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The REAL Reason Why Film History Matters
🕑 Added 2023-09-06 21:36:57 +0000 UTCThe following essay may seem like it’s about many things, from current trends, to 90s programming, to the 2000’s box office swells, and the modern streaming age, but really, it’s about how it all comes together in the same harmful, cyclical dynamic.
1. TIMING, ANIME, AND EMERGENCE
There’s this great story that Seth Meyers told after Norm MacDonald’s passing. He recalled a time where Norm was a guest on the show, specifically a moment where Norm and his son were watching Seth do the monologue from backstage. Now, as another former update guy, Norm is a huuuuuge influence on Seth’s comedy (perhaps less content-wise and more his blunt sense of delivery), but Norm’s son noticed the similarity and went, “oh wow, you kind of sound like him, dad!” And while there’s a million easy jokes or annoyed responses one could give, Norm went right for the best one:
“Oh no! My son doesn’t know how time works!”
The thing about that joke that highlights the obvious nature of what’s come before (and goes one better with the absurd conclusion), but I bring it up because it’s a playful way of characterizing something that’ve I’ve seen a lot lately, particularly with teens and 20-somethings on TikTok. Specifically, I’ve been seeing these surprised comments from them when they see certain great movies (either recent ones or films from the past) where they go, “Oh wow, this is like anime!” And they’re basically talking about any movie that has stylistic cinematic expression. But I want to be clear immediately: I don’t lament this. In fact, I think it’s great. Heck, it even makes the most damn sense in the dang world.
Because we’re talking about a popular movie going audience who has grown up in a time of Gen X / Elder Millennial Nostalgia that was all about LEGITIMIZING fantastical interests through the use of popular I.P. Which means, sure, you get movies where there are wizards and gods and iron menz on screen, but all done so in the style of “cinematic naturalism” that was used in the actual telling. Which is something perhaps most evident in the ho hum of cinematics of a lot of the MCU’s wet-cement, boilerplate style. It’s all designed to “uphold the normalcy” of the fantasy of it all. But anime? Well, now that I’ve finally gone down that rabbit hole I can tell you it’s a world full of hyper-expressive-ness, exaggerated cinematic moments, and larger-than-life feelings to boot. And y’all, that’s WHY the younger generation loves it so damn much. There is both a cinematic flare and loving flourish to the telling. One that stands in stark contrast to so much of the studio fare they have been offered in the last fifteen plus years. Which just means, boy howdy, is there so much they have yet to discover!
I mean, wait until you see this cool anime, Raging Bull!
Look, I’m citing that one as a joke, but also kind of not. Because it’s a landmark work of style and gumption that brings you into a moment and time with outrageous specificity. And film history is full of these apt comparisons. Conceptually speaking, there is a straight line between Jodorowsky and Neon Genesis Evangelion. You can even see the hallmarks of The Man With The Movie Camera on something like Paprika. Or Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits on Miyazaki’s similarly titled Spirited Away. There are so many hyper-expressive films to be enjoyed like An American In Paris, Hausu, Enter The Void, and Speed Racer. And in going back into history you discover that a lot of these old fogies like Scorsese, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Danny Boyle, etc. are all steeped in a cinematic language you already adore. And in many ways, they were part of its inspiration. Which is the whole point: I want to use this existing love not in an effort of gatekeeping (which is the problem with how a lot of people treat film history and lording over and lamenting), but instead embracing the joy of discovery.
This is not some abstract discussion, but a personal one, too. I can’t tell you how many old movies I first saw as something parodied on The Simpsons. It always makes sense that you discover Z before you discover Y and X because you’re living in the time of Z. Thus, this is always the path to go on. But the real reason it’s so important to understand that path is because if you *don’t* understand things about what has come before, then the studios and powers that be will use it against you. Not just when it comes to formal expression, but representation, too.
Because they will use it to uphold the great myth of emergence.
Essentially, whether consciously or subconsciously, the powers that be constantly want you to believe that X and Y have never happened before and that Z is some newly emergent thing. On a marketing level, this makes sense! They want whatever new movie to feel new and different and exciting! To the audiences, it’s exciting because emergence because feels like progress! Even for the artists themselves, they often want to be seen as the Jackie Robinson of X, but, let’s put it this way… raise your hand if you know who Larry Doby is? Yeah, you can see the allure. But the whole entire problem is that most of the “newly emerging” arts and positions have actually happened before. Often many times over. And the emergence myth doesn’t just erase that history, it is exactly how the studios use the false belief in a cyclical process of taking it right back away from them again and again…
2. ALL THAT 90’S MEDIA
I was thinking about all this the other night while showing a lot of people 1996’s Set It Off. Because so many of the viewers couldn’t believe the great similarities the film had to Widows, as if invoking shock that something like this could get made almost over 25 years ago. Not just that, but it’s a pulpier, fun, unapologetically all-Black film that still goes HARD with a lot of the drama and pathos. So you might think oh, I should have heard about this! If I didn’t, it must not have done well then! No, it was a hit! It made 40 million on a 9 million dollar budget! Moreover, it was part of a much larger trend of actually programming specific movies for audiences and knowing they’d do well. Which brings us to the whole string of amazing Black films that populated the late 80’s and 90’s.
There were the coming of age masterpieces that dug into sociology like Do The Right Thing, Boyz In The Hood, and Menace II Society. Seminal biopics like Malcolm X and What’s Love Got To Do With It? Will Smith led the action comedy genre into the stratosphere with Bad Boys, Independence Day, and Men in Black. And sure, these are the films you may know, but there were also a bevy of amazing Black Neo Noirs like Deep Cover, Dead Presidents, New Jack City, Devil In A Blue Dress, and One False Move (weird to say about a film co-starring Bill Paxton, but Carl Franklin is clearly going for something specific). Tender romantic films that skewed younger - Poetic Justice, Jason’s Lyric - and older - like Waiting To Exhale, Boomerang and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Not to mention broad comedies like Friday, House Party, Sister Act, and so many countless others. And the whole point is almost NONE of these were outsider indies. They were audience-pleasing studio films. And they were a crucial part of how studios engaged viewers.
Something that was also part and parcel of the way television pursued young Black audiences on Nickelodeon with shows like All That, Kenan and Kel, etc (this Mona Kosar Abdi tik tok explains it quite well) and - believe it not in this day and age - it was a key part of Fox’s rise to prominence with primetime shows like In Living Color, Martin, Living Single, etc. This was all a fundamental part of the media business of the 90s because studios actually competed over demographics and valuable audiences. Again, these films and shows all did well. They made a lot of money. They made their studios happy. They connected with a huge cornerstone of the intended audience, not to mention a huge part of white audiences that cared about these zeitgeist-defining entertainments. I cannot explain how much every young person I knew was going to see these films / TV shows… So what the hell happened? Why did the studios stop?
Well, the idiotic intersection of greed and racism happened.
3. THE GENERIC BOX OFFICE GOLD RUSH
In order to properly understand what studios try to do now, it takes understanding the philosophy of what existed beforehand. The whole idea is that across the movie and television landscape, you would have what the industry affectionately called “programmers.” The following doesn’t really sound like a nice notion because it’s something that “fills in the programming schedule” but really it’s an essential idea. You have these bigger tentpole things that you intend as hits for the year, but what are people going to see from your studio in February? What is the lower risk / lower budget fare that will still get some butts in seats? Or in the case of older schedule-based television, when you have monster hits like Friends at 8 and Seinfeld at 9, what show do you put in the 830 slot? I realize these questions seem like they matter less in the streaming age (we’ll come back to this), but it’s all the same core goal. Because it asks: how do you wisely use this space to keep people interested in continuing to come and watch? How do you keep up the culture of going to the movies? How do you BALANCE hit-chasing with keeping up the core? Which brings us to why Fox stopped making shows for black audiences.
Specifically, American Idol happened (the aforementioned Mona Kosar Abdi tik tok talks about this in depth above). Because they sudden had HUGE four quadrant hit show where *enough* minority families watched along that they could be like, “oh, we don’t completely lose that audience, so that’s good enough! This will make us so much more money!!!” But it is, of course, a devil’s bargain. Because the popularity of a big hit show will wane. And it’s so damn hard to chase the appeal of a big four quadrant hit to follow it up. And so what’s left in the wake of that decision is that the steady, cornerstone audience has now been abandoned. Which then comes with additional problems of people checking out of that media system completely (they moved to the less-well-funded UPN, before that was destroyed in favor of seeking white audiences, too). And yet, the powers that be will do this again and again and again. They just get stars in their eyes and want to go after the big white thing that side-swipes the interest of enough minority audiences along the way.
Take the recent trend, instead of trying to make programmers with more support and broader appeal, they just try to lump specialized audiences into the big massive thing that’s trending - and then blame the audience for “not showing up” when it fails. You can see the appeal after huge event films like Black Panther - but any copying of the formula is a failure of recognizing the specificity and important timing of that crucial exploration (along with the fact it was a truly great film that played long). But now we’re also seeing ways it can hit a brick wall with The Blue Beetle and the way that film gets way, way too much pressure from a broken WB / DCEU system (which ties into a whole other discussion about their support of, say, The Flash). Which is why you can’t put the pressure of “emergence” on something like that in a hit-chasing, trend, and timing-based system. For instance, they’ve finally opened up the MCU to a deeper roster of minority characters, but they’re getting hit by the post Endgame / Post-Disney Plus fatigue. I mean, The Marvels means you have to have watched TWO television shows prior and yet, they will likely blame any underperformance on it not being the white status quo. But really it’s their own harmful lumping instincts.
Think of it like this: pre-pandemic there were 600-800 movies that were put out in America, meaning that each studio conglomerate, including their smaller arms, put out about 80 movies a year (though that’s a little complicated when talking about what gets a “proper” release). Now, it’s easy to associate a film’s success with its biggest hits - and I understand the inclination when you look at all the big sequels in the top 50 - but it’s not just about the top 50 films. So much of the evening out of your total revenue is about those smaller releases. These are the programmers and historically they are the broad comedies, the adult dramas, the horror films, the rom-coms, the tight little action flicks, and B-movie fare that helps keep theaters engaged from weekend to weekend. But what we’ve seen from Hollywood is them constantly chasing the big franchise IP and they stopped chasing middle-ground gains. They just stopped. Heck, they’ve almost stopped making R-Rated comedies all together. Every single time they gave the same reason, “oh why make 50 million profit when you could potentially make a billion profit!!!!” Which not only misses the fact that there’s a good chance that the film won’t make a billion in profit, it misses the whole point of the system / demographics selling in the first place. Because what happened when they stopped making these kinds of mid-tier films?
A lot of kinds of people stopped going to the movies.
There was a recent poll that of the people who went to see Barbie a whopping 24% hadn’t been since the pandemic. That’s an insane number. One that wholly indicates that a massive audience was simply not being given something that appeals to them. But instead of looking at the broader spectrum of WHY that film appealed to so many people, they will not learn and instead try to rubber stamp the success by giving us a carbon copy of Lena Dunham’s Polly Pocket, which feels kind of absurd for so many reasons. Especially because trend is always late. And remember the lesson of film history: an already existing audience is NOT A TREND. The success of Crazy Rich Asians was NOT A TREND. These are just existing audiences properly reached. Even with something like Oppenheimer this pertains because it’s an adult drama with major support and thus it’s the first movie my mom wanted to go see since pandemic, too (and prior to then, she was one of the most ardent movie goers I knew). The simple lesson: People want the things that feel like they are for them. And when you chase something for “everyone” you kind of make films for no one. Especially because they AREN’T for everyone - they’re for the aforementioned white Gen X / Elder Millennial Nostalgia audience. And they just THINK they’re “everyone.”
What makes things more complicated is that the powers that be think the art house-ification of genre films is what will fill in the programming cracks, hoping that an A24 can pop here and there. And yes, this SEEMS to work because every year we are getting these brilliant, creative films from somewhere that strike a chord, whether it’s Parasite, Pig, Widows, Everything Everywhere, All At Once, Little Women, Drive My Car, Aftersun, etc. But we’re talking about two different audiences. Go back to many of the 90’s Black films I listed above and you’ll realize how many of them are straight-forward, crowd-pleasing, conventional genre pieces - they just had diverse casts. I don’t say any of that as a sleight. They’re well-made, professional films for people who want an ecosystem of steady, comfortable entertainment. I mean, I love Queen + Slim, (which ALSO did well by the way), but we’re talking about something even more broadly appealing than these barely-supported / advertised indies that need to break out through word of mouth. And we’re talking about films with broader appeal. And yet, they’ll constantly tell you “these films don’t do well” plainly ignoring the fact that Girls Trip completely popped off as a raunchy R-Rated comedy and that Crazy Rich Asians dominated as a family-centric rom-com.
So why do they ignore it?
They’ll just keep deferring to “well, those films don’t travel” which is just straight up racism that reinforces more racism - and it’s a complete fucking myth that has been debunked again and again and again. But they’ll just keep making safe, bullshit decisions because it’s so much easier for them (and because they don’t want to give up the status quo). But I can imagine you asking: shouldn’t they know better? Don’t we have better tools to analyze the why and how of these things? Well, no matter how many strides we make in technological data gathering, a lot of that just means that they will keep falling for it even harder…
4. MACHINE (NOT)LEARNING
I use this metaphor a lot, but one of my favorite Simpson’s gags is when Homer finds himself in a tar pit with his concerned family watching on in terror, but Homer insists he can save himself, by saying “first I’ll pull my legs out with my arms! Now, I’ll pull my arms out with my face!” [fully submerges into the tar and certain death]. It’s funny, but you see it in so many industries again and again and again. Especially in modern television and the streaming, which in its odd way is not better with its technology…
But a hundred times worse because of the algorithm.
Now, it essentially SHOULD be the same general question as with the media programming of the past, right? You’re asking: how do we keep people seeing movies? And to streaming, how do we keep you watching / clicking on our stuff? There is no doubting that in one way, streamers have the greatest advantage imaginable in terms of accessibility. They don’t have to get you into a theater. They don’t have to get you in a certain place at a certain time. You just turn on the app and you can click a button. Heck, whatever is on the main page THE MOST EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING in the world! It’s the dream! You can just click a button and you can watch NOW!!! And it’s the reason for the mega success of so many things - or at least so they tell us because they problematically hide the stats (which we’ll come back to). But it also runs into a few problems really quickly. Namely, how do you direct people to OTHER things (through menu systems) and how do you curate what they can see? In one way it's a simple point and click near the top of the page: here’s all our originals! But the thing about that is also using algorithms to guide you. And that’s where the trouble potentially starts.
But it also starts with acknowledging the way algorithms can, of course, be useful! I mean, I’m not a luddite here. I get it completely. And an example of something that serves a great function is Spotify’s discover playlists, which essentially does a very simple thing: they look at all the songs you’ve recently listened to - then they match that with other users who have listened those songs - then they find a song that THEY’VE been listening to that YOU haven’t heard yet - which basically amounts to a good recommendation from a friend who has similar taste to you. It is the platonic ideal of how these kinds of things should work. And in terms of video media consumption, the thing that best replicates that is Tik Tok. For it is an ever-scrolling array of videos you might like (driven by the same essential means, plus a million other sketchy invasive things like what you’ve been googling, which is pretty fucked up). But the core idea of an algorithm is necessary because there are 8.6 billion tik toks and it is thus uncurate-able. You are talking about bite size chunks of programming that NEED the algorithm to even function. I get it. But where the rubber starts meeting the road a bit more is Youtube, which doesn’t have the scroll function, but instead a point and click system that relies so much more on your sense of choice. The programming is also far more TV like, where you can binge an entire channel, go down rabbit holes etc. Essentially, all the streamers want to be like Youtube. There’s just one silly little problem.
That’s not what they fucking are.
They aren’t massive platforms with user-generated content. They don’t have billions of hours of low-quality things that people upload and that need to be sorted from the chaff (though they sure would seem to love that and the whole barely paying people thing). No, they are curation services of professionally produced media. They are dependent on having libraries of great, high quality programming that you want to sit down with and enjoy. And yet, they both NEED to behave like platforms (because of the sheer size of their libraries) and yet draw in eyeballs with very specific curation. And that’s the whole problem: are you really a platform or a channel? It’s easy to say “well, we’re both” but that serves two very different masters. Because a channel is all about branding, how you create identity, and foster people coming to specific shows (popular cable channels like HBO, FX, AMC, etc. had to get great this). And a platform is a platform where any old thing could be. I mean, we don’t think of it like this, but Youtube is the #2 search engine in the world. But I perhaps get where the confusion comes from in the first place and has to do with the haste with which companies jumped into the streaming space in the first place.
For years, there was a very specific economic pipeline for media. Movies come out, they sell international rights around the world, they go on home media, they appear on pay cable, then regular cable, then network TV debuts, and so on - and at every single one of those points they make money that helps them tremendously (especially with the ups and down of first run box office) and thus necessitates royalties for all the people involved (and which our unions fought so hard for). As I always put it, every movie has SUCH a long tail that you wouldn’t believe. Even 4 Jills In A Jeep was still making money off the TCMs of the world. Then the first streamer, Netflix, came around and they offered a complete and total mirage. It was a cheap cable replacement with most of your favorite TV shows already there and you can just click away. They even won the great coup de grace in that they became the most treasured of commodities: they became a verb with the phrase “netflix and chill.” But it wasn’t sustainable. Heck, it wasn’t even profitable (thanks growth based speculative finance!) because ultimately there was going to be competition and then they would be faced with the tasks of curation / branding / etc…
And their choices there have been pretty much abysmal.
It starts with the fact that television and movie programming doesn’t work at the same level as spotify / tik tok, because the voluming and sequencing is astronomically different. You can whip through tik tok. You can quickly sample a few songs and stay plugged in. But with narrative media, you are talking about getting people to plug into something that requires greater attention and commitment, which means it is much more driven by choice (and we’ll come back to this). They try to use the same tools as those platforms, but the real problem is not just that they’re trying to use the algorithm the same way - it’s that they worship it and think it’s smart. As if it contains all the beautiful answers for what viewers truly want! They can finally hack audiences and know what’s REALLY going on! Which if you know anything about audiences is laughable. More importantly, the algorithm, for all its computational prowess, is a stupid, easily manipulated tool that ultimately depends on the thought process of people framing its functions. Which is why every single interview with Netflix makes me want to lose my mind (even from a data-driven scientific point of view) because they’re constantly mistaking correlations with cause, often with interpretations of the data are ABSURD if you know remotely anything about why people like watching things.
Famously, there was the way they “noticed” that most viewers tended to drop off at about four episodes and their big revelation was “people like shows that are four episodes long!” And never once realized that that was just when they were ducking out of bad shows that they didn’t like - and they of course stayed and watched shows they DID like. But then Netflix would attribute that to, like, the fact the characters ate ice cream or something (this is a Barry reference). They are making every wrong conclusion at every possible moment. In yet another movie reference, it’s like when Steve Martin is getting shot at in The Jerk and he sees bullets whizzing into the gas station equipment behind him. And he goes, “he hates these cans!” And because the streamers get to hide all their data, we have no idea if literally anything they are saying is on the level anyway. If the data of success was on table, things like nielsen ratings were before - there would be so much more we could tell.
Remember, at the finance and business levels of all this you are dealing with people who don’t understand the cause and effect of the industry. Shane Black has the famous story about when he went to a test screening and the data people noticed the “fluctuations” of the audience's enjoyment of the film and they pointed to the high points and he was like, “yeah those are the laughs” and the low-points were the set-ups for the jokes. And the were like “okay, then get rid of those so it’s only the high points.” AND THEY LITERALLY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF SETUPS AND PUNCHLINES. On the most basic of levels, they will ignore the simplest notions of craft behind why things actually work. And because of that, they will use the “data” to make every wrong decision based on what seems so “clear” to them. And out of fear of having something so obviously dumb, they now rely on a fish-hooking, tail-chasing data monster that not only pigeon holes so easily, it also programs diversity AWAY from you. Or worse, then pushes to the fringe.
All of which is represented in “The Psy Problem” and its horrible fallout.
If you’re not familiar with this story it is at the root of one of the biggest difficulties facing algorithm-based systems and the like. Because in 2012, Youtube had a problem where their recommendation system was always directing people to more and more popular things, which meant people were constantly ending up getting Psy’s “Gangham Style” video recommended to them over and over again in a constant loop. So they had a “simple” solution. They didn’t have the recommendation system go toward broader, more popular things you might like, but less popular things to spread interest in more niche subjects. Sounds great, right? Well, here’s the obvious problem: if someone is watching, say, a Fox News clip - that means the next recommendation comes from “smaller, more niche” places like Breitbart, and then you’re well on your way to the insanity of Info Wars. That’s right, they created the radicalization machine. And boy howdy did it work. I mean, this has been covered to no end so I don’t need to go further, but it’s at the point that it’s now the chief strategy of fringe groups and recruitment. But what does this have to do with YOU?
Well, you might not think you’re in danger because you won’t click on alt-right bullshit! But remember, algorithms are dumb, reactive nonsense. On Tik Tok I liked one big creator's goofy fall in a video and soon enough I was filled with a bunch of heteronormative comic bullshit and soon it was peddling worse. No matter how often I hit “not interested” or tried to swipe quickly, it became CONVINCED I would like this “outside my comfort zone” shit and it took a week to get it away (which is fucking insane). You have to realize: you are watching something where YOU DON’T HAVE THE REMOTE. They do. And this happens all the time on bigger platforms, too. On Netflix it’s always like, hey you liked this british stand-up special, are you suuuuuuuuuuure you don’t want this transphobic comic’s bullshit? You may ask, how is this different from seeing what’s advertised on tv? And it’s easy: that’s a curated ad put in a general space. But we all know the difference of how it feels when the advertising algorithm comes AT you. It’s like all targeted ads and overwhelming things that feel invasive. And it lines up with the equal amount of WORK you have to do to undo a dumb machine thinking you want this - or the ways you just roll over and consume it, not having another choice. It’s often not “easy.” It's exhausting.
Which brings to the whole issue and that is the net effect on the viewer.
By pure happenstance Anne Helen Petersen wrote about this part of the subject in her recent newsletter titled, “The Sterile World of Infinite Choice” and she wrote about her pre-internet college days as such: “The lack of precise data about where people were and what they were doing — and the lack of documentation of where they were and what they doing and whether or not it was “worth” it to go find them — meant that you might have a plan for what the night would be….and then there was what the night actually became. There was just so much less control, so much less ability to curate what your night would look like… My surroundings are always in my control — which also means that I am always doing the work of controlling them…
“Algorithms do the work for cheap, but when they reflect our taste back at us, it feels misshapen and insulting, a crude and unfair representation. When everything is available, all knowledge, all information, all entertainment ….nothing is perceived as valuable. Not the labor that creates the thing, not the person behind it, not the thing itself. The only valuable thing is our time, and if we spend it on something that isn’t amazing, isn’t exquisitely for us, we understand it as time wasted, instead of time gloriously wandering. That understanding extends to time traveling or with friends or even trying to make new ones. Within this paradigm, the entire experience of finding new things, new people, new places and experiences — all of it feels broken and unsatisfying and bad.”
And people can feel it. There’s a grand ugliness to this kind of curation. To line up with much of what I wrote before about 90’s Black media versus the way they get lumped into things for white audiences - one of Netflix’s “great” decisions was to have different thumbnails for a show depending on who you are - meaning the algorithm (which is not them so its not their fault!) will often put Black characters on a show on the poster for a Black viewer. Which means they think this character might be the subject of the show - and then the viewer will quickly discover the character is only, like, the seventh lead. Talk about misshapen, insulting, broken, unsatisfying, and bad. But this is what the powers that be will always do. They will repeat the mistakes of American Idol gold rush and the lumping in again and again.
But now, it’s not about “their” decisions, they have some blunt tool of a machine that will do the ugly, racist work for them. And worse off, in the chase to the Netflix mirage, every streamer tried to buy back their library and compete with one another - with NONE of them understanding the difference between channel / branding and being a platform. I mean, what the hell does “paramount plus” actually MEAN to a consumer? And thus it all got destroyed - even Netflix because they finally faced competition. They saw what Netflix was doing - chased an impossible dream - and literally destroyed the profitable economics of all television. And now ,they’re all scrambling and selling parts of the library, mostly adding insult to injury. Like Homer Simpson, they followed the algorithms / trends / and greed right into the tar pit…
But is there anything we can do?
Luckily, the answers are already in front of us.
5. A MUCH NEEDED SYNTHESIS
The WGA and SAG-AFTRA are on strike.
And they’re doing it because of pretty much everything I’m talking about right now. It’s all completely and totally related. Part of the reason the AMPTP is fighting so hard IS because they fucked up so hard and the only thing they’ve gained from all this is that the streamers effectively union-busted the industry. But it’s all a part of the way that the dumb, skittish Zaslavs of the world destroyed something that we all know and love - even if a consumer may not understand the way we are fully dependent on it. I mean, I always laugh when Tech Bros in the industry call entertainment a “non-essential” when really it’s integral to our lives. Believe me, they’ll say this in meetings! But then it’s always like, okay, go without a movie, tv show, podcast, book, song, youtube video, tweet, tik tok, article, or literally any single thing produced by a creative or entertainment journalistic entity for a whole month and I can guarantee you after two days they (and ESPECIALLY they) will want to blow their brains out after actually being forced to be be alone with their own thoughts. This always happens. And it is the reason this stuff matters to people - not just in terms of how they get through their day just a little bit easier - but because it can actually end up meaning something more, too.
All of this is about the grand history of purpose. Believe it or not, the root of understanding the problems with current tech and industry trends has more to do with understanding why we all gathered around campfires and talked a hundred thousand years ago than it does “girl-based-toy movies are so hot right now!” It’s about understanding things like purpose, community, and connection along with the ways these things invariably connect with the patronage of the arts. And yeah, the funding of arts has ALWAYS been a sticky complication, but it’s a necessary part of the bargain. You simply gotta find the way to fund it, but the idea is that there is inherent worth in that funding. The Sistine Chapel was meant to inspire awe. And yes, in the modern age, it SEEMS like it’s more about the money, but 1. I hate to tell you what the catholic church was really about in those day$ and 2. It's still that same core goal as a person who consumes the art. You go into a theater. Or you sit down on a couch. And you lose yourself to something grander. But every moment these bozos are talking about the given assumptions they talk about the state of the industry as if it's on a precipice of doom - and in some ways it really is - but it is precisely because they cannot grasp the truth about what’s already happened / been there the entire time.
People will always need to be entertained. It’s as simple as that. And we built a system that was more or less working - but it’s also an industry that has gone through constant change. But it takes looking at what those changes have REALLY done to overall effect. To wit, all the great streaming revolution did was eliminate unions and drastically reduce the quality of what was produced in favor of cheap, phone-friendly, emptiness - that now, surprise surprise, they’re having a tough time keeping afloat. It’s the same thing where financiers will chase the monster hit and abandon a steady audience. Or when you have tech bros who want to scale at tech profit curves, which means trying to platform a brand or trying to brand a platform in equal measure. Heck, everyone thought commercial-free media would feel equally freeing! But it just meant plodding episodes of hour fifteen minute run times that are purely designed to keep you plugged in for the “hours consumed” statistic (at this point I would DIE for a cheap fake out in the middle of an episode that keeps you interested during the break). Which all brings us back to the same point.
They will keep using this ignorance to prey upon your own. They will tell you again and again that this situation is different, that it has to be this way, that they HAVE to adapt to this current climate by doing X terrible thing - which is just the way of using the same excuses to bury progress once again. Because it’s ALWAYS the same dynamic…
- They’re going to tell you why they are something based on current conditions.
- It’s not going to be true, but instead reactive status quo bullshit.
- The real solution is hiding in history.
- They will ignore this and use your ignorance to bury it.
Even now, the thing that is driving me nuts is that people talk about Oppenheimer / Barbie, specifically the fact that they both over-performed, is that they are calling it an anomaly (and yes I get why partly it is in the modern age), but putting interesting things out together on the same weekend use to be a massive strategy that was LITERALLY CALLED COUNTER PROGRAMMING. Heck, I remember everyone talking about how smart it was that Notting Hill - the eagerly awaiting Hugh Grant follow-up to Four Weddings And A Funeral, a film pairing him with the great Julia Roberts no less - was released right in the middle of The Phantom Menace storm. Both did so damn well precisely because it’s about upholding the value of both. And if everyone's going to the movies? Then a rising tide lifts all boats.
Which is why understanding history matters. It is how you get what you want and deserve. Don’t let any part of them pit X against Y in the negative way. Especially when there is so much to be gained in the camaraderie. Lily Singh fell for the emergence narrative saying she was the first woman of color to host a late night show, but conveniently forgot that Monique did it years prior. This not only erases history, it erases the fact that both shows didn’t get the support they needed - and now both get forgotten in turn, all in favor upholding the safety of the status quo. Which is why the late night convo will happen again. Even now, studios are saying Crazy Rich Asians was an anomaly, ignoring the fact they said the same thing about the success of the Joy Luck Club years prior, nor even the fact that Bruce Lee was one of the biggest movie stars in the world - let alone how much this all goes back to the silent era and Anna May Wong. And the powers that be will go for what is reductive, easy, greedy, and racist - because it means they don’t have to know anything or do anything different.
But you can - and you do.
You know so damn much. And you know what you want to see. And there’s an entire history of media that backs up that value. It may feel hopeless to try and navigate these things in this big system. But do you know how much these companies WANT consumer feedback that isn’t just internet noise? You just gotta do it in the channels that actually feed them. It sucks, but absolutely take those stupid surveys. And when you hit positions of power it’s sooooo easy to send hate, but speaking from places of love and what you want to see actually moves the needle (and you realize all these execs have forward- facing places to email / call right? https://contactanycelebrity.com/cac/contact-david-zaslav/ ahem Zaslav). The unions are trying to build support staff that uphold the integrity of the writing and product. They’re trying to instill positions of power that understand the myth of emergence - so that it is not constantly falling on the latest star with the duties of representation. They’re all going to have to figure out the more straight-forward methods of “making good stuff” and “curating” and “programming” that have upheld the industry for generations - and just doing so without falling prey to the ignorance of algorithmic functions on top of it. YOU have to uphold the history - because if you don’t?
They will always do this.
They will convince you that movies haven’t always been cinematic. Or that they need to look bad on purpose for phones. Or that there’s no steady market for Black entertainment. Or that minority lead movies are a newly-emergent thing. They want you to believe that X and Y never existed (or heaven forbid A or B) so they don’t have to actually give a shit about Z in the long term. Which is why they will try to erase their libraries before our eyes because they don’t know what to properly do with them. In short, they will double down on their own ignorance AND bad business sense. Because every single one of them will shoot themselves in the proverbial dick to chase a billion dollar trend that’s already too late in the first place. And while that’s a funny image, they’re also killing the things we all care about. Don’t let them. Know the history.
Because it’s how we protect our future.
Sending solidarity and strength,
<3HULK
Comments
Easy Riders Raging Bulls is a WILD place to start if you want an entertaining read where you probably have some familiarity with a lot of the directors / figures.
Love you sm! Are there any books/ lecture videos you recommend on film history? Thanks <3
yoooo this was so good. thought provoking and actually inspiring.
This is all spot on and I'm guessing they're counting recommendations as anything not exactly searched for!
RichterCa
This reminded me of a comment I made years back on a Birth.Movies.Death. post (man, remember BMD?) about an article on Netflix's then fledgling algorithm: "80% or more of the transactions that happen on Netflix are through their recommendation engine." But what is counted here as a "recommendation"? Are we talking just the top level of sliding recommendations? Or all 20+ rows going down? Because saying that 80% come from that top row would be very impressive. But if we're including over 200 recommendations, I'm less impressed. Also considering how many of those recommendations are "new episodes" of shows I've been watching on Netflix, of course I'm going to watch those, too. Also, there are only two ways to get a movie from Netflix. Either pick one of those rows of recommendations, or go in knowing exactly what you want to watch and type the name in the search bar. I'd be surprised if even 20% of Netflix visits are from people who go there with a specific movie in mind. So of course people are choosing from the recommended movies, they just want to look over their options and pick something. That's exactly how video rental stores worked, and I've never heard anyone say "100% of video store rentals were by people who looked over the moves and picked one" even though it's true.
Chris Johnson
"AND THEY LITERALLY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF SETUPS AND PUNCHLINES"… NO exhale! Only inhale! :D
Same. It's a thing I have to constantly remind myself, too.
I’ve had one of those weeks where I’ve had a hard time seeing a positive way out of this extremely precarious situation, but the note you ended on did cheer me up a bit. Hoping we find a way forward to something better
