On American Monolingualism

It is an old stereotype that Americans, especially if they are not immigrants, are less likely to have second language skills than people in other, comparable countries, and especially less likely to be fluent in a second language than they.

Of course, all this is tougher to estimate than it sounds. Statistics based on self-reporting, for example, likely exaggerate capability, especially given the vagueness of concepts like "fluency"--and the demonstrated inability of a great many people to function at a high level in their own native language, even after lengthy formal education. (Perhaps one can carry on a simple conversation in a given language--but cannot speak it, let alone read it, at a very advanced level, such that so simple and mundane a task as understanding a common bus schedule can defeat them. Can that truly be regarded as command of the language?)

Still, there seems to be at least some truth to the image, sufficient that those interested in those subjects point out a couple of factors with some regularity. One is that an English-speaking American (as compared with a citizen of the European Union, for example) generally has to travel a long way before they are in a place where the people predominantly speak, write and read a language that is not their native one (and less often need to do so than, for instance, people in countries where hard circumstances drive their people to go abroad looking for work).

Another factor is that Americans are far more accustomed to exporting pop culture than importing it--the songs they listen to, the movies they watch, much less likely to originally have been created in a language other than their native one. (Indeed, Americans much more often see Hollywood's remakes of foreign movies than the movies they are based on.)

All of this implies a great deal for the pressure to learn, the opportunity to practice--that they are less likely to have just "picked up" other languages in childhood, or acquired something of them in everyday life, instead making this a thing one goes that much more out of their way to do, indeed specifically, consistently commit time to over a long period for the relatively distant payoff of competence in the language, which is often little more than an end in itself.

There is also what all this means for those taking the deliberate, academic path to which they have no recourse--that they get language instruction conceived by linguists for other linguists, rather than for more general users; instruction by teachers inclined to a scholarly perfectionism rather than offering up a package the student can quickly begin using as a basis on which to build that subtler knowledge. Is it quite so important that the student be enjoined to remember every last form of every verb to which they are introduced, the vast majority of which forms they are unlikely to see anytime soon, practically before the student has acquired any vocabulary at all? I doubt it. But that is what the textbook writers insist on, and the implicit enjoinment to perfectionism--which leaves potential learners thinking in terms of a far greater competence in the language than most native speakers of that language are likely to have as the standard of acquisition, and the choice between this or nothing at all. And that would seem to be another problem in itself, for when it is perfection or nothing I imagine many resign themselves to nothing. (I suspect contributing to this further is the pop cultural garbage inundating us in false images of hyperpolyglot geniuses who all speak a dozen languages perfectly, in spite of never actually studying or practicing, making it look easier than it is, setting impossible standards that make the onlooker feel inferior.)

There is, too, the way a purely academic effort can produce a very uneven capability. (One may end up in a situation where they can read the second language at a very high level, within some field of competency they have perhaps far more adroit at reading the relevant material than a native speaker who has not been trained in the field--but at the same time find that coming up with the words with which to carry on an everyday conversation defeats them.)

And of course, that those most likely to make the academic effort are people who probably speak their own native language with exceptional skill and polish is likely to pose obstacles for them as well--by leaving them the more impatient of their difficulties and crudity in that other language, all while they are perhaps juggling other intellectual or cultural interests as well with less than all the time in the world for all of them. (For example, they have only so much time to give to discretionary reading. As a result they find themselves having to choose between reading a book they are interested in their own language for the knowledge it contains--and struggling along with a book in another language just for the sake of practice.)

Of course, all this does not in itself mean that Americans as a whole might not be doing better--but it does at least call into question the tone of accusation and moralizing that American social critics tend to assume (and the sneering of a good many foreign observers) when discussing American monolingualism.

Hollywood Takes the Chinese Market For Granted--to its Cost

As even a glance at the box office data from China indicates the Chinese film industry is a powerful competitor for its vast domestic audience. Consider the following numbers:

* Since 2016, in spite of the difficulties for the market over the past two years, nine Chinese-made movies have broken the half billion dollar barrier.

* In the last "normal" year for moviegoing, 2019, 24 movies broke the $100 million barrier at the Chinese box office, of which 15 were Chinese productions. Of the top 10 earners (all of which broke the $200 million barrier), 7 were Chinese productions, while 5 Chinese-made movies took in over $300 million and two broke the half billion dollar barrier, with the disaster film The Wandering Earth making $690 million and the superhero movie Ne Zha taking an astonishing $703 million.

* Wolf Warrior 2, to date the highest-grossing Chinese film, took in $854 million back in 2017--outdoing the much-crowed about global gross of the first Wonder Woman. Translating to some $945 million in 2021 dollars, this falls just short of the billion dollar mark. Think about that--a billion dollars taken in by one movie in a single country.

As all this shows the Chinese market is big enough to support the making of big budget films just for Chinese audiences, without much concern for foreign viewership--with this extending all the way to first-rank blockbusters like the $200 million The Battle at Lake Changjin, which has made almost four times that figure at the Chinese box office in a mere three weeks. And of course, Chinese filmmakers have even less difficulty making lower-cost comedies and dramas suiting local taste.

Of course, much is made of Chinese censorship, which is real enough, and perhaps getting tighter (with three Marvel movies frozen out of the market this year, perhaps costing them the proceeds from hundreds of millions in ticket sales). Still, contrary to what the entertainment press claims it is far from the whole story. Even without censorship being at issue Hollywood has shown itself consistently clueless about what will or will not be a winner with Chinese audiences, or international audiences generally--perhaps as a result of America's culture these days making it less able to connect with foreign audiences like China's. The slogan "Go woke, go broke" represents the grinding of an ideological axe--but the fact remains that there is no reason for foreign audiences to care about an extremely particularist identity politics, with even the successes showing this. Black Panther, for example, was a strong earner overseas, picking up $600 million (and just $105 million in China). Yet while Black Panther was #1 in the U.S. that year, it was far outdone that year by Avengers: Infinity War, taking in close to $1.4 billion ($360 million of that in China). Simply put, Black Panther was received as another Marvel superhero film, and not the major cultural moment it was made out to be in America at the time of its release (with the result that, in China certainly, Infinity War outgrossed Black Panther by a factor of over three).

And of course what went for even the hits went that much more for the disappointments, with Crazy Rich Asians exemplary. The press for the film was extremely heavy on the identity politics angle--but it was far from clear why such American concerns would make the movie a blockbuster elsewhere, and indeed they did not. (Indeed, in a China still nominally Communist, and where the social divide is enormous and people less prone to pretend obliviousness to it than in class-phobic America, audiences were likely less inclined to see a spectacle of the vulgarity and snobbery of the ultra-rich as somehow uplifting simply because the vulgar snobs happened to be Asians.)

The blind spots were even more astonishing where more action-oriented fare was concerned. In America Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was celebrated as the first Marvel movie with an Asian lead, as its promoters conveniently overlooked the story's evocation of the vicious Yellow Peril racism that produced Fu-Manchu (an oversight the more appalling at a time of increasing anti-Asian racism, and Sinophobic fearmongering); while if they saw the casting's not conforming to ideals of conventional physical attractiveness as a rejection of "racist" standards of appearance, they were oblivious to how at least some Chinese filmgoers saw it, namely as Western stereotyping of how East Asians look, and so yet another racist insult. Given what has happened with last year's Monster Hunter after the movie's release this could have cost the movie dearly even if it had its crack at the theaters.

Similarly reflecting that self-absorption is the place given to nostalgia in making movies for mass consumption, with again, the attempt to sell Star Wars exemplary. When Disney relaunched Star Wars Americans went to see it because they had seen Star Wars movies before, and remembered their earlier experiences in particular fondly--but this was not the case in China, which was in a very different place in 1977. And unsurprisingly the sales pitch fell flat--just as it was soon to do everywhere else, with Episode IX taking in about half of what Episode VII did, and Disney shelving its once Marvel-like plans for a mega-franchise sending two or three big Star Wars movies our every year. Now Star Wars is something people see on TV--and it remains to be seen when, and even if, Star Wars will be a big screen property again.

Altogether in this moment when Hollywood is ever more reliant on the global market it has become more national, even provincial--a fact on which few seem to care to linger these days. The question, however, is what Hollywood will do about it. Will it stop worrying about Chinese and foreign markets so much and focus on appealing to easier markets--or will it attempt to become more cosmopolitan, the better to secure as big a cut of the tickets bought by the planet's moviegoers as possible? The latter seems to me a far more likely outcome than the former--but first it would have to admit that it is having a problem, and at least to go by the tenor of the press that moment has not yet arrived.

Why James Bond's Audience is so Middle-Aged

As the latest Bond movie finally has its day at the box office, and the data about the viewers is piling up, one thing that has attracted a good deal of notice has been the age of the audience--the Hollywood Reporter noting that some 57 percent were 35 or older, and 37 percent 45 or older.

Basically, Bond fans are, compared with the fan bases for other action franchises, middle-aged-to-old. Why is that?

I can think of at least three factors.

1. Older viewers got hooked on the Bond series back when it had a genuine claim to novelty--the first of the really high-concept action-adventure franchises--and little competition (nothing to compare with it until Star Wars, really, with real competitors few in number even into the '80s). By contrast younger viewers had numerous franchises clamoring for their attention, and effectively splitting it. (Indeed, they have their choice not just of action franchises but specifically spy-fi franchises, with the Fast and Furious film series, in its incarnation over the past decade, apparently their preferred flavor.)

2. Nostalgia has been a powerful factor in sustaining interest in the Bond films--but we are increasingly remote from that moment. People who grew up in the '80s and '90s might still remember being touched by the nostalgia for the '60s in which jet-setting Playboy lifestyle spymania figured so prominently (hence Austin Powers), but someone who grew up in the '00s would likely be left scratching their head looking at all that. The pull is simply not there for them. And that matters all the more given the aforementioned competition, but also a third factor, namely that

3. The newer Bond films--the films younger viewers are most likely to know, and to judge the franchise by--basically abandoned what was distinctive about the series (such as would let it stand out from the intense competition), and some would say, also what was fun about it. I recall Bosley Crowther's review of Goldfinger in the New York Times where he characterized Bond as "a great vicarious image for all the panting Walter Mittys in the world." I doubt anyone would say this of the Craig-era Bond--least of all in that incarnation's first and defining film, Casino Royale. The associations people have of Bond from watching the older films may keep them watching--but again, those associations are just not there for the younger crowd, which finds itself treated instead to gleeful stomping on the fantasy that Crowther's generation so enjoyed, by no means the crowd-pleaser that some seem to think it is.

And so they went to see Venom: Let There Be Carnage instead.

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 its handling of the form, 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 more 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 are less inclined to coping, or failing 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.