Hard Times for Hollywood?

P.S. Best movie of 2023? Well, maybe American Fiction. I posted my endorsement earlier to the ping list, but you don't have to take my word for it:

American Fiction: Film Threat Review

A lot of freepers are partial to Critical Drinker, and Nerdrotic has started to surface here and there. The Film Threat guys are probably less well known, but all of the above are regular guests on each others' shows. That are part of a very vocal claque of YouTube commentators who spend most of their time raining hell and damnation on Disney and Woke Hollywood. I wonder if any of them lurk here.

Anyhow, they liked American Fiction for the same culture war reasons that I liked it, and they are the first reviewers I've seen (apart from myself) who have picked up on the fact that the movie is merciless on woke, identity politics leftism.

American Fiction is now rolling out in theaters. It is now in week two, having expanded slightly from a very small limited release last week. Further expansion is expected, perhaps as soon as Dec. 22 and much more in January, so if your knees are up to it, take a chance and buy a ticket as you did before the streamers turned you into a passive couch potato. I have no idea about the politics of the filmmakers and I wonder if they themselves understood the subtext of their movie, but this is a film that conservatives should be supporting.

I gave up movies and tv. It is just garbage.

But today the city is on hard times.

Hollywood is not a city. It is part of the City of Los Angeles. "Hollywood" is a concept and the location within Los Angeles where most of the early studios began.

I was a regular moviegoer in the sixties, and toward the middle of the decade, I noticed something was changing about movies that I couldn’t really put my finger on. Sure, John Wayne was cranking out a lot of good movies, but still, I sensed that something was wrong.

For example, war movies weren’t quite the same-—they seemed to be getting more anti-war. I went to see “Up from the Beach” in 1965 thinking it was going to be like “Merrill’s Marauders” or “The Longest Day,” filled with action and heroics but ending with the USA triumphant, but it turned out to be a stupid movie about the evacuation of civilians from the Normandy beach head.

And with the notable exceptions of “Torn Curtain” and the classic “Dr. Zhivago,” both from 1966, Hollywood also seemed increasingly reluctant to take on Communism or the Soviet Union. James Bond went from tangling with Soviet agents to fighting a crime syndicate. In “The Fantastic Voyage,” the Soviets, who were clearly the bad guys, were referred to as “the other side.” And movies about the Cold War such as “The Russians Are Coming,” “The Bedford Incident” and “Ice Station Zebra” always ended in a standoff, never a victory for the West.

From what you wrote about movie theater attendance, maybe I wasn’t the only one who sensed that something was wrong in Hollywood beginning in the mid-sixties.

I used to live in Hollywood—on King’s Road near Sunset. It was a fun and exciting place to live, even though the traffic was terrible. However, I wouldn’t want to live there today.

The jobs lost aren’t going to come back. The advent of AI generated content means never having to pay huge sums to fickle actors anymore. They can simply create them from bits and bytes. If you don’t have actual actors, you also don’t need a whole litany of support staff. Everything digital means, no costumes, animal handlers, stunt men, lighting, etc, etc, etc.l They all go away with AI.

It’s time the entire group learns to code.

I don’t want to have to debug code a bunch of former actors wrote.

“ I don’t want to have to debug code a bunch of former actors wrote.”

That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to. The code they will write is for creating movies with AI. When it sucks all that means is the movie will suck, and that means nothing changes.

All the good movies have already been made.

I would disagree with you about movies, but that is certainly true of popular music. There has been nothing good since the Kingston Trio.

On a more serious note, I realize that it is perfectly natural as we get older to grow bored with whatever. We've simply seen enough. I walked away from professional and college sports a long time ago: been there, done that, and I've seen my fill. There is nothing wrong with getting bored and moving on. And if we get an occasional itch to watch a movie, there are so many classic films sitting on the shelf that there are plenty to choose from. The current offerings in the theaters are never going to match up to our personal GOAT lists.

The same principle applies across all the arts. Painters should stop painting. Sculptors should stop sculpting. They are never going to surpass the greatest works that are already hanging in museums. That principle can be extended across all cultural domains.

Of course, the logic of that position is that we should be content to live in a dead culture, never looking beyond the monuments of the past. I prefer to think, however, that we still inhabit a living culture. I also think that modern culture has become a towering pyramid of lies, and that ultimately the lies will become insupportable, the truth will out, and the pendulum will swing back. The question is how deep the destruction must go before we hit bottom. But the culture will hit bottom. On my optimistic days, I think the rebound has already begun.

Modern popular culture is leading to nihilism and despair. The bait at the front end is hedonism, ego gratification, and an ethic of pure selfishness, but the endpoint is nihilism and despair. We're at a point now at which conservatives need to build a self-conscious counterculture and be prepared to secede intellectually and morally from the degenerate mass culture around us. This will involve a huge job of institution building. Movies, television, and other cultural domains are a moderately important part of this job. We can't do what we need to do if conservatives simply walk away. We need to present viable, vibrant counterexamples, not retreat to the catacombs. Etc.

When it comes to movies and tv, many here have simply lost interest. That's fine at a personal level. But as a culture war issue, we need to recognize that we're too old to be the future. We are grouchy old farts nostalgic for a better past. But the rising generation is glued to screens. (If I could wave a magic wand and limit screentime to an hour or two a day, I would do so, but I don't have a magic wand.) We can't tell the rising generations that they should be content to watch only movies that were made 50 years ago. Can't be done. Entertainment, escapism, drama, tragedy, comedy, theater in all its forms still speak to people. We need conservative creatives who produce an ongoing stream of superior, morally coherent cultural products. And we need an ecosystem in the television, film, and online domains that lets such voices plant a flag, find an audience, and stand for better values.

It's a matter of personal preference whether any one of us wants to engage in a given domain. There are great swaths of popular culture about which I am content to remain basically ignorant, unless and until such time as they spill over into something I care about. Fair enough. But as a group, we should at least be prepared to acknowledge creatives who are doing good work in leftist dominated fields and who produce, for example, movies and tv shows that run against the grain.

At this point, the left is attempting to limit viewpoint diversity and enforce a party line on core cultural issues. And their party line is a lie. Since a pyramid of lies can't withstand honest criticism, the left is attempting to monopolize all channels of communication and marginalize dissent, with an endgame of criminalizing dissent.

So ... I'm eager to support a movie, a podcaster, an embattled academic in a woke university, etc. who is still fighting the good fight. I'm eager to point to movies like American Fiction that hammer at the fault lines in the woke pyramid of lies; this is how cultural subversion works, and we need to learn to use the tools. Mockery is a powerful tool, and American Fiction relentlessly mocks woke, identity politics liberalism. And as a practical matter, I still enjoy movies, and I have a good enough memory that I don't much care for watching the golden oldies for the umpteenth time. I'm up for writers, directors and actors who can put a fresh twist on yet another retelling of ancient truths. Intellectually serious and morally coherent movies are still being made, and many films and shows still do approach historical events with a commitment to truth.

Let Disney and the rest of Woke Hollywood die -- and the sooner the better, as long as someone gets the rights to the classic films and makes them available on other platforms. Something/someone will replace the rotting giants that dominate the industry today. I just want conservative filmmakers to have a strong showing in the next generations.