toward the realistic--and especially the everyday. The young lead very limited lives, and the big wide world of which they have seen less--and the worlds beyond that--may have an attraction for them that they do not to a more experienced, more world-weary adult who has already seen a bit of the world, often on terms that have not been particularly pleasant, and been disillusioned by it, so that such things as long journeys to faraway places have not the same romance for them.

That sounds negative, and I have no intention of pretending it is not, but at the same time I do not think all the factors are negative ones. Alongside what they lose is there what probably is more likely to come with age than in any other way, the ability to take an interest in the little things, and the everyday things--mastery of the handling of the details of which is, after all, an area where realism has been stronger than those forms of fiction which incline to flights of fancy.

The Waning of Nostalgia for the Rat Pack

I remember that in the late '90s there was a resurgence of interest in the old "Rat Pack" and its members and their works. Thus did we see, for example, a homage of sorts to the group in Doug Liman's Swingers, the Steven Soderbergh remake of Ocean's Eleven that launched a whole cinematic franchise, and such oddities as Larry Bishop's Mad Dog Time, as Ray Liotta played the actual Frank Sinatra in HBO's film The Rat Pack. (Meanwhile remembrances of the group cropped up in a good many smaller ways--as with Brent Spiner's rendition of Dean Martin's "Sway," as seen in the film Out to Sea--itself a piece of nostalgia in its reunion of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.)

The boom in Rat Pack nostalgia waned, but something of it seemed to come back a decade or so later, helped perhaps by the obsession of a culturally influential stratum with the aesthetic of the '50s as Mad Men became a hit.

However, a decade after there was no repeat of that. The only really significant usage of the Rat Pack's work in pop culture in the late '10s was in Todd Phillips' Joker--a film which, significantly, was itself a throwback (to the work of Martin Scorsese in the '70s and early '80s), and in which the particular theme of "Send in the Clowns" was highly relevant (and probably the reason the film also used Sinatra's rendition of "That's Life" in the end credits).

Some might see cultural politics in that, identifying nostalgia for the Rat Pack with a kind of machismo of which the mainstream has been less and less approving, with the #MeToo era a low point for such tolerance. However, one can also see it as a matter of how in popular memory even as grand a legacy as that of Frank Sinatra and his cohorts fades--perhaps the more quickly with pop culture getting ever more fragmented, and popular memory getting shorter all the time.

The Copyright Nazi Sheds Crocodile Tears for the Struggling Artist

It is rare that anyone in this society expresses sympathy for the struggling artist. Quite frankly, with very few exceptions, no one cares about struggling artists but the struggling artists themselves--not even their more successful brethren. (As Balzac put it when writing of the publishing world in Lost Illusions, "the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as" they, for where a "bookseller sees a possible loss of money" in a newcomer's manuscript, a successful author sees--"dreads"--in the newcomer "a possible rival," with the result that "the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you.")

The result is that such expressions of sympathy from people who were not struggling artists have tended to get my attention in the past--until time and again the reference to the troubles of artists proved to be just a hook for another rant about the glories of copyright and attack on anyone not taking a maximalist view of such rights as scum. That said, I will not get into the rights and wrongs of copyright here--but the plain and simple matter of the fact is that sterner enforcement of copyright laws is just not going to do much for the newcomer. Such laws defend the interests of those who possess intellectual property. They do nothing for those who have yet to produce any of commercial value. The standard copyright supporter's position is that a strong copyright regime incentivizes the creation of such property--but those struggling artists need a lot more than that if they are to do so successfully, and those professing concern for them show no interest in that whatsoever.

After all, if we grant what copyright's supporters say, and that a more stringent copyright regime does leave, for example, publishers with fatter profits, what are they likely to do with them? Give newcomers more chances? Only those who have no understanding of publishing, business or the neoliberal age can imagine that they would prefer this to a course of new mergers and acquisitions, or financial engineering, because publishers exist to make money, not produce books (and not even necessarily make money by producing books if they can get more, faster, with greater certainty in some other way)--the monuments that young authors rear with their life's blood, as Balzac put it, to them "simply a good or a bad speculation," and in the view of publishers, generally a bad one, whatever the merits of the work. Alas, a refusal to acknowledge such facts is a requirement in those given platforms from which one can reach an appreciable audience in our time, helping make the reference to the interests of struggling writers the cynical thing that it is.

What Irony is Really About: Superiority Without Responsibility

The word "irony" is much misused, so much so that reflecting the situation the writers of Teen Titans Go! actually had one episode in which such misuse by other members of the team had Robin devoting much of one of their adventures to explaining the concept, to the point of giving them an eighth grade English class explanation of the differences between verbal, dramatic and situational irony (as they went through one of their adventures, of course).

Sound as far as it went, it was also consistent with the fact that even those who actually use the word "irony" with impeccable correctness from the standpoint of denotation and syntax are not often sensitive to what it means to look at others and their troubles "ironically," namely the sense of superiority without responsibility involved, for instance, "I can see that this person is heading for a fall, but I can just sit back and enjoy that."

It is the outlook of the self-satisfied aristocrat without respect, sympathy, empathy for lesser beings, whose destruction he takes as entertainment, and the history of art being what it is, pervasive across our inheritance of higher culture, widespread today, and altogether absolutely irresistible to a middlebrow mind--which is why we see so much of it about, all as it is a rare occurrence that anyone points out that this might not be an entirely healthy state.

"But He's So Smart!"

It does not seem uncommon for a certain sort of person to defend a position on the basis of its endorsement by some public figure alleged to have a higher than normal level of intelligence.

"But he's so smart!" they will say when anyone challenges them on this.

It is a case of that very basic logical fallacy, the "appeal to authority," one that is the more blatant because alleged high general intelligence is the source of the authority on what may be a very specialized topic, addressing which high intelligence may simply not mean much unless it has been trained and informed and, of course, put to use on the problem in a serious way, which is far from always being the case. The intelligent may on average be better-equipped to form a rigorously thought-out opinion, but they have their areas of special concern, and there are so many issues in the world, and only so many hours in the day, while even the greatest intelligence is uneven in its performance across the full gamut of mental tasks and subject matter, and even among the intelligent few are capable of wholly setting aside prejudice and self-interest. And they often offer opinions in line with all these limitations--even the genuinely accomplished offering only banalities and worse when they speak about something outside the area of their special expertise (and alas, not realizing it themselves).

The illogic of the approach is underlined by the selectivity of the approach, and its vulnerability. Those who appeal to the authority of intelligence in, for example, citing tech billionaires' statements in support of unrestricted capitalism cannot on this basis respond when someone cites that supreme icon of the Cult of Intelligence, Albert Einstein, in defense of the opposite--remembering that he published "Why Socialism?" in the very first issue of the Monthly Review. Indeed, taking that into account it becomes very easy to argue that tech billionaires (even if one accepts the far from unimpeachable claims for their "superior" intelligence) support capitalism not because they have reasoned out that this is best for society, but because they are billionaire capitalists who, perhaps knowing and caring nothing about anything else, are selfishly defending their positions of extreme privilege.

That Cheerful "Think Again!"

I have always found the rhetorical device of stating some misapprehension supposedly existing among their audience and then saying or writing "Think again!" at the end exceedingly obnoxious.

There is not only an often unwarranted assumption that the audience is thinking the thing they will presume to show to be false because they know so much more than the idiots in the audience do (especially offensive when the misapprehension in question is something only the deeply ignorant or profoundly stupid are likely to believe), but the cheery self-satisfaction in slapping them in the face with their presumed misapprehension with that "Think again!"

"Think that eating a tub of fried lard every day is good for your health? Think again!"

Think that's good writing?

Think again!

The Obnoxiousness of Prefacing a Statement with the Word "Look"

A great many people seem to find a person's starting their statements with the word "Look" off-putting.

A significant part of it is likely the strong association of the tendency with a tone of exasperation, and condescension, which can seem at the least graceless and very easily insulting, which is inseparable from the fact that the exasperated, graceless, insulting person who has resorted to this usage is presuming to tell another person what to do. To command them. If someone can't stand being told what to do even by a person indisputably authorized to do so, how are they going to feel when someone with no grounds for bossing them about that way starts speaking to them in that manner? Especially when they are, as is very likely the case, dictating to them not simply what they are to do but how they are to see the world, forcing their self-serving subjectivity upon their own?

It is no accident that in an interview that is other than the usual flattering promotion by a courtier a cornered rat of a politician, lacking much in the way of self-awareness or alertness to the subtleties of the English language, or respect for the intelligence of an audience in many cases likely to be far smarter than they, so often begins an answer to their interlocutor with that word "Look"--a fact which does nothing to make the unpleasant usage seem any more genial to those who have to hear it.

How Much Research Do Writers Really Do?

Considering the matter of writers' writing from fiction--a tendency so extreme that they do so even when they are writing about that professional activity they know personally, writing--it seems that a good explanation is, besides the demand that they produce work according to formula to get their paychecks, their essentially impressionable natures.

Of course, considering that one might come to that question of the research writers are supposed to do.

This has always been much on my mind because the writers I gravitated toward tended to write "information-heavy" narratives, much of the interest of which was their showing us something of the world, which they often treated in "big picture" fashion, doing which well often entailed a very heavy burden of research. Even as I found myself reading fewer techno-thrillers and more science fiction, and then less science fiction and more of what we call "classics," this stayed with me--such that even as my personal reading consisted more than before of Capital L literature, it was people like Balzac and Zola and Sinclair and Dreiser who got my time and my respect.

These days I suspect that figures like them, who are pretty unfashionable these days (today literary critics are apt to ignore Balzac, mock at Zola's science-mindedness, deride Sinclair for "message," treat Dreiser as "a dead dog"), are also unrepresentative in this way, most writers doing very little research at all. There are often practical reasons for that, especially for those who find their ability to make enough money to live on are driven to work at high speed, with all that means for the opportunity to properly research their subject matter. However, that impressionability seems to have given them that other way of thinking about their subject matter even when they were not so pressed--with the crummy result that fills up our bestseller lists with dreck, as I find myself far more interested in Balzac and Zola and Sinclair and Dreiser than the works our retailers are ceaselessly trying to foist upon us today.

Why Do Writers So Often Write From Other Fiction Instead of Life?

Where the answer to the question that is this post's title is concerned my thought had long been that it was a matter of plain and simple laziness--hacks taking the path of least resistance, and relentlessly encouraged in this by the Dauriats of the industry, whose determination to pay for what is most easily sold within the market they have created through the exercise of their power to the crassest ends leaves them open to only a painfully limited range of material.

Yet considering the view that artists are a "sensitive" lot working in unconscious and impressionistic rather than conscious and analytical ways suggests that there is something more. They go by their impressions--and the reality is that, in a mediated world, their impressions will be mediated ones, especially in regard to anything outside what is usually rather a narrow range of personal experience. Depicting, for example, police investigations, they are apt to have a head full of episodes of procedurals, and so this unavoidably influences what they are likely to write when they pen an episode of a procedural themselves--easily producing results like those atrocious episodes of Castle which I watched unsure of whether I was supposed to be taking it as a parody or not.

Of the Term "Useful Idiots"

The term "useful idiots" to denote a person whom a cynical operative dupes into supporting a political agenda not their own apparently dates back to the article "Party Spirit in France" in the June 11, 1864 edition of Britain's The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art. The usage specifically referred to "a supremely foolish" citizen who gave Olivier Émile Ollivier, a formerly republican statesman increasingly siding with Napoleon III in these years of the "Second Empire," a convenient chance to defend his (to many, treacherous) actions.

However, the term has since been almost universally treated as a coinage of the Russian revolutionary and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, and in the associated memory used as both exemplifying the view of leftist leaders as vile cynics whose only motive is gaining, holding onto or increasing their personal power, and anyone who not merely followed them but was simply "soft" on the left as at best the dupes of such.

All of this, of course, is in spite of the inconvenient fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Lenin ever said any such thing, or even anything from which such a meaning could be extracted. However, as the ubiquity of the belief that he did indicates the attribution is almost never questioned. Equally, anyone who says that Margaret Thatcher called any man riding a bus past the age of twenty-five is likely to have a right-winger immediately screaming in their face that "She never said that!" Not that "There's no proof that she ever said that," but a very confident "She never said that!" (Indeed, even when Thatcher was so obviously on the record as having said something similarly callous and insulting to working people, as with her notorious "There is no such thing" remark in reference to the existence of society her supporters, unable to say "She never said that!"--indeed, the Margaret Thatcher Foundation itself has the full text of the relevant interview up on their web site--insist "She never meant that!" when the easily checkable context, evident in the transcript on the web site, makes it all too clear that she meant exactly what she sounded like she meant, and indeed came off as even more sneering toward the disadvantaged when we do check the context and see her mocking the homeless for expecting help.)

One cannot call this respect for the facts, only respect for the piety of the politically orthodox, and the prejudices that go with that, making for an easy attitude toward the difference between fact and fiction in the one case, and pseudo-sticklerism for the facts in the other, each equally propagandistic.

Of "Writer's Block" in Bad Fiction

One of the more irritating clichés of the writing life as depicted in pop culture is the ceaseless reference to "writer's block." The writer in question, perhaps in the middle of some project, perhaps after the completion of some project, simply cannot write another word.

Certainly writers do get "stuck" in their writing, for any number of reasons--stress and self-doubt as ever-present as they are unhelpful. Yet we see so much of it in pop cultural depictions of writing because it is so much easier to present to an unsophisticated audience than the multitude of other difficulties that writers face in their work--all as they would much rather present writers having trouble writing than writers who have no problem producing the words, but finding no takers for them, and still less succeeding in making any living from them, precisely because they have been so cowardly about telling the truth about their own business.

Alas, they are not necessarily worse than the practitioners of other profession that way.