Raritania

The Shape of the Box Office of 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

In assessing the 2025 box office my first thought was of how the reality stacked up against my predictions at the end of last year. In particular I was interested in checking whether or not, as I thought, the forecasts so many others had made regard the year's gross had not been overoptimistic; the year had hewed to the pattern I saw in 2023 which seemed likely to be repeated of a pre-pandemic release slate in a shrunken post-pandemic market (reduced by a third), with the result too many tentpoles for the number of ticket-buyers to go around, leading to a large number of disappointing grosses; the claim that "Marvel's Back!" in the wake of Deadpool's success in 2024 proved wrong-headed as that film proved to have borne out interest in Deadpool, not the Marvel brand as a whole as the year's three major Marvel theatrical releases underperformed; and in general, the year's grosses conformed to the impression I have had for many years of increasing superhero fatigue and sci-fi actioner fatigue and franchise fatigue and the decreasing viability of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy so reliant on them for so long. As it turned out, what seemed to me was likely to happen, did happen, with the year's gross, instead of the $9-$10 billion so many hoped for instead under $8.7 billion, thanks to a large number of underperforming films--not least the three Marvel releases that showed that Deadpool was the exception, not the rule, for the sinking ship that this onetime king of the franchises has become.

Now, with the inflation data for the year out I am looking at the numbers again a little more closely, not least for how those of 2025 compare with those of 2023-2024, and 2015-2018. Doing so affirms that 2025 saw a gross 1.5 percent down from that of 2024, when a strike-thinned release slate was supposed to have been responsible for the soft gross, and down 8 percent from that of 2023, when the slate was pretty packed--and thus a more suitable point of comparison for how 2025 really did. In the process the gross continued its slippage from the level of 2015-2019--the figure for 2025 just 58 percent of that level (as against 59 percent in 2024 and 63 percent in 2023), suggesting that even after the dramatic drop of the pandemic period (which had me estimating a structural shrinkage of about a third) the erosion is still quite visibly continuing, rather than the situation stabilizing, let alone any recovery ongoing in the way some in the entertainment press at least pretend to continue to hope in spite of the evidence of the numbers from year to year since the pandemic.

In the face of this trend does Hollywood have options? As I have been saying for two years now they would do better to make cost-effective, well-targeted films than to pour money into tentpoles that nobody asked for (and those who never asked for them ever more inclined to take a pass on them entirely), and also make the most of the international opportunities open to them (as perhaps they mean to do in China, to go by what Disney did with the Zootopia sequel). Still, the problem right now is far bigger than anything Hollywood does. So far as I am concerned no discussion of the matter of the weak film grosses we are seeing is at all complete without acknowledgment of the extreme financial stress the public finds itself under today, one reflection of which is its passing up on all sorts of little luxuries they took for granted in better times, like dining out, and going to concerts, and yes, taking in a movie in a theater rather than contenting themselves with the offerings available to them on littler screens--the "affordability crisis" about which, of course, government has done nothing and shows no interest in doing anything positive. Indeed, elite unwillingness to address the issue is only underlined by the ways in which they pretend to address them (as seen in Ezra Klein and company's feeble sales pitch for the economic and political stupidity that is the blatantly neoliberal "Abundance" agenda). As the last implies I see no grounds for expecting any improvement in that part of the sorry picture, with all that means for Hollywood's share in it.

Whither the Jane Austen Fandom?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

The term "fandom" is probably most strongly associated with science fiction, where Hugo Gernsback did much to cultivate a self-aware, self-identifying, active, visible community among fans of such fiction in the earliest days of its history as a genre. However, science fiction was by no means the first scene of such a phenomenon. Certainly my impression reading Julian Symons is that Sherlock Holmes had a fandom decades before Gernsback (such that Holmes may be the first really great example of the phenomenon). At the same time one finds fandom outside the realm of what is ordinarily regarded as "popular culture," with the following Jane Austen enjoys perhaps the most striking such example.

The question on my mind recently was just how long that would go on being the case. Fandom itself generally seems to be in decline, certainly going by what many say of the science fiction fandom, and the factors behind that--a result not just of the decadence of science fiction as a genre about which I have written so many times, but of how people generally experience our entertainment-saturated era. The conventional wisdom has it that, enjoying what is at least superficially a superabundance of choices, and not exactly encouraged to develop their attention spans, people sample a great many enthusiasms rather than immersing themselves very deeply in any of them--and one might add, favor the "relatable" over the pleasures of the exotic and faraway--so that the conditions and outlook that gave rise to the old-fashioned "fan" are a thing of the past.

If anything, the Jane Austen fandom would seem much more vulnerable. After all, it is ultimately print-based--the media adaptations of Austen's work numerous, but essentially secondary (does anyone consider someone who never read the books a genuine "Jane Austen fan?") at a time in which the habit of reading, and especially reading long works of fiction for pleasure, is in sharp decline. It also does not take much imagination to see that if even the most commercially-oriented contemporary work for young adults is not commanding the audience that it did a decade ago anything such as what Austen wrote is that much less likely to speak to their passions, as she not only writes of another era, but does so from within that other era, with its perspective and conventions, and with which they can have little patience, and which they can scarcely seem able to wrap their minds around. So does it go with, for example, that stress on chastity, propriety, reputation that plunged the Bennet family into crisis when one of their daughters ran off with Mr. Wickham, such that, as seen in the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice, the movie's makers had little choice but to greatly compress that very large and important part of the book at the cost of not just faithfulness to the original but the fabric of the drama--all as given their intent of reaching a really wide audience it was, again, natural for them to reimagine Elizabeth Bennet as a far more lively character than the original (her having a little more sensibility and a little less sense, so to speak). Indeed, that cliché of the depiction of the Austen fandom, the young woman picking up Pride and Prejudice and identifying with Elizabeth and being swept up in her story and swept away by it is something I find very hard to picture as a phenomenon of the 2020s--the more in as we are told that Bridgerton is more the present generation's speed. Bridgerton, of course, would never have become the phenomenon that it is without Austen and her less celebrated imitators and successors creating a genre of love stories romanticizing the Regency era so popular that an identity politics-obsessed Hollywood would give it its "makeover," but that fact does not necessarily translate into interest in the antecedents, certainly in a different medium, as written in and for another time. Just as those who enjoy today's space opera and superhero tales generally do not go back and look at the old pulp tales in which those forms were born, let alone become devoted to them, it seems to me that only very rarely will those enjoying wokefied twenty-first century versions of Regency romance on streaming pick up Austen's old books.

Instead the declining interest would seem likely to translate to the withering away of the old cohort of enthusiasts as, like so many giants of English and world letters who have become merely "obscure" names to even those who pass themselves off as literate today, just something they get assigned in school and never bother with again. At least, for as long as schools continue to assign their students literary reading--a practice that may well be on its way out in an era in which the Untermenschen who hold power at every turn show themselves out to kill the humanities, and indeed, humanity itself, in their Apocalypse-like chase after the godhood they and the media endlessly stroking them believe they deserve.

Is This Really an Age of Disclosure?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Hollywood producer Dan Farah's recent documentary The Age of Disclosure takes its name from the view held by some of those who believe governments have been concealing the reality behind reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The "ufologist" as some call them generally assumes this to be hard evidence of visitations of the Earth by extraterrestrials in vehicles capable of interstellar flight, with all that implies about the advanced character of this other civilization; that the "UFO cover-up" thus conceals a great deal about the history of humanity, the technologies that may actually be available to us, and possibly much, much else; and that the time when those long-held, profound secrets will be secrets no longer may be close at hand, perhaps "changing everything" for the better. However, in spite of recent public hearings about the subject of government knowledge of these matters in the United States Congress, among other such developments, I cannot help but think of how the broader direction of government conduct seems to be headed in the extreme opposite direction of what would expect in an age of openness. The twenty-first century has seen the governments of even those states that Westerners identify most with liberal freedoms, government accountability, democracy conduct worldwide programs of rendition, torture and assassination--all as it seems the public, encouraged by the brass check takers of our news media, take the situation in stride. Indeed, governments are becoming secretive about matters that most would consider to be far more banal than extrajudicial killings, refusing to release data they formerly made public as a matter of course, and even removing previously published data from their sites. (That U.S. Department of Agriculture report on food insecurity I cited in a post on this very blog a while back? The government has officially announced that there won't be any update on that, the report gone.) And indeed, it seems that many an informed observer even the most narrow-minded centrist would hesitate to dismiss as an ufologist-style "conspiracy theorist" openly discusses what report the government does put out regarding such matters as prices, economic growth and employment with unprecedented suspicion, charging increasing manipulation of the numbers to brighten the dismal picture.

All of this, of course, has gone hand in hand with an era of open contempt on the part of elites in and out of government toward the public at large, whether one thinks of the increasingly unhinged character of their dismissal of working people as "takers" parasitic upon their supposed betters (now we hear that they are "scavengers," and even "unhumans"), or their indifference to the prospect of their mass death as already seen in a viral pandemic; or as they now contemplate in the event of environmental collapse, and even the nuclear war that, displaying a Barry Goldwater-like incomprehension of what such a conflict would mean.

Looking at all of that I imagine that if governments really are sitting on a mountain of world-changing information of this kind (about which proposition I must account myself skeptical), any "Age of Disclosure" remains far off, with the chatter we have heard so much serving other purposes, not least a distraction from more pressing matters that we all know to be only too real, with the choice of distraction itself significant. As Tom Engelhardt remarked in his very worthwhile book The End of Victory Culture, ufologists were "almost the only group . . . to take on the national security state directly" in the Cold War period, while in spite of that being case this was "the only oppositional group in those years that no one bothered to accuse of communism." That Authority treated the ufologists so lightly even amid the hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War as to not even bother Red-baiting them in that way to which they so reflexively and nastily resorted would seem far from testifying that they were ever onto anything--all as, where the public's perhaps inevitable skepticism of government truthfulness is concerned, there has been no safer outlet than this one. Accordingly one may reasonably see the interest here as a sublimation of other discontents, and at the same time, an interest that those desirous of deflecting public attention from the hard facts of polycrisis have every interest in cultivating.

Book Review: The Road to Omaha, by Robert Ludlum

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Robert Ludlum's MacKenzie Hawkins-Sam Devereaux novels seemed to me even more off the main track of his work than the novels Ludlum published as Jonathan Ryder. Those, at least, were thrillers (indeed, as it turned out, the Ryder novel Trevayne was one of his best such works), whereas his Sam Devereaux novels were comedies--all as I had found Ludlum's attempts at humor uneven. In truth I had sometimes enjoyed them (as with Valerie Converse's New York cab ride in The Aquitaine Progression or the misadventures of Brendan Prefontaine in The Bourne Ultimatum), but the weaker aspects of Ludlum's writing tended to put him at a particular disadvantage here. His tendency to make caricatures of his characters, ethnically as in other ways, went into overdrive here, with results that could seem crude and offensive rather than funny (like Krusty the Clown performing his '50s-era routine before a '90s audience), all as his less than efficient use of words seemed particularly disadvantageous when he went for laughs. Meanwhile this particular book, coming late in a period in which Ludlum was repeating himself (counting the return of Inver Brass in The Icarus Agenda this was his fourth sequel in a row), often to diminishing returns (certainly evident in the immediately preceding Bourne Ultimatum), could seem as if it had been on the shelf since the time when Ludlum wrote The Road to Gandolfo as he focused on his more profitable straight thrillers, and just brought this one out when he did out of sheer exhaustion before putting the pen down and letting the Ludlum name become the Ludlum "brand" slapped on the covers of the increasingly generic intelligence procedurals published under it from The Scorpio Illusion forward.

Still, suspecting this was the last "true" Ludlum novel I dove into The Road to Omaha--and all too predictably found it a slog. Rather than laughing at Sam Devereaux's predicament I found myself feeling sorry for him as I sympathized with his desire to just be left alone by the egomaniacal lunatic grifter General Mackenzie Hawkins (Ludlum's apparent admiration for whom jarred), all as the writing lived down to my lowest expectations. Indeed, during a rather protracted and complicated pursuit sequence through Boston that overtaxed my willingness to continue following the story I put down the book, unsure as to whether I would bother returning to it. But in the end I did so, and if it took me quite some time to "get into" the story (it didn't happen until I was almost halfway through this six hundred pager) I did get into it.

With the set-up out of the way, and Ludlum proceeding to develop the broader plot (this time Hawkins, with Devereaux once again dragged in, is suing the government "on behalf" of a Native American tribe Hawkins has determined may rightly own the land on which Strategic Air Command headquarters is built), he managed to put the scale and intricacy to which his narratives were prone to good effect, his taking in the bigger picture giving him plenty at which to direct his not merely comedic but satirical barbs, especially as we saw more of the villains of the piece and their machinations as they presumed to head off Hawkins' challenge to the government by other than strictly legal means. In the process Ludlum actually transforms General Hawkins from the (comic) villain he was the last time around, when he was simply after a big score, into an antihero fighting for justice (in his deranged way), all as Sam Devereaux goes from being Hawkins' hapless victim to this comedic epic's answer to Joel Converse, an accomplished attorney battling his Vietnam-era ghosts as he also battles the book's conspirators with the law as his weapon, with the book better off for it. Indeed, Ludlum gives free rein not just to the comedic impulses that did not always well-suit, for example, his Bourne sequels, but also to the politically critical impulses he made clear were still alive and well in his introduction to the reprint of his earlier Trevayne (impulses, if anything, exacerbated by the repellent state of American politics as Ludlum found it at the end of the 1980s) evident here to a degree not seen since the days when he was writing novels like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, giving the comedy its edge--with it helping greatly that displayed a healthy disrespect for the Establishment. Ludlum's depiction of Randolph Gates in The Bourne Ultimatum was just a hint of what he is to offer here, as Ludlum offered up some fairly inspired ideas, not least making the Director of Central Intelligence a literal "goodfella," selected for and installed in his position by the yacht club clichés who own the country's defense-industrial base (though they would never have such over to dinner, of course, such a personage "socially unacceptable," don't you know)--all as if you ever wondered what an "all star" government counter-terrorist team with John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier on it would be like (I didn't either), you find out here (sort of). Some of it even looks like prophesy in hindsight--like the combination of crudity and ignorance characterizing the dialogue in the book's Cabinet meeting, and its White House chief of staff who gives the press the middle finger as that press goes on being deferential in its wearisome pompous way.

The result was that what began as something of a chore became a pleasure as the pages flew by with results that were consistently amusing, and every once in a while even laugh out loud funny. By the end I was glad I had stuck with the book, which seemed a not unfitting close to the oeuvre of what I as much as ever think of as the "real Ludlum," the more in as where commercial fiction is concerned, what it had been possible to present as the material of a straight thriller in 1977 could only be presented as comedy in the political milieu of 1992, a less and less free and tolerant place where satire was concerned--all as, as we now know only too well, history's course was such course that in a very short time satire would be completely incapable of comparing with the stuff of our ever more em dash substitution-filled headlines for sheer absurdity and obscenity, exaggeration to any useful end simply impossible.

For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.

Of Mack Bolan and Leroy Jethro Gibbs: Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

The near-total media silence regarding the announced end of Gold Eagle's day as an active book publisher was an indication of just how much the genre with which that imprint had become a publishing powerhouse--"men's action-adventure"--had fallen off the media's radar since its heyday in the '70s and '80s, going bust in the '90s and never recovering afterward. In the process the visibility of particular series' and characters has declined. In the case of the Destroyer series a feature film adaptation that, if a flop at the time of release, has since (deservedly) acquired a cult following, helps keep memory of that franchise alive, but the biggest series of all in that field, which was actually the one that started it all, the Executioner series featuring Mack Bolan, never quite made it to the screen, with all that has meant for its lingering in the broader pop cultural consciousness.

Still, echoes of Mack Bolan's creation remain audible, perhaps most obviously in the form of Marvel Comics' Bolan-inspired Punisher, but I suspect also in the form of less direct derivatives, like that lead figure in the JAG spin-off NCIS, Leroy Jethro Gibbs. So far as I know there has never been any public acknowledgment of conscious inspiration or influence here on the part of show creator Don Bellisario or anyone else "in the know" about it. Still, it would be a bit surprising if, given his generation and his particular line of work, Bellisario had never, ever, heard of the Executioner series and its hero Bolan, and still more surprising if there wasn't at least some indirect influence given how big the phenomenon was at its peak--and the numerous parallels between Bolan, and (at least where his personal back story is concerned) Gibbs. Like Bolan Gibbs was a young man from a blue-collar background in a relatively provincial part of the Northeast (indeed, it may not be wholly irrelevant that just as Bolan comes from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Gibbs' Pennsylvania has a Pittsfield of its own) who enlisted in the armed forces, and became a sergeant in a special forces section of their branch (Bolan an Army Green Beret, Gibbs a Marine Scout Sniper) with sniping as their specialty and a reputation for excellent marksmanship. While away at war (Bolan in the Vietnam War, Gibbs in the 1991 Gulf War) "ethnic" gangsters destroyed each of their families (Italian Mafia in Bolan's case, a Mexican drug trafficker in Gibbs'), after which, on returning home, each man used his skills as a special forces soldier, specifically relying on his prowess as a sniper, to exact personal revenge on those they held responsible for their loss in a vigilante action that the law could never countenance, but with which the audience is expected to sympathize.

Of course in other respects the situations are different. There is what exactly they had in the way of family. The young Bolan who went off to war had yet to settle down and marry, with the result that his family consisted of his parents and siblings, whereas Gibbs was a married man with a wife and daughter. The circumstances of the destruction of their families were also different, Bolan's father Sam, trying to make ends meet in the wake of a heart attack forcing him to shift from his old job to a less demanding but lower-paying one at the steel plant, took out a loan that seemed safe enough at first but proved to be predatory. Repayment being beyond his means he unsurprisingly failed to pay up, leading to the loan officers having the affiliated Mafia henchmen beat him up to make him somehow come up with the cash he didn't have. This drove his daughter Cindy to go and plead with them to lay off--something they agreed to do if she entered their employ as a prostitute to "work off" her father's debt, an offer she accepted. As it happened, her younger brother Johnny found out about what she was doing and told dad, who, apparently driven to madness by the news, shot the women, then Johnny, and then himself. By contrast it seems that Gibbs' wife simply happened to witness a crime, and the killer she was in a position to testify against decide to keep her from ever being able to testify. And of course, there was what the heroes did afterward. The vengeance Bolan exacts on the Mafia in Pittsfield--a whole series of actions that leave a very large number of gangsters dead and no doubt about the party responsible in the view of either the Mafia or the authorities--places him squarely outside society, while being just the beginning of the "War Against the Mafia" that is the book's title, and the theme of the series through the decade. For Gibbs the revenge killing is a one-shot incident he buried in his past as, after departing the Marines, he joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and rose through the ranks to become the senior functionary he is by the time of the TV series--though of course, like just about every popular hero of the type, he is not unknown to act the "loose cannon" and so look less Bolan-like in the process.

Still, having described the two characters' arcs it should be clear that any attempt to adapt Bolan's story would easily see the creator end up with something that looks a lot more like Gibbs'. After all, if Bolan's creator Don Pendleton in 1969 could expect that his readers would see the elder Bolan's destruction of his family as ultimately the fault of the Mafia's preying on them this is less the case today. His taking a gun and shooting his children, his wife and himself is what we today call a "mass shooting"--discussing which it is today all but taboo to seek explanation, those who violate it being vulnerable to accusation of excusing it (a stance that is not only unfair but, self-servingly from the standpoint of those who prefer such things not be discussed, putting consideration of social and economic factors, and criticism of what they mean for human life, beyond the pale). And of course the complex of prejudices regarding gender, religion, race further problematizes the matter, given the news that prompted the elder Bolan's action. Certainly were Bolan not an Irish-American but of a certain other background the conventional response would be to call his act of violence, particularly in regard to his daughter, an "honor killing"--remembering which facts is an unwelcome reminder to many that traditionalist notions of female and family honor in America are not so different from those of peoples that mainstream Americans prefer to treat as an utterly alien Other whose barbaric behavior toward their womenfolk is absolutely unlike anything ever seen in the West. Meanwhile even if oblivious to the ethno-religious double standard prevailing in such matters (as a great many persons who think of themselves as "progressive" are) the "woke" would at least speak of Bolan's father's "toxic masculinity" in dealing with his failure to provide for and protect his loved ones in the way that he did (while those with a broader, richer, social perspective will think about what Sam Bolan's hard luck says about working class life in America). Altogether, if no reasonable person would deny the destructive role of the Mafia in the episode, many would blame the elder Bolan and his backward values for his ultimately having killed himself, his wife, his daughter, with this, in turn, coloring their judgment of Mack Bolan. After all, not only does his course raise the eternal controversy over the legitimacy of vigilante action, but the view of Bolan's actions as a matter of Mack, refusing to accept his father's inability to confront either his personal mistakes or the bigger social reality behind them as ultimately the culprits, laying the entire blame on ethnic gangsters as he goes on a racist vigilante killing spree--and indeed, between this and Bolan's own recognition of the impossibility of his task (one vigilante wiping out the whole Mafia?), many would see him as the product of a sick, bigoted, culture simply having lost his mind. The result is that even if Bellisario had actually consciously thought through an adaptation of Mack Bolan's story as the basis of Gibbs' back story, his keeping that particular sequence of events in his own narrative was totally out of the question, and electing instead for the plain and simple murder of Gibbs' wife and daughter by the thug against whom he exacted his personal revenge was probably the only way that he could have gone if he was serious about getting a show on the air in 2003.

Top Gun: Maverick, Ready Player One and the Weaponization of Wokeness

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

I remember that when the press announced that Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick) was out of the development hell where it had languished for three decades and going into production I was skeptical about its box office prospects, and later surprised at how high it soared--grossing over $700 million in North America, a figure which would have been stellar even before the pandemic, and was that much more so after COVID-19 dealt a structural blow to the theater business. Of course, hits like that tend to not "just happen," and in this case the film was helped by at least two advantages, namely the relatively weak competition in the summer of 2022 compared with more crowded summer seasons, and the media cheerleading for the film. The latter was evident in the extremely positive reviews (the Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics score was 99 percent--versus the 56 percent score they gave the original back in 1986, even though it was pretty much the same film), but also in what was evident in those glowing reviews, the critics giving much that they sometimes find objectionable a pass. This certainly went for how the film held up from the standpoint of "wokeness," and indeed a comparison of the response to Top Gun 2 with the response to Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One not much earlier is revealing.

After all, consider what those who attacked Ready Player One with such vitriol had against it, its trafficking in nostalgia for '80s pop culture. Many would not see anything inherently offensive about that. (I didn't then--and frankly still don't.) But some see the fact that Ernest Cline's book simply happened to be a love letter to things mostly enjoyed by males of a certain ethnic background as infuriating because of their demand for the "decentering" of that perspective and desire for the "centering" of other perspectives (non-male, non-White, LGBTQ+, etc.) in its place--to the point of demonizing pop cultural nostalgia of Cline's type. Rounding out the attack on that front those taking this line nit-picked his book from the standpoint of its failings with regard to "diversity" and "inclusion"--again, hyperbolically I thought, Cline seeming to me to have gone out of his way to offer exactly that in such characters as Aech, and Art3mis, only for those critics to dismiss them as superficial concessions (quite unfairly, in this reader's view, given the "moving the goalposts" of the implicit and very unreasonable demand for High Literature-level characterization in an unabashedly non-Literary novel). However, Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick), no less a piece of '80s nostalgia than Cline's book in intent and execution, seems to have caught nothing like such flak on that account. Equally those who were so hostile to Ready Player One did not raise any objections to the nods to diversity in Top Gun 2 having been rather more vulnerable to dismissal as "superficial concessions" than in Cline's book and its film adaptation, all as those prone to be fire-breathing about LGBTQ+ inclusiveness and "body positivity" did not raise a hue and cry about the self-described "fat," "old" and "age-appropriate" Kelly McGillis being out in favor of a slimmer and younger Jennifer Connelly as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell's love interest this time around.

Considering the difference one could argue that the summer of 2022 was not the spring of 2018, that passions about these issues may have cooled somewhat by that point--and that Cline's Ready Player One may simply have been unlucky in that one book and film's subjection to the whole weight of the identity politics' practitioners' fury over pop culture broadly, so that it ended up the object of what became a mindless pile-on in that way that so happens in political life as its detractors loaded it with a burden no one work can fairly be made to bear. However, that does not seem to me the whole story, especially in light of the media's Rah-Rah attitude toward Top Gun--and the plain and simple fact that wokeness was far from dead then. (Just consider the reception Barbie got a whole year later.) Rather it seems that the differences in the content of the two works matter immensely. After all, the entertainment press being what it is it is not without reasons for despising Ready Player One, and encouraging the public to do so. Most obviously, if that book's politics were often confused (with its thoroughly right-wing cult of the self-made tech billionaire, its evocation of Ayn Rand and her ideology by way of Rush's allusions, etc.), it still featured an ecologically ruined neoliberal dystopia where corporate scum who enslave the hapless are intent on controlling and enshittifying the Internet, with the heroes those who fight against them--and at the climax of the story, their not doing so in a singlehanded, individualistic way but literally rallying the whole online world's people to fight to keep the commons that is the only thing enabling them to get through the day in their hands and out of those of the grasping capitalists in what by twenty-first century standards could seem October 1917, all as Cline gave the middle finger to the copyright Nazis dominating the media over and over again. Don't think for a moment that any of this went over well with the neolibs and neocons who dominate the conventional wisdom--even with the film watering down what oppositional content the original possessed. By contrast Top Gun 2 was an old-fashioned flag-waving armed forces-singing right-wing movie all the way down--and don't think for a moment that this didn't go over well with the neolibs and neocons who dominate the conventional wisdom, for whom this was not Red October but the Hunt for it. That made all the difference in their attitude--and specifically in the weaponization of the wokeness that, for the millionth time, is not a left-wing but an essentially anti-leftist political outlook very readily deployed against anything that can smack of the left in that way that accounts for a very great deal in the politics of our time, even on Big Media's review pages.

The Whining of Literary Agents

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

It has long been routine for the functionaries of Big Publishing to write pieces in which they whine that the hatred that frustrated authors feel for them is unjustified. (One may find examples of this dubious literature in such places as the Guardian and Salon.)

As with almost everything that people in Big Business tell the broad public about their business these pieces, which bespeak the self-pity and callousness of privilege toward the less advantaged--the narcissism that says "Attention must be paid!" to my concerns as they deny that "Attention must be paid!" to anyone else's--they obscure rather than reveal, and it seems there is something to be said about that. Certainly I do not deny that people do pursue careers as authors with unreasonable expectations, and that the enmity many of those who have been through this feel toward literary agents and the like partly reflects those unreasonable expectations. For a start, the aspiring author is encouraged to think that publishing is a career open to talent; that publishers exist to publish books; that the slush pile is a plausible path to publication; that any good book is likely to find a home somewhere. However, every one of those premises is false. Publishing is a very crowded milieu, the actual demand for book writers miniscule next to the supply. Publishers exist not to publish books but to make the maximum short-term profit for their owners, with books a mere means to an end, and while things have always been that way as Balzac demonstrates in Lost Illusions, one should not underestimate how much more intensive and minute the predominance of the profit imperative has become in today's ever-more corporatized and monopolized market, where the biggest publishers are corporate giants in their turn owned by asset managers that practice as well as preach "shareholder value." Indeed, in line with this imperative many have decided to have nothing to do with slush piles, dumping that job on literary agents who are in the business of representing their clients, not seeking out new talent, such that where they do have a slush pile it is apt to be the responsibility of some unpaid intern. And as all the foregoing implies--the crowdedness, the emphasis on profit rather than books, the marginality of the slush pile--it is not to be assumed that a decent book, or even a great one, will make it all the way through the labyrinth. Indeed, what an aspiring author writes is of no consequence whatsoever--what they know of no consequence whatsoever next to who they know, and who knows them, which is to say their having "connections" and/or "platform," nepotism and a claim to fame, working in their favor, such that the industry's Dauriats are happy to make "authors" of illiterate celebrities as they brush off a worthy effort by a newcomer because idiots will buy a book with a celebrity's name on it, and not a nobody's, no matter how brilliant (all while encouraging them to believe the fault lies with their writing "not being good enough").

Of course, that raises a very important question, namely "If aspiring authors have unreasonable ideas about this business, one can only wonder: where did they get them?" The answer is only partly the pop cultural crapola that so profoundly misrepresents what writers do, and how publishing works (all the crappy books and movies of our time about this subject offer less truth than does Balzac's great novel of two centuries ago), but also the hard reality that a great many interests profit by exploiting the hopes of would-be authors. Just think of the vast business of books, magazines, web sites, seminars, workshops which bring in revenue by taking such authors' money. Think of higher education, with its Masters of Fine Arts programs--which are central to the revenue and the hiring of English departments, the persons running which, contrary to stupid clichés about the genteel residents of "ivory towers," are as cynically and ruthlessly entrepreneurial as mobsters where Money is at issue. (As one who has been there, you can take my word for it that the colleges wouldn't be able to get all those composition classes that English teachers view with as much distaste as do the students taught at the rates they do if there weren't adjuncts thinking "I'm just doing this crappy job 'til I make it as an author.") Many joke that the withered remains of the once vital fiction magazine scene endure mainly because of the people buying them and reading those magazines less out of interest in the content than research for the sake of attempting to publish in those magazines themselves, they hope, on the way to bigger and better things. And of course, the authors who have "made it," insistent that they made it on talent and hard work and nothing else in line with the egotistic stupidity standard among the "successful" in America, encourages this view as well.

Moreover, those whining functionaries do nothing to disabuse the aspiring authors of these illusions. Quite the contrary, they reinforce them at every turn. After all, who is it that publishes those "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" books? Publishers, of course. Meanwhile, on the web sites and other places where an aspiring author is likely to encounter these functionaries' presentation of themselves to the world feeds their expectation that, yes, these people are willing to look at material people submit to them through the procedures they prescribe, and taking the trouble to follow the instructions will have its reward, for these people have slush piles for a reason, and if seeing something of quality will show it some respect. They even attempt to affirm this in those rejection letters, the recipient of which is encouraged to think not that this was a hopeless endeavor given what it is that publishing actually does and how they stand in relation to it but that the match between their manuscript and this particular agency wasn't quite right. It is even the case that a literary agent's form rejection letter will have accompanying it an ad for their own "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" book, which they hope the author they have just soul-crushingly rejected will actually buy--the existence of which book, written by people who should know better than anyone else exactly how things stand in this world, testimony to their personal investment in the cruel exploitation of those authors' hopes.

That Big Publishing's functionaries feed these illusions, and exploit these illusions for profit, makes their complaining that people have these illusions and act on them entirely illegitimate--the more in as when they do so Big Publishing's gatekeepers (whine as they do about being called gatekeepers, that is exactly what they are) treat them so high-handedly and insultingly, to such destructive effect. After all, let us not forget just what hopes these people are exploiting because of what the dream of authorship represents to so many, not merely the realization of the whim of "seeing their name in print" but, as Upton Sinclair dared to acknowledge, their one shot at escape from the scarcely bearable life of a nobody, such that the hope of that escape and their glittering vision of the life they will have if they do is the only thing getting them through the do. And let us not forget what I have described means in this context, that pursuing that desperate hope the business instead subjects them to the misery and despair of a Lucien de Rubempre and a Martin Eden (two protagonists, mind you, whose involvement with the vileness of the literary world ultimately saw each of those men die by their own hand). The bitterness and the enmity of the author cannot be properly understood without acknowledging how it comes from that desperate hope, and the way in which they have been deceived by the lies Big Publishing and its cohorts spread, made a mark of its own, and as a result brutalized by the "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" racket. Alas, acknowledging that would mean taking responsibility, whereas in this society the respectable abide by the rule that with all the power comes none of the responsibility, and vice-versa, that those who have none of the power have all of the responsibility, and so deserve all of the scorn the world can fling in their faces. Acknowledging it would also mean acknowledging the Big Lie of the "You can do it too!" aspirationalism pervading the entirety of American culture for two centuries now, and that other Big Lie it sustains that this is a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Of course, very, very few have ever had the courage to speak honestly about that.

What Query Letters Really Ask of Their Recipients

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

It seems that those who think about such things conventionally think a "query" letter sent by an author looking for a publisher to an editor at a publishing house, or a literary agent they hope will connect them with a publishing house, is asking the recipient "Is this a good book? Yes or no?" with a rejection letter meaning "No, it isn't a good book," and this the sole possible explanation for their declining to publish it.

However, what the query letter really asks, whether the author realizes it or not, is "Are you willing to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in publishing my book? Yes or no?" It is, in short, a business proposition, and a "No" not a verdict on the book's quality, but whether in the circumstances the recipient finds the particular business proposition more attractive than the others available to them at the moment, only a very limited number of which they could take up even were they all attractive. Unsurprisingly their answer to a stranger of whom they have heard, and of whom it seems no one else has heard, asking them that question is almost certain to be "No, we will not invest hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars in publishing your book"--regardless of what the author has written, the issue likely to be decided even before the matter of quality could even be considered.

Why does the profoundly misleading conventional view of submissions to publishers as being a question about a book's quality rather than the business proposition that is publishing it endure? The reasons are numerous. The most obvious is that making clear the business-like nature of the matter is injurious to the hopes so many have of becoming authors, and thus also injurious to a very lucrative business of exploiting authors' hopes, ranging from publishers hawking "how to" books, to college English departments selling Masters of Fine Arts degrees, to underemployed authors supplementing the sub-poverty "wages of writing" with teaching in and out of "the Academy."

However, beyond that there is the reality that people are generally afraid to speak of the really important things in any area of life, and instead provide them with a bodyguard of irrelevancies. In a society where "economic self-interest" prevails--where, as a practical matter, the view those who have money take of whether or not a thing will be consistent with or opposed to their further enriching themselves as much and as quickly as possible decides what will and will not be done--people are at best squeamish, and often outright cowardly, about discuss hard business realities in all their crassness and cruelty. This is all the more in as they are scared out of their tiny, tiny minds of seeming to criticize the crass, cruel realities of business at all, because that would make them heretics in a land where Anti-Communism is, as Herman and Chomsky had it, the "national religion," and in the United States in particular "You can do it too!" aspirationalism is so much a substitute for any genuine outcome-and-not-"opportunity" consideration of the have-nots. This squeamishness-to-cowardice certainly applies to the nexus between business and culture, given that whether the arts can flourish where business concerns predominate is something about which pretty much anyone who isn't a complete idiot is skeptical at best.

Meanwhile the romance of the arts, literary art included, is central not only to the amour propre of the culture industry's functionaries (few of whom are as honest with themselves, let alone others as Dauriat about what it is they really do), but also to their "moving product." Publishers do not sell books so much as they do authors, and it is important to them that the public think of their authors not as the often mediocre or worse stringers together of words and sentences they often are who just happened to "get the breaks," but rare and special talents, figures touched by magic, "geniuses," such that if they come to their local bookstore they should buy a copy and wait in line to get it signed by the Great Genius themselves. That marketing imperative does not conduce to telling the truth that a great many authors are not just commercially but psychologically invested in this illusion, all the more reason that that category of human not much given to critical thought to begin with are the last to question little inclined to question it--even when what they sign as they so smugly sit in that bookshop is, as is so often the case with those who have been on the bestseller lists long, trash their publishers arranged to be ghostwritten for them to take the fullest possible advantage of the Name that they have one way or other ended up with for as long as works "by" them continue to sell.

Blaming the Victim on the Eve of the Web's Maximum Era

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Contrary to the cyber-utopian stupidities championed by market populism-peddling corporate PR hacks, those whose economic function it is to platform the views of such vile specimens, and those people stupid enough to repeat such persons' lies, the playing field was never level, the game never meritocratic where trying to reach an audience online is concerned. Those who had deep pockets, powerful allies and privileged sympathizers were well-positioned to win--with the outrageously hyped possibility of the Little Guys competing against the Big Guys on the basis of the possibility of online "discovery," the "long tail" and perhaps "going viral" never better than slim, the equivalent of hoping to buy a winning Powerball ticket really, and as is generally the case with lotteries, for most a cruel disappointment. And it has all only got worse since. Indeed, these days the game, ever more "winner take all," can seem to be running its course as small bloggers, if never getting what they hoped for from their effort, find their traffic collapsing from quarter to quarter with each new round of "algorithmic" changes. And where many of them had once really been part of the dialogue in some degree they have increasingly wondered if there even is a dialogue anymore, and they are not after all on a "dead Internet," where all the humans have already departed and it is just artificial intelligence-generated sites out there being crawled by bots, or even if this hasn't happened yet this will soon be the case with what I have written of as the Internet's "Maximum Era" upon us.

Of course, this is not the Establishment version of the matter. "The major platforms pushing the small Internet sites to extinction, you say? Heavens, no!" they protest. They are simply trying to give the Internet user the best possible experience by separating the wheat from the chaff all as if anything they are helping the small-timer, who need only create quality "content" to succeed.

Alas, even the dumbest of us should on merely hearing such drivel recognize it as the same obscenely stupid and stupidly obscene claptrap that those complacent about the chase after success have peddled for as long as it has been around--as we can confirm given that the basis for judging what is wheat and what is chaff uses criteria ("brand names," backlinks, etc.) ever more favorable to the better-funded and longer-established players rather than the up-and-comer, and ever more remote from the "quality" of the content they present. Garbage on a too-big-to-fail platform (for indeed even mainstream media's supposedly most reputable newspapers and magazines are drowning the web and its users in garbage) will be moved to the top of the search results--the more in as it lays out the money for "sponsored" results--while gold on a blog by a nobody will likely not be indexed at all. Meanwhile, as they defend the vicious practice they not only hawk that bankrupt aspirationalism but engage in the all too familiar cruelty of telling those cheated in the rigged game that they have no one to blame but themselves for their unhappy lot for they "were just not good enough" as a prelude to telling anyone who would dare question the justice of the game's terms that they are not merely a "loser" and a "failure," but a "taker" if not a "scavenger," or even an "unhuman." For the time being, of course, few but those bloggers and others directly victimized by this process really care, but even those who have little sympathy for these groups should remember that this is part of the bigger enshittification of online life that touches the life of every web user, which is to say, everybody who has not elected to flee modernity for the wilderness and hide from it under a rock--and again, entirely in line with the ways in which those who flatter themselves that they are winners not only demean everyone else, but employ that demeaning of them as a tactic to compel their acquiescence in their victimization by this grift.

Richard Marcinko and the Cult of the Navy SEALs

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

A few decades back the U.S. Army's Special Warfare troops popularly known as "Green Berets" after their distinctive headgear were the most celebrated of the country's special operations forces units. Robin Moore wrote his bestseller about America's special forces in the Vietnam War specifically about, as the title made clear, The Green Berets, and John Wayne wrote, directed and starred in the hit film adaptation, further popularizing the force, helping make the Green Berets the go-to unit for writers wanting to impress their readers with their hero's association with an elite military unit. Thus Don Pendleton made his War Against the Mafia protagonist Mack "the Executioner" Bolan a Green Beret. David Morrell's Rambo was a Green Beret, and so did he most certainly remain in the film adaptation of his work. Air Force veteran and martial artist Carlos Ray Norris became the personage we know as "Chuck Norris" in large part by playing Green Berets--certainly in the first proper Chuck Norris-as-we-know-him-today film Good Guys Always Wear Black, and still more in his (and Cannon Films') greatest screen success, the Missing In Action trilogy, where he was Colonel James Braddock. Billy Jack was a Green Beret too, and so were the heroes of The A-Team (so named because they were formerly the members of a Green Beret A-Team). And of course, so were the many, many lesser imitations of all these figures, all as Green Berets were prominent in other ways, "paramilitary culture" icons Barry Sadler and Bo Gritz both, significantly, former Green Berets.

The U.S. Navy SEa-Air-Land (SEAL) units were not entirely absent from popular culture. Thomas Magnum of Magnum P.I. was a Navy SEAL, and so too Mitch Buchannon from Baywatch. The Navy SEALs also had some film appearances, as in Disney paramilitary-action-for-kids film The Rescue, and the SEALs' own would-be Top Gun-type film, creatively titled . . . Navy SEALs. Still, those very examples prove just how much less cultural cachet the SEALs had relative to the Green Berets in the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, in a situation that can seem the reverse of today's. Obviously that had a lot to do with the SEALs drawing the assignment of raiding Osama bin Laden's hideout and the adulation that followed from that, not least how for several years afterward a big movie lionizing the SEALs with a portrayal of what were at least supposed to be their real-life activities was an annual Hollywood tradition, producing the blockbusters Zero Dark Thirty, Lone Survivor and American Sniper, as well as a multitude of more thoroughly fictional portrayals like Act of Valor (which dramatized a typically made-in-Hollywood plot but had the novelty of using real-life SEALs as performers in the film)--and two television series' (the History Channel's SIX, and CBS' SEAL Team, which starred David Boreanaz and ran for seven seasons). Meanwhile it seems at times that you can't look at the coverage of the country's electoral races without coming across mention of a former SEAL running for office somewhere, and often getting it (seven members of the SEALs in the current Congress), as they frequently lean heavily on their Navy SEAL image in the campaign, sometimes more than they ought to have done. (Consider, for example former Missouri governor Eric Greiten's parody-proof 2022 ad.)

Still, the SEALs were gaining in prominence a long time before that, with their profile already rising in the '90s (as seen in The Rock, and G.I. Jane), and Richard Marcinko's emergence as a public figure rather important to that. The founder of the famous SEAL Team Six Marcinko published his (ghostwritten) autobiography back in 1992, which, aided by a storm of media publicity, became a major bestseller (making the New York Times hardcover list for 15 weeks), and launched a series of (ghostwritten) action-adventure novels billed as "sequels" telling of "missions" Marcinko undertook after his official departure from the Navy that could not be presented to the public in any other way (Rogue Warrior: Red Cell et. al.) also having their bestseller list presence. In spite of that, and advisory work on various TV shows and films (including, besides the expected shoot 'em up action-adventure stuff, Ron Howard's The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), Marcinko's adventures never got the big-screen treatment, but there was a video game (titled, of course, Rogue Warrior), all as Marcinko parlayed the publicity and the image it brought him into a talk radio show and a career as a writer and speaker on business leadership-management-team-building stuff for executives who like to pretend they are conquerors. Yet it also seemed the case that in spite of Marcinko doing so much to put the SEALs at the forefront of public consciousness the figure was, in exactly those years when the celebration of the SEALs shot into the stratosphere, pretty marginal in the whole business, and it does not seem unreasonable to say something about why that was--the more in as it can seem telling indeed of American attitudes toward the armed forces over the period.

As those familiar with Marcinko may recall the title of his autobiography was Rogue Warrior, foregrounding the idea of Marcinko not as the impeccable member of his service but that archetype of the then-still-very-much-alive paramilitary culture, the swaggering individualist, the "conformist nonconformist" who in the course of seeing that his institution's job actually gets done is willing to break the rules when faced with no other choice, infuriating the cowardly higher-ups anxious to keep up political appearances so that they are ever out to get him in so much Anti-Establishment-from-the-right storytelling. Certainly this was the case in Marcinko's account of his conduct of the "Red Cell" operation, through simulated raids showing up the security of Navy facilities again and again in ways that outraged a good deal of the brass--all as, to go by what Marcinko says, they framed him for taking kickbacks from a grenade manufacturer, after which he did time in prison and ultimately left the Navy under a cloud. The Dirty Harry of the U.S. Navy, this was undeniably part of his cachet, and so too the extent to which, in this era in which the right bemoaned the supposed dominance of political correctness, and being politically incorrect seemed to so many a daring act of rebellion, the extent to which the exceedingly un-p.c. Marcinko, if undeniably an officer, did not seem a "gentleman" in any sense of the term, and indeed held that in his line of work it was a good and even necessary thing for a SEAL officer to not be a gentlemen. Reading Marcinko's biography, or his novels, one finds Marcinko reminding them again and again that SEALs and those at the tip of the spear whose work is killing people and breaking things generally live out on the edge, that it is a dark, wild place naturally inhabited by dark, wild people, with Marcinko apparently not joking when he told them that his old mentor Roy Boehm sought candidates for the unit in the brig because that way he knew they had at least a little much-needed "felony and larceny" in them, in contrast with the straight arrows who wouldn't cut it out where they were headed--with all that meant for what he thought about the quashing of aviator careers by the Tailhook scandal, or aspirations to making the armed forces a "female-friendly" environment, at a time in which even the generally stridently right-wing members of the circle of prominent military thriller writers to a man broke ranks with the Pat Buchanans to support the idea of "women in combat" (in the case of Army officer Harold Coyle's Scott Dixon thrillers, even women in ground combat, as he made Nancy Kozak a series character from Trial by Fire forward).

What served a Marcinko well with the audience for paramilitary culture arguably served him less well in a period in which the news and entertainment media lined up behind what many in the government hoped would be a looking-back-at-the-Greatest-Generation-through-rose-tinted-glasses World War II-style promotional effort for the War on Terror. That meant, at least at a surface, official, level, not anti-Establishment right-wingerism of the post-Vietnam Dirty Harry variety, but classic True Blue patriotic pro-Establishment center-right "bipartisanship" and "unity" behind a hard right line that, however Dirty Harry it could be in practice, made blatant Dirty Harryism not just unseemly but injurious to the mood they wanted to foster, and at any rate superfluous because the right-wingers were getting what they wanted, with for the time being everyone behind it (or so marginalized or scared into silence they couldn't give the lie to the image of bipartisan unity). Meanwhile, the more in as feminism was so much on board with the War on Terror, and so much a rationale for what was being done, a Marcinko-like attitude toward gender wasn't helpful. So (at least where what was put before the cameras was concerned) the officer and a gentleman was in, the rogue warrior out. That the particular rogue warrior in question, whether innocent or guilty of the charges made against him, had left under a cloud, with some powerful enemies behind him; that the wars in Southeast Asia, and even the "post-Vietnam" period, so significant in Marcinko's story, were becoming, as one Naval Academy instructor had it, as remote as the Peloponnesian War to the cohort of young people just then preparing for the grave duties of a commission; that Marcinko had already had much more than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame while newer folks like Marcus Luttrell were getting theirs; could not but have further diminished the media's eagerness to get him on their show, and indeed encouraged many to see Marcinko as "yesterday's man," the more in as they were less than sure that he could even be called "yesterday's hero," especially as Marcinko never seems to have tried to "clean up his image" or make concessions to changing social attitudes (Marcinko, apparently, never changing his mind about his old unit being no place for a woman). And even as the early World War II redux vision of the War on Terror (very quickly) unraveled, and the Dirty Harry attitude was often evident not just in the subtext where it had always been present, but very conspicuously in the text, some of this stuck. Thus Marcinko's post-military media figure career continued, but his cachet never again became what it had been in the '90s as today the preference for a sanitized, officer-and-a-gentleman image of even the roughest and toughest military units endures in a country where even those most eager for bigotry and brutality expect that their real-life Navy SEALs should be suitable for presentation as the leads in squeaky-clean Doris Day-ish Hallmark Channel romantic movies, and reacted with great hostility to any suggestion that they were not, such that the darker side of these things comes up only in exposés of the kind investigative journalists like Matthew Cole publish in alternative media outlets like The Intercept. If often giving mere hints of how ugly things really get in that world, the authors of such still get denounced as unpatriotic, left-wing attacks on national heroes, and for the most part seem to have had little effect on the celebratory, post-2011 image of the Navy SEALs and the special forces generally among the American public.

Mass Market Paperback Sales Collapse

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

The New York Times and the Guardian both recently noticed what many, many, many others (myself included) have been remarking for years--the disappearance of the mass market paperback. Evident to anyone who had even semi-regular contact with the inside of a grocery or convenience store this past decade Publisher's Weekly's numbers tell us that where there were sales of 387 million such paperbacks back in 1979 (itself a year of decline), the total figure was down to 131 million in 2004, and just 21 million in 2024. That is to say that sales fell two-thirds in 1979-2004, and by another 85 percent or so in 2004-2024, which works out to a fall of 94 percent for the 1979-2024 period. Keeping in mind that the population of the United States grew about fifty percent in this period the fall is even deeper in per capita than it is in absolute terms--more like 97 percent--such that where paperback sales averaged two a year per person these days there is only 1 paperback sale per 16 people, all as 2025 portended worse (with a mere 15 million sales "through October"). Hence the decision of so many stores to not stock them anymore.

Of course, faced with that number some may wonder just what it means, not least whether this is a matter of people's preferred format for reading books changing, or whether there is simply less reading going on. Especially given the stagnation and erosion of e-book sales (and e-book reader circulation) the latter seems the more plausible case, though I don't think the matter ends there. There is also something to be said of a change in the kind of reading that does go on. The mass market paperback, after all, thrived on the existence of a large audience of people who picked up books quite casually, for pleasure; of people who read quite a lot because they liked to read. The fiction market lived on the basis of that habit, the paperback a crucial source of sales and profits for publishers and their royalty-collecting authors because of their lower cost (for the publisher to print, for the reader to buy) and convenience (for they were a lot easier to carry around and enjoy on a bus or a train or a plane than a hardback). That's gone. Meanwhile in the days of a low-end paperback market, of slim genre series' of books, there was an important opportunity for an apprenticeship for authors looking for an in (not quite as much of an opportunity as in the era of the fiction magazine, but still, not nothing), and indeed many of those we know as writers of more prestigious works, in the thriller line for example (a David Hagberg or Gayle Lynds, for example), got their start and their training in this way, even if they tend not to list those publications in their "Also by" lists. That's gone too.

The result is that it seems to me that it isn't just a matter of people individually and on average reading less, but the disappearance of a kind of reading, and in the process the basis of whole businesses and careers. We are also seeing both symptom and cause of a decline in popular literacy--because if the vast majority of paperbacks were lightweight stuff, they were still practice, practice that let people keep up and even develop the skill in the best way of all, the kind that doesn't feel like work, as it led to some of them becoming more interested in more demanding material. At the same time, as people became less inclined to read for entertainment they found when they actually tried to read for entertainment it wasn't so entertaining, and didn't pick up, or lost the habit, with this translating not to their becoming more skilled and ambitious readers but the opposite as they became ever more dependent on streaming, video games and making nuisances of themselves to other people on social media to pass the time. And all the stupid boosterism in the world about how really things are looking up for books and reading and publishing in this way or that such as we get from certain outlets; and all the whining in the world about THESE KIDZ TODAY! by elders who for all their complaints about the young are themselves no better at this point, just as much a sorry bunch of phone addicts; will not make the hard facts of the situation go away.

Just How Much Do Science Fiction Fans Read the Old Stuff?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Way back when I got caught up in the debate over whether the science fiction genre was dead, dying, declining or otherwise at or approaching its "end," and seeing the more dismissive responses to the suggestion, it seemed to me that some were simply reacting in the usual boosterish industry manner, still others disinclined to see any value in science fiction being its own part of the literary world doing its own thing rather than being part of the mainstream and thus prone to downplay it in their "literature envy"-afflicted way--and still others who were brushing off the discussion simply incapable of understanding what someone discussing a "genre" means by that term, no matter how much other people explain it to them. It is that last category of persons that concerns me at the moment as I consider a likelihood to which I initially paid little attention, namely that those who brushed off the talk of the genre's decline did so partly because they couldn't personally make much comparison between new science fiction and old, certainly in an open-minded way.

Discussing this now it seems only fair to get out of the way the fact that when it comes to science fiction older names have tended to have the most name recognition--Golden Age Big Names like Isaac Asimov, for example, better-known than anybody who came afterward. But those so attentive to science fiction as to have a strong opinion about the question "Is Science Fiction in Decline?" and prone to answer with an emphatic "No!" were apt to be exactly the people who read the new stuff, often a lot of it. It was also the case that they didn't look at the old stuff so much, and then not with an open mind. (Indeed, many is the time they reported having taken a glance at older work like Asimov's and shuddering at prose unbearable to their refined aesthetic sensibilities, as they made much of the social attitudes that seemed to them antediluvian.) The result was that comparing old with new they just couldn't give the old its due--whereas I did, and the fact was indispensable to my contention.

Personally I wouldn't care to stand by either the politics or the literary craftsmanship of E.E. Smith--but in the grand sweep, fecundity of imagination in regard to ye old super-science, and pound-for-pound pulp sci-fi action-adventure thrills that makes space opera what it is I have never encountered the equal of his Lensman saga, which wowed me not as a neophyte, but rather the very seasoned reader of such fiction that I was when I actually got to it. I have no illusions about the originality or accomplishments of John Campbell and his writers. (In Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry I myself stressed Campbell's debts to Wells--and indeed think he can be characterized as having given us a version of the Wellsian approach impoverished by his prejudices and obsessions.) Still, I did and do admire much of what appeared in the pages of the old Astounding under his stewardship, not least what came from the typewriter of the aforementioned Asimov, whose commitment to rationality, not least in regard to artificial intelligence and robotics, remains a touchstone for me (as it is for so many others) because of how the extreme opposite of rationality prevails in our time, the stupidities of the Frankenstein complex still dominating the field--and by way of it, the far from unimportant discourse about artificial intelligence. And if it was not without its own limitations Horace Gold's Galaxy remains for me a high point of the genre's history for its wealth of satirical-sociological science fiction, so many of the novels and short stories which made their first appearances in it--the classics of Alfred Bester, the Pohl and Kornbluth collaboration, the great Robert Sheckley--deservedly became classics. Having all that to compare the new work to enabled me to make a critical judgment of what we have today--while lacking that same basis for comparison has had those who sneer at the merits of older work less able to make any sort of judgment at all, and instead simply heeding the conventional wisdom of an era in which what is conventional wisdom is ever more misleading for anyone at all concerned with reality.

The Artist at War with Official Society

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Surveying the state of crisis America was in, amid economic calamity, war and much else in 2010, and the "entirely inadequate, statistically almost insignificant" artistic response to them David Walsh asked "'Where is the artist today at total war with official society? . . . the artist who says: 'I despise all this, patriotism, nationalism, war, the military, religion, the government, parliament, business, profits?'"

Of course, Walsh's question is rhetorical--Walsh himself having lengthily and well explained the matter, and in the piece in question proceeded to reference much of his explanatory work again. As he remarked, not only is it the case that practical realities incentivize the artist to play it safe (you can't be an artist for long if you can't live from your work), but they are also not the instinctive revolutionaries people seem to think they are--outraging the bourgeoisie with their predilection for "Bohemian" living, "edgy" creations and so forth, but often little interested in or conventional or even reactionary on the great questions of the day (a Nietzsche far more attractive to them than a Marx, so to speak). When they become otherwise they are often reacting rather than anticipating, following rather than leading, a point Walsh himself makes again in his recent book Art and the Influence of Revolution. And as Walsh himself constantly points out this has been a particularly lousy time for an artist to try and "be a rebel," the more in as the state of our social and political life at the supposed "end of history" has not exactly been great inspiration to those artists potentially capable of making us see reality in a more critical way.

Yet, while all this most certainly bears repeating because it is not only true, but criminally underappreciated, my real interest is in another side of the matter, what the state of feeling oneself at war, really feeling that way, means for how and what an artist produces. And particularly of what Ilya Ehrenburg--who knew a little something about the interaction of war and the artistic sensibility--had to say about the matter, particularly that war is conducive only to poetry and "reportage." To, I suppose Sinclair would say, the "art of beauty" rather than the "art of power," where what the artist has to say counts for more than how they say it, content taking priority over form, with this again having significant political consequences. As Sinclair noted in the same study of art, the "art of beauty" which is first and foremost about form and the beautification of life is the art of the established and comfortable elite content with things as they are and intent on keeping them as they are, and thus the specialty of the "ruling-class artists"; the "art of power" that is above all about the Message is the art of those challenging things as they are, the "hero artists"; with the former exalted and the latter scorned by the professional tastemakers, the kept critics of the ruling elite who gatekeep culture. Certainly in our time they have inclined to the view that form is everything and content nothing, and the art of power not really art at all, as indeed they reserve special scorn for "reportage"--actually dismissing plain realist fiction more concerned with content than form with the word "journalism." (Those desirous of specific example may consult that classic, art of beauty-championing, art of power-scorning essay "Technique as Discovery" by Mark Schorer, whose career highlights include inflicting severe damage on the reputation of H.G. Wells with his assault on Wells' most acclaimed realist work in that very essay, and with his "cultural Cold War" hatchet job of a biography wrecking the standing of American Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis in a way from which it has never recovered.)

The case of that novelist Walsh esteems as America's greatest, Theodore Dreiser, would seem exemplary. Here was a writer who could and did feel himself at war with official society. He didn't want to be at war with official society, because it isn't very pleasant to be at war with official society--official society makes damned sure of that--the more in as one feels themselves fighting alone or nearly so, and has very little to fall back on in the face of official society's hostility. (How Dreiser would have preferred to be Frank Cowperwood rather than Forbes Gurney!) But at war he found himself, and fight that war he did, producing, above all in the novel on which his reputation ultimately stands, An American Tragedy, a novel of extraordinary power, one that for all its prejudices the Modern Library still had to recognize with a place on its list of the 100 Best Novels published in the English language in the twentieth century (#16, as it happened), but nonetheless despised during his lifetime and ever after by the gatekeepers as a writer of mere "journalism." I, for one, would say that American and world literature are better off for his "journalism," the gatekeepers be damned. But to recognize that what the gatekeepers may sneer at as "journalism" may well be Great Literature is not to deny the constraints under which the novelist at war toils.

The Right to be an Introvert

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

It may sound strange that anyone speaks of the right to be an introvert. The matter of such rights simply does not come up, not only as a political cause but even a more abstract moral claim, and indeed thinking about the matter I suppose that most will see little point in discussing the matter as no one is questioning or interfering with anyone's right to be an introvert.

But is that really the case? Consider what is known of the "biology" of introversion. In introverts' nervous systems the "rest and digest" response prevails over the "fight or flight" response (the acetylcholine-driven "parasympathetic" over the "sympathetic" nervous system). Their brains also maintain a higher "baseline" of alertness and readiness than tends to be the case with those who are more extraverted (certainly going by the level of activity in their (thicker, bigger) prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, deep reflection, and situating oneself in time and space, and their more active amygdalas--memory, decision and emotional response-processing nerve centers); they process stimuli through longer, more circuitous neural pathways (a differing "functional connectivity" in which "introspective cognitive pathways" and "internal processing" are more prominent); and they reach reward satisfaction at a lower threshold (more sensitive to dopamine, less of it will get them to a state of satisfaction). This combination of nervous system orientation, elevated baseline alertness and readiness, and differences in stimuli processing pathways and reward response, has practical consequences, making introverts prone to be more sensitive to subtle details, more analytical and deep-thinking, and--apparently--more inclined to use these capacities (because their nervous systems, and their baseline of alertness and readiness, orient them to "conserving their energy," and they can find satisfaction in solitary activity, and activity others conventionally find "dull," such as calm reflection or study). However, these same neurological traits often leave them less quick to react and more susceptible to being overwhelmed, while experiencing others' demands and impositions as more painful, and interpersonal confrontation as more stressful and exhausting (because they are more sensitive to demands and imposition and confrontation, because they have fewer spare "resources" with which to meet them, because they process so much more internally in a way that leaves them more prone to ruminate and suffer in other ways when people mistreat them).

All of this has a great many practical implications for their interaction with their environment--particularly where introversion is so pronounced as to really make a difference in one's daily life. Being in an environment where authority is present and overbearing, where others set rules and enforce routines with which they must comply, where status competition is constant, where one is surrounded by people behaving obnoxiously toward each other and oneself--few find much pleasure in all that, but the introvert suffers more than others because of their sensitivity to that obnoxiousness, and their internalization of what they experience. Given an order they are less likely to "snap to it"--because of how stimuli make their way up their neural pathways--and of course those expecting people to "snap to it" do not react graciously. Given an order to which they are resistant by an authority figure, where others would simply grumble the introvert may feel that they are under attack--and in following the order feel themselves capitulating before an attack, with all the wrenching pain of surrender. Social rituals others don't think twice about ("Let's start by having everyone stand up and tell us their name and say something about themselves to the rest of the class") may be pure torture for them. And so on and so forth, all as after being subject to these things they have a need for time-consuming recovery, and face consequences if they don't get it. They do rather better in conditions of solitude, where they can exercise some control over the stimuli surrounding them, and direct their own action.

But which set of conditions is one more likely to face in school, in the workplace? Which set of conditions does society demand its members accommodate themselves to? We are much more likely to be trained for the former, because we are much more likely to be offered the former, than the latter--solitude and self-direction something the privileged are able to get if they want it, all as everyone else has to get on without it, all as there is certainly no provision to either direct introverts to those all too few places where they might be happier and more productive, or go any way toward accommodating them in the circumstances where they find themselves. The square peg, especially where fending for themselves, is simply required to fit themselves into the round hole as best they can, the matter as simple as that--because society doesn't recognize the introvert as having the slightest claim on its consideration whatsoever. Indeed, the introvert is likely to get treated worse than others--because they fit in less easily, have less support from others, are less prone to assert themselves and generally not be the useful tool that those in charge demand, making them more prone to be bullied by peers, bullied by authority figures. Indeed, if entirely capable of study, hard work, accomplishment (often, exceptionally so) the circumstances within which they are obliged to work are far from what would be ideal for letting them realize their potentials, while they incline less than others to the competition and confrontation forced upon everyone by the terms of the vulgar chase after "success." Naturally their gifts and their efforts get them less than their due.

Given all this it does in the end seem to me that there is something to be said of the rights of introverts--that so far as society is concerned, they don't have the right to be what they are--and that one may reasonably see this as a significant societal failing. What might actually be done to redress that failing may be another matter, but the point remains that there is a failing here, no matter what the idiots already assuming that particular jaw-jutting, stony-faced expression to go along with the "Don't care" shrug with which they reflexively react to any mention of society's imperfection think of the matter as if they have a deep personal investment in immediately shutting down anything of the kind, unpaid policers of thought and speech who are much more often than not enabling their own oppression. Naturally the thoughts of such, if one chooses to dignify the discharges within the gray matter inside their skulls with such a term as "thought," mean infinitely less to me than mine do to them.

Thomas Dixon and the Superhero Tradition

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

When I started looking at what I have since called the paramilitary action-adventure genre I was struck by its novelty in historical terms, certainly as long-running writer on the foundational Executioner series Michael Newton described it in the book that first got me thinking about the matter, How to Write Action/Adventure Novels (1989). Why, I wondered, did Newton describe the genre as having appeared in the 1960s (indeed at their very end, in Don Pendleton's 1969 War Against the Mafia) and not before? After all, adventure--and at least in a broad sense, action-adventure--stories are as old as storytelling itself, aren't they?

If Newton conveyed a sense of the genre's history he didn't bother much with its roots, but I later concluded that the claim for the genre's novelty was a strong one after all, resting on its tales being set not in the historical past or some exotic, remote, location but in the here and now in the very center of our civilized, urbanized world, in which there were those prepared to imagine that due to the failure of constituted authority to defend the order of things self-selected heroes had no choice but to do so in its place. A product of the social stresses of the long twentieth century this sort of genre really came together in that period, but was not without antecedents--one of which was Thomas Dixon's romanticized portrait of the Ku Klux Klan in the era of Reconstruction in his epic of post-Civil War North Carolina The Leopard's Spots (1902), and subsequent novels that focused more fully on the Klan's activity, starting with far and away the most significant of them, The Clansman (1905)--the book that inspired the milestone of cinematic history that was D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), and through it, the rebirth of the formerly Southern Klan as the nationwide "Second," Klan which was to wax so powerful in the reactionary, xenophobic 1920s.

All of this, of course, aligns with the more socially critical view of the genre as a right-wing celebration of vigilantism, and the identification of fictional angry men with guns as a hysterical middle class person's fantasy of latterday Freikorps slaughtering rebellious minorities, out-of-control youth and radical leftists in the streets. Still, if the connection with paramilitaries was what was most on my mind as I delved into that literary current I have since found myself thinking more about Dixon's Klansmen as having been precursors of another popular adventure genre--that of the superhero who conceals their everyday identity behind a visually distinctive costume, their real name behind a code name, as they act to uphold order where Authority has failed through physical action, which the Klan most certainly do in Dixon's depiction of them. Of course, the general expectation is that alongside the voluntary character of this action, the secret identity, the costume, the protagonist has powers beyond the ordinary--"super" powers. Dixon can at times seem to think that mere Southern-ness is itself a super power (bringing with it a superhero-like "genius for command . . . deep sense of duty and honour . . . deathless love of home . . . supreme constancy and sense of civic unity"), but as it happens he even offered what would be more broadly recognizable as superhero capacities in The Clansman by way of that important member of the organization Ben Cameron, who has, via the European education he had in preparation for his successful career as a physician, a scientific prowess extending to optography, and mesmeric abilities he uses in the course of the novel to subdue an enemy and later force a confession from him critical to the advancement of the plot. Indeed, along with the fact that Cameron is in the tale a wealthy landowner and "pillar of the community" in his normal, everyday life, he can seem like the Batman of the Reconstruction-era South.

Even acknowledging that I think it would be a mistake to on this basis alone try and draw a line running straight from the Klan to DC Comics (as some have indeed done). Still, it is fair to say that if the Klan were criminals, terrorists and villains in the eyes of the mainstream today Thomas Dixon made of them figures who can be described as superheroes as we know them. Accordingly, however antipathetic to the politics of a figure like Dixon one may be (and affectionate toward the superhero genre one may be), those concerned for the history of the form should acknowledge the extent to which Dixon's widely and highly influential portrayal of the Klan corresponds to the concept of the superhero, reflects an outlook that finds such figures particularly appealing (the ultra-individualism, elitism and vigilantism on behalf of the status quo of the superhero far better suit the right than the left), and if it did not inspire in the way some suggest still may have played a part in preparing the way for the superheroic figures of later fiction to become such popular, resonant figures--even where these would have a very different politics from the avowedly reactionary and racist Dixon.

Remembering '90s-Era American Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

When we look at '80s nostalgia it seems that the things of childhood loom large here--not least, certain cartoons of the Saturday morning/weekday afternoon type, as the legacy of G.I. Joe, He-Man, the Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shows. By contrast nothing I know of from the '90s has quite that cachet.

In fairness the reasons for the change have been talked about quite a bit. There is the way that, exceptional in an age of telecommunications deregulation, the regulatory climate became less hospitable to the basis for those '80s-era hits, the making of cartoons that were basically half-hour commercials for toys and candy, Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour-style. There is the broader decline of the Saturday morning/weekday afternoon time slots associated with that fare--as the proliferation of home video and cable offered more viewing options in different hours, and increasingly accessible, immersive, absorbing video games competed with cartoons for children's attention. And there was the broader fragmentation of popular culture in the digital age that, if a far cry from what it has become in 2025, was already clearly underway in 1995 as the numbers of channels rose, and the Internet began to enter the lives of the broader public.

Still, the fact that it was appearing in a market less conducive to hits of the kind so prominent in the '80s does not change the fact that it was an interesting time for American animation, not just including the revival of animation as a prime time staple intended to entertain more mature viewers (this the decade of The Simpsons, The Critic, Family Guy--as well as darker stuff like Aeon Flux), but even the stuff of the kids' time slots. Both pressed and inspired by the successes of Japanese animation not just globally but in the American market itself (where, for example, Beast King GoLion was a hit as Voltron), this saw animators get more ambitious. The results were not always spectacular, with part of the legacy of '90s animation what were for many visually and narratively disappointing reworkings of shows like the post-movie continuation of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero or The New Adventures of He-Man (attitudes toward which have not warmed with the passing of the years, such that for fans the '80s versions remain the principle objects of interest and nostalgia). But along with the clinkers there were shows that won enthusiastic followings, from Batman: The Animated Series (something of a watershed for the American market, such that it even scored a brief shot at prime time on the FOX network), to the FOX Kids take on the X-Men, to the space opera Exo Squad, to Phantom 2040--the last of which, if somewhat more obscure than the others, also exemplifies just how different the material of the '90s could be from that of the '80s. Created by Batman: The Animated Series veterans Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, with character designs by Aeon Flux's Peter Chung, and Big Name voice talent supplied by Scott Valentine, Leah Remini, Margot Kidder, Ron Perlman, Richard Lynch and Mark Hamill, the series took Lee Falk's classic comic strip character The Phantom, and imagining the young man who is the twenty-fourth in the line started by the original Phantom taking up the hero's mantle in a cyberpunk version of the then-distant-seeming year of 2040 fighting to save a world on the verge of ecological collapse from the villainy of the dynasts of the world-straddling Maximum Inc.. A perhaps unlikely-seeming blend, it worked, all as, in spite of the constraints of children's television, the arcs of not just an overarching story but subplots inside it (including smaller mysteries that connect back to the bigger one), the world-building (we got city-states, cyberspace, posthumanism--the whole cyberpunk package, developed in detail), the characterizations (as with the tragedy and contradictions of the life of Hubert Graft, now reduced to an unwilling henchman of those he once fought), making for a show rather far removed from the '80s-era series' with their plots typically wrapped up in a single episode, simplistic premises, one-dimensional characters, and shallow treatment of their themes (with the ecology-mindedness so fashionable in '90s-era cartoons, when Captain Planet was on the air and even the Joes assigned Flint to a special environmental crime-fighting unit, in this case going beyond a mere gesture toward "education" in its vision of the "Maximum Era"). All the same, if fans, critics and historians of the form have given credit where credit was due, it did mean that success was more of the cult than the major breakout type, with the endurance of a sufficient fan base for the '90s-era X-Men series to interest Disney Plus in a belated continuation an exception rather than the rule.

Responses to Election's Tracy Flick: A Mertonian View

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

On the twentieth anniversary of the release of the film Election New York Times' film reviewer A.O. Scott looked back at the movie, concentrating on the matter of public perceptions of Tracy Flick, and argued that societal misogyny has viewers of the film falsely seeing Flick as the villain of the piece.

This seemed to me to beg the question of whether or not so many people really do see this film as one with a "villain" as such in this characteristically '90s piece of Are-you-being-ironic-man-I-don't-even-know-anymore--and whether they really take Flick for that figure. (After all, as Scott points out himself, here is Jim McAllister trying to sabotage a high school student by stealing a student council election, making him the obvious "villain" (complete with humiliating comeuppance by film's end), in contrast with Flick, a young person whose sole lapse in an otherwise generally respectable life was, amid the pressure created by that sabotage (even if she was admittedly not aware of exactly what was being done to her, by who) tearing down some campaign materials and failing to prevent another student happily taking the blame for it for the sake of her own agenda.

More importantly, by making the issue gender in the unilluminating fashion characteristic not just of his reviews but the whole mentality of the Times and the stratum to which it panders, Scott seemed to me to miss what was really interesting about Flick, a point on which it is useful to reference Robert Merton's theory of anomic behavior. As Professor Merton had it society sets goals for its members, and specifies approved means for achieving them. Those who accept society's prescribed goal and means are "conformists." Those who accept the goal but not the means are "innovators." Those who don't believe in the goal but go through the motions--which requires them to at least be respectful of the means--are "ritualists." Those who want nothing to do with society's game, and pull away, are "retreatists." And those who want to change society and its prescriptions are "rebels."

In America the goal is "getting ahead"--advancing oneself economically on an individual basis. There are approved and disapproved means for doing so. Conventionally "stay in school," "work hard," "get a good job" is the approved means (while we also hear much of "entrepreneurship"). Where acceptance of the approved goal but not the prescribed means is concerned we are likely to talk of "crime," though one may also see other paths as innovation--like forgoing the thankless day job as one aspires to become a celebrity. The classic ritualist is the employee who knows that playing by the rules doesn't get you ahead but puts in their hours and does the job until they can retire. "Retreatist" is a term that well-describes those we call "hikikomori." And the rebels are those who want a society that gives its members genuine choice about how to live their lives, in the sense of an alternative to sacrificing all for the Rat Race that is really what economic individualism comes down to where day-to-day living is concerned.

Tracy Flick is, of course, a conformist, indeed an ultra-conformist, raised by a mother who writes Elizabeth Dole (?!) for advice about how her daughter can be "successful," and frankly it is this and not her personal lapse, or her gender, or anything else, that rubs people the wrong way. Much more than is admitted in this society where economic individualism is the supreme principle, the highest value, a great many people are sick to the back teeth of the whole thing, the brutality and ugliness of it, the dishonesty and manipulation and exploitativeness of it. In a society where people have more scope to question the ethic of economic individualism, to discuss it and understand it and protest it, this dislike can be articulate--but this isn't one of those societies (indeed, it is not for nothing that Americans call such individualism "pursuit of the American Dream"), any such questioning utterly anathematized as Authority barrages us with its propaganda for Aspiration, and Opportunity, and Hard Work, and Success, nonstop, intolerably for those who believe consciously or unconsciously that it is all a cruel, life-destroying fraud for the perpetration of an unjust, ruinous inequality whose sole purpose is sustaining a system of privilege that is killing the planet and everything on it. Quite naturally they can't stand those who really do seem to believe in the whole thing, making things harder for everyone else in many, many ways--and the all-in-on-getting-ahead Flick draws their ire accordingly, just as, disproving the nonsense that this is an issue of reactionary attitudes on gender, the more in as those who can't stand Tracy Flick love the equally female (and LGBTQ+!) Tammy Metzler for the spirit of rebellion she displays when she calls out the nonsense of student council elections in the face of disapproving Authority.

The Oddity of "Looksmaxxing"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000
The term "looksmaxxing" recently entered into the popular lexicon, apparently by way of the "manosphere." Apparently it refers to members of this culture's efforts to "look their best" in order to improve their chances with women.

This is hardly a new concept, such that it may appear unworthy of a new coinage. Yet those who speak of it relate it to a fairly specific conception of going about this rooted in the especially brutal, bleak take on men's lot that it is common to identify as the conventional wisdom of the manosphere, and the extremes of behavior it produces--like, we are told, smashing themselves in the face with a hammer as a do-it-yourself form of plastic surgery for the cash-strapped man intent on a Derek Zoolander "Blue Steel"-type look.

Once again it is incumbent upon me to say that I suspect the influence of the manosphere is greatly overrated by the news media, and that its intensive attention to it is a diversion from other, more consequential matters, as was the case in the "analysis" of the presidential election of 2024--the quality of which thinking on the part of the Democratic Party's house (pseudo)intellectuals and the mainstream media was frankly equivalent to what comes out of that part of the body referred to by the first four letters of that word, "analysis." For the millionth time: if the exit polls had young men going for Trump the far stronger evidence of the Validated Voter Tables (see them for yourself) had males 18-29 voting for Kamala Harris over Trump by a margin of 51-46 percent, completely mooting the claim that some huge lead with this demographic singlehandedly gave him the election, let alone did so because he sat down with the guy who played a handyman on Newsradio, or had the endorsement of that ex-Disney sitcom star who thought he would show us what a tough, brute man he is with the lamest (talk about cheat codes!) live-action recreation of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out ever. But the talking heads-with-no-brains-in-them, for which elementary school mathematics are simply too much to handle, continues to propound its narrative, because it is not just stupid, but terrified of acknowledging the neoliberal-neoconservative-centrist Democratic Party's decade-on-decade giving the middle finger to working people and their desires for prosperity, peace and justice as they urged them "Hold your nose and vote" until millions just couldn't take it anymore.

Still, there is something to be said about the disgusting and depressing phenomenon on which they are reporting all the same, and not least how bizarre it all is. After all, consider what it entails, an extreme enjoinment to on males to "make themselves pretty" on the part of what is supposed to be the ultra-macho, ultra-traditionalist-and- reactionary-on-gender manosphere. After all, the traditionalist view of what made a man successful with women may never have discounted looks, but always emphasized power, money, status as the ticket. Enough power, money, status and a man has his pick of women, even when he is ugly, old, etc., the combination of "power and beauty" the male and female contributions, respectively, and the male gaze what the woman indulges rather than the other way around, in that way epitomized by Howard Marshall in the decrepitude of his extreme old age marrying Anna Nicole Smith. Manosphere looksmaxxing can seem to fly right in the face of that, its exhorting men to regard themselves as sex objects for the female gaze in a profound reversal of roles as men behave in a way that by traditional standards would seem feminine, feminizing, effete, emasculating, castrating (the more in as, to go by a Susan Bordo, the female gaze of recent times is in significant part borrowed from a male gaze, and not the heterosexual one). That the manosphere should be pushing such courses seems all the more dissonant because of the manosphere's reputed high regard for evolutionary biology and its conceptions of the high-status "alpha male" as the winner of the mating game; the rhetoric of a "crisis of masculinity" supposed to be insistent upon ultra-traditionalism as a corrective; and the view that the changes in the relations between men and women have gone far past being more equitable to simply being onerously, degradingly, exploitative of the man; all as it is also the case that the prospect of moving up power-money-status-wise is as much a part of the self-help-flogging manosphere, where, for example, the prospect of crypto as their way to the "something for nothing" of the American Dream is very, very big indeed.

Why then do the hucksters of the manosphere not focus on that? I suspect there are two reasons. One is that the hawking of get-rich schemes, and even get-rich-quick schemes, depend on their audience not being too critically-minded--in a flexibility of expectations, or less generously, haziness of mind, about how much richer they will get, how fast, to gain and hold their credulity. By contrast a frustrated young man anxious for "success" with women is less susceptible to such manipulation. Biology itself makes him less patient, a man in a hurry, for whom talk is very cheap indeed, enough so as to make even the stupidest of them more critically-minded than the self-help hucksters would find good for business. The result is that there is a good deal of room for seemingly quicker, surer, roads than the grow-rich scam of the aspirationalist (which of course they exploit for a profit, selling other people grow-rich scams their own grow-rich scam, which seems to be working pretty well for some of them).

The other reason is what it would mean for the right-wing manosphere to direct their attention to the power-money-status aspect of male "success with women." For them the issue is not sensitivity to feminist hostility to discussing such facts of life (which is enormous, and so inhibiting for others), but rather their sensitivity to what it means for how a highly unequal social order looks, few things as quick to drive home the inequities of a class system as the eagerness for success in this area of life, with this easily turning into hostility toward those inequities. That, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise, the son of the richest man gets the prettiest girl, is much less likely to make young men "work harder" the way conformist simpletons imagine (even those buying into the claptrap about aspiration know it'll be a long time before it makes a difference in their lives) than to make them furious that they live under such a system, and rather than ultra-conformist anti-capitalist the way Fitzgerald and so many of his peers in that era of American literature were. The overlords of the manosphere avoid encouraging that at all cost--and so rather than admit what even the stupidest of males has likely figured out on some level no later than the age of fifteen, they sell them looksmaxxing, as they decide to only worry later about what might happen when they catch on to how they have been bamboozled.

Stendhal and the Youth-Spoiling Attack of Unhappiness

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000
In his classic The Red and the Black Stendhal, writing of the inner turmoil of his anti-hero Julian Sorel, remarked how "engrossed in the difficulty of deciding on a calling" he suffered what goes with it, "that great attack of unhappiness which comes at the end of childhood and spoils the first years of youth in those who are" not saved from that particular misery by being rich. It is rare we see anyone so forthright about the matter, not least because those of conventional views prefer to think this is not the case--that any "normal," properly brought-up, "well-adjusted" young person does not feel that way, is instead wholeheartedly eager-beaver to throw themselves headfirst into the Rat Race the way "society" demands, and that anyone who feels the least bit differently has something wrong with them, something shameful. Indeed, Theodore Dreiser, who wrote with exceptional frankness about his experience of that youth-spoiling unhappiness in his memoir A Book About Myself, expressed again and again his sense that feeling this way he thought there was something wrong with him for doing so.

Yet such feeling is probably the most natural thing in the world. After all, here is a vast system of which a young person knows little into which society demands that they not just fit themselves but do so enthusiastically--all as the little they know of the matter is likely to include something of how brutal and brutalizing, how alienating and even mutilating, this all is. A desire to throw themselves headfirst into such a situation is what is unnatural, with, contrary to how the conventional would like to equate intelligence with conformism, and the most intelligent with ultra-conformist overachievement, the intelligent may be especially likely to shrink from the demand, because they have a better idea of what is in store for them, and the faculties for questioning the world around them. This probably goes double for those who combine intelligence with a comparative lack of privilege. The youth from the working class home may well become the ultra-conforming scholarship student the proponent of aspirationalism smarmily holds up as a "success" story with which to "inspire" their inferiors and shame dissenters. However, because of how they have already taken some of life's hard knocks with all the cynicism this teaches, because the path is so narrow and self-denying and unappealing and hard to stay on and easy to get off of the more in as it never simply comes down to the talent and hard work their elders are always talking up, because people will always be there to "remind them where they came from" and tell them to go back there (the cold shoulder what they are more likely to get than the helping hand when they need it), what promise they ever showed may be far more likely to conduce to the trampling of their hopes. Likewise the independent, the introverted, the creative have a tougher time accommodating themselves to the demands than those who are not--especially as such traits will have likely subjected the possessor to a tough time in school, and even at home, long before they have got into a position where they make any really serious career choices. And of course, we live in a time in which the demands are getting more exacting, all as the rewards get smaller and more remote and more uncertain as, in a time in which college degrees can seem like another asset bubble and many respond by going for the safest-seeming of the assets in that class in the form of paper issued by the most "respected" institutions, the competition is ever more intense, the bill and its associated debt burden mounting, the odds that the gamble on a high-paying job waiting for them pay off decline, and the job itself seems another miserable trial as entry-level positions in the more prestigious professions and firms subject them to gratuitously stupid brutality to prove their commitment to them, because they can--all as at any level short of the absolute top people who actually work for money watch the gap between their income and the cost of living widen from year to year. This, too, dampens whatever enthusiasm there may be for living up to society's demand--and to all evidences is dampening it to a greater degree than before.

Indeed, we see evidences that young people are increasingly resisting the demand, from the chatter about a "Gen Z stare" to how Americans who do not watch anime have learned the term "hikikomori," and that the phenomenon to which the term refers is not some uniquely Japanese exoticism, but also Made In The U.S.A. (the way so many things aren't, anymore). But so far as I can tell this has made the excoriation of those who fail to conform more intense, rather than led to any greater frankness about the matter--leaving the national discussion about this matter as shallow and vacuous as . . . well, the national discussion about every other thing there has been a national discussion about within living memory.

Artists as Followers Rather Than Leaders, and the Stagnation of Science Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Back in 2007 I wrote an essay about the long-standing debate over whether science fiction had pretty much run its course as a genre. Thinking of genres as currents within the larger world of an artistic medium and the culture more broadly, which tend to follow observable life cycles; defining the science fiction genre not in the broad way of fiction with speculative elements (which in a sense has always been around, and is not going away) but a specific Anglosphere and especially American genre that came into its own in the magazines of the 1920s and has since had its own concerns, discourse, classics, traditions, its own fandom and sector of the publishing world and section of bookstores which have had a distinct history (what we speak of when we refer to Hugo Gernsback and the "Golden Age" and the "New Wave" and so on); and identifying that genre with the presence of fundamental innovation in ideas and their execution, as against endless reiterations of the same old thing, after which a genre is not so much living as a "zombie"; I concluded that there was reason to think science fiction was doing so by the late twentieth century (that, as Brian Aldiss, writing with David Wingrove in Trillion Year Spree suggested, the genre was already looking and feeling its age by the '80s), and certainly 2007.

Nothing I have seen since has seemed to me grounds to question that conclusion. Still, I have had plenty of occasion to think about why that is, considering some new ideas--and revisiting old ones about it. Certainly the idea that genres do live out a life cycle seems to me more persuasive all the time. Yet there were more contingent factors that influenced its course, just as in the life of a living creature, with one that mattered greatly the state of society broadly, with stagnation here translating to stagnation in the arts--and in science fiction as part of that. If science fiction was lacking in Big Ideas, well, so was a society where it had become plausible for a figure like John Horgan to raise the question of "the end of science," where the hype about technological progress far outpaced the reality, where people believed they were at "the end of history" and that scarcely any other sort of modernity could be imagined. Of course, one may have hoped that science fiction would offer a salutary challenge to all that--and to their credit some science fiction writers did (a Ken MacLeod, certainly, had no truck with the end-of-history propaganda, and indeed defied it from The Star Fraction forward)--but on the whole, as many an observer has noted, artists tend to be impressionistic creatures, following rather than leading, and there was little in the situation to impress or lead them in the relevant ways.

Stargate: SG-1 and Made-for-Cable in An Earlier Age

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

In line with the unhinged exaltation of made-for-premium cable production, recollection of its history seems to run along the lines of "In the beginning, there was The Sopranos . . ." And as one might guess of recollections amid unhinged exaltation, this misses a lot. Premium cable was quite a different place before 1999. Some of it would seem to have been ashamedly swept under the rug since--as HBO has done with its sex-themed content (the documentaries that ran after 11 P.M. on that channel, the softcore shows that caused some to jokingly refer to Cinemax as Skinemax). Other such material has been more enduring even as cable moved on, as with Showtime's not insignificant contribution to the '90s "golden age" of science fiction teleivison. After all, it was here that we got the revival of The Outer Limits, the tie-ins to big-screen hits Stargate and Total Recall that were Stargate: SG-1 and Total Recall: 2070, and the miniseries Tales From a Parallel Universe, out of which emerged Lexx.

Some of this fare is actually consistent with, if nothing else, premium cable's more daring and edgy image. The critics may not have loved it, and so far as I can tell there has been no revaluation of the show in the quarter-century since it went off the air, but Tales From a Parallel Universe/Lexx was certainly both (with a good deal more on its mind, I would add, than much of what gets talked up to the skies). By contrast Stargate: SG-1 was relatively safe in its approach, most obviously in the showrunners' taking a page out of the then-still reigning Star Trek's book in turning the movie into a series, with "dialing out" taking the place of warp drive. The safe approach extended to the more sensationalistic content. Thus was there action a-plenty, but the violence not generally needing to be edited down for over-the-air television. Meanwhile the showrunners also eschewed sex for the most part. (Indeed, such an element as Bobbie Phillips' dance in "Brief Candle" was unseen again, Vanessa Angel's turn as Anise a rarity, and many a fan of the show likely pleasantly surprised at the hints of what they were missing when they saw the pictures from Amanda Tapping's shoot for Femme Fatale Magazine.) In fact, basic cable channel Syfy's Stargate spin-off Stargate: Universe leaned much more heavily on sex than its premium cable predecessor--on sexual tension, sexual relationships, and plain and simple sexiness--for its dramatic and visual interest (and caught some flak for it).

That tameness may seem surprising, but it was by no means accidental. If the series aired on Showtime the show's maker MGM apparently wanted a show that it could easily syndicate, and got it, episodes soon on over-the-air TV as well, usually without the necessity of any censorship, while when Showtime ceased to give the show a home after season five the series moved to the Syfy Channel without a hitch. By contrast the situation was very different a few years later, as J. Michael Straczynski attested when describing his time producing and writing the series Jeremiah for the same MGM-Showtime team-up. MGM still wanted a show it could syndicate easily and profitably the way it had Stargate, while Showtime, displaying "HBO envy" in that era when The Sopranos was new, wanted something thoroughly R-rated, between which promoters of irreconcilable visions Straczynski was caught in the middle, making for what he characterized as the worst experience of his life in TV production (which is saying something after the truly cowardly--and disgusting--way that the management of TNT treated him while he was making the Babylon 5 sequel Crusade). At any rate Showtime's interest in science fiction of any kind was fading fast, and Jeremiah didn't make it past season two, dooming the syndication hopes regardless of what kind of content the show had, as the network went on beating its own path, all as even the original Stargate's run chugged along for several seasons, even before taking into account the spin-offs and the reruns. It is all a reminder that in those days TV was a smaller world, the economics of cable TV more constrained, syndication and its revenue stream mattered a lot, and the situation brought with it different imperatives and different results, such that there was much more to the scene than the "Sopranos Studies" to which those who thought Tony Soprano would replace George Washington on the dollar reduce the matter.

The Waning of the Golden Age: Memories of The Simpsons

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000
Enjoying The Simpsons in its golden age, and just how much hilarity its writers were able to pack into a single episode on so many occasions, it seems that the show had the advantage of comparative freshness in being the first animated sitcom in American prime time in decades, and its establishing a free-wheeling spirit early on (in contrast with, for example, a more grounded show like its contemporary King of the Hill). The result was that it had a relative freedom from not just budgetary constraints (if they could draw it, they could do it), but the expectations of plausibility, consistency, continuity. Thus did we constantly get what would in a live-action version have required "set pieces" unrealizable even in a big-budget movie, never mind a half-hour show (like Homer's attempt to jump across a canyon on a skateboard, and its results), elaborate musical numbers, complete freedom with regard to locations as the Simpsons and other characters adventured all over the country and the world, and of course, a vast cast of recurring characters beyond the ability of any live-action show's budget to procure. Thus was it also the case that, at least up to a point, particular characters could become more rather than less entertaining even as they became caricatures of their earlier selves (Homer Simpson's getting "dumber every season" part of what made the golden age what it was), and the show in turn make a joke of its own excesses (as when Moe Syzslak reflected on how his brief moment as a handsome soap opera star came to an end). Frankly it also enabled the show's makers to get away with a great many artistic sins. (Consider such a matter as the characterization of Montgomery Burns. Ordinarily written as plain Evil, when John Swartzwelder was writing, the show treated Burns much more favorably. The result of these contrasting efforts was not to make Burns a more realistic, complex, interesting figure, but plain and simple inconsistency that few seemed even to notice, let alone think about, because the show so plainly disregards consistency, all as these were years in which everyone was encouraged to take everything "ironically.")

Yet even with all this freedom, which could seem to make the show jump-the-sharkproof, the endeavor had its limits. The writers, perhaps unavoidably, repeated themselves in ways that left the audience thinking to itself "Been there, done that"--as with the telling of the story of Homer and Marge's early days. Many a character became increasingly one-note--as did a Lisa Simpson or Ned Flanders (today a byword for this development). Others changed for the worse, as did a Homer who could not really get any dumber and instead just got increasingly nihilistic, such that already in just the tenth season, after Homer accidentally wrecked Reverend Lovejoy's church with a model rocket a horrified Marge told him "This is the worst thing you've ever done!" and Homer answered that "You've said that so many times it's lost all meaning." The line got laughs--but all the same, when you get to that point, where is there left to go with Homer's antics? (Especially when one remembers that even if many of us came to the show for laughs rather than sentimentality--and were just fine with no hugging, no learning, as the folks at Seinfeld had it--the laughs Homer got at his funniest did commonly derive from a profoundly stupid and irresponsible man also being a loving father who was within his very limited capacity trying to do right by his family, which was of course what got him on the aforementioned skateboard in the first place.) Meanwhile the new additions to the cast just didn't have the zip of the old, even the supporting ones, certainly not to the point of compensating for what was no longer working. (Pathetic "Old Gil" seems symbolic of the eagerness, and failure, to actually win people over.) Just about everything in the show bespoke exhaustion as what was new at the start of the 1990s--prime-time animated comedy, which had been the more striking for an American audience that never got over the idea that animated fare is for children and so amused or scandalized when such material is not for children--became commonplace, and the competition the product of an EXTREME! era in which there was a widespread sense of a culture watching itself have a nervous breakdown. Thus along with the danger of staleness there was the danger of being left behind by fashion, as where the show once started a moral panic by having a cartoon fourth-grader swear mildly in prime time now it was the cartoon fourth-graders of South Park who were pushing the envelope with far, far worse. As is so often the case with once ground-breaking series' that go on too long, stopped leading as it increasingly followed the trends others set. Thus the comedy got "edgier," and meaner--but not better. Quite the contrary the show looked increasingly desperate going this route (as, indeed, the more edginess-reliant South Park did even earlier in its run). Meanwhile it didn't help that the show wasn't even trying anymore to do some of those things the audience loved most about it (the day of its musical numbers ended, a casualty we were told of how the network's unhinged cramming of more and more commercials into each half hour were depriving the episodes' scripts of the "room to breathe" that allowed them to include such things as long song-and-dance sequences).

From the standpoint of both art and dignity it would have been better for those in charge to realize that they had given their best, and given what could only follow--not their best--go out on top (as the folks at Seinfeld did, in the very period when The Simpsons was looking less golden). Instead the show lumbered on from season to season as the audience withered away, to such a point that today the network may be cranking out new episodes solely for the sake of that "back catalog value" that, like so much else in a financialized economy gone brain-dead (as seen in the insane valuation of Tesla and so many other artificial intelligence firms), amounts to building a skyscraper of cards atop a foundation of nonexistent values and either being so deluded as to believe the evil day when it catches up with them will never come, or at least that they will have sold out before then and made the collapse someone else's problem.

The Right to Play Video Games All Day Long

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000
I previously remarked that the right to live that a Universal Basic Income would make materially meaningful would necessarily include the right to live in ways other than many of those prescribed by cultural traditionalists--for example, young people staying in mom's basement playing video games all day rather than going and getting a job. Indeed, considering the case of the UBI-subsidized gamer I specifically pointed out that besides their having the right to live in that manner, those who might be discomfited by the notion of their doing so may do well to consider how preferable this would be to the ways in which people get into trouble; that even those who may seem to be in this way "contributing nothing to society" may at least be costing society far less than those who are falsely thought to be contributing, such as investment bankers both in their personal consumption, and the consequences of their often useless or pernicious work activity (yes, I am flatly saying that according to the available data if society traded one investment banker for one gamer, maybe one investment banker for ten gamers, we would be coming out ahead given what investment bankers actually do); and that contrary to the vicious stereotypes the young person living at home is actually likely to be making a contribution to their household of some kind, not just with whatever income they have to a household budget that often needs the support (which UBI would certainly enable), but in ways that often do not register in Gross Domestic Product but are nonetheless genuinely valuable, like being helpmeets or even carers to parents or other relatives (just as much that does register in the GDP as "growth" may be worthless). The result is that not only would any respect for freedom require tolerating the likelihood of some, perhaps many, young people electing to use UBI to do this out of respect for freedom, but one has reason not to worry overmuch about the loss to society represented in their choice--especially in a context where, as is already so frequently the case with even young college graduates in the fields we are told are "in demand," their labor is really not wanted, certainly not wanted enough for anyone to pay them a living wage for it. Indeed, past a certain point the expectation that they go on looking for a taker for it, begging someone to let them make a profit for them, is nothing but doctrinaire insistence on mindless conformism, extreme callousness, and even sadism of the kind that makes the belief in "prescription" so often go hand in hand with admiration and apologia for "injustice, misery and brutality." Reflecting on the prejudices of such--alas, the makers of the conventional wisdom of our time--it seems striking that where they are so quick to demand that people of more egalitarian sensibility stomach much that they find unpalatable in the name of "freedom" they are unwilling to do the same when an even more robust argument on these grounds happen to run up against the demands of the unthinking traditionalism for which they stand.

The Movies They Aren't Remaking

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000
Hollywood often seems remake-mad--because it is remake-mad. Thus are many of its remakes not only entirely pointless from an artistic perspective, but from a commercial one as well, with the remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer exemplary. Yet it seems only fair to say that even in its remake addiction Hollywood has not been wholly insensible to the limits of what it can sell. If 2025's I Know What You Did Last Summer was a dubious prospect, it was still broadly the case that it was a relatively low-stakes bet (the production budget was reported as being a "mere" $18 million), which may have seemed plausible on the basis of the relatively good track record of relatively low-cost horror movies for relative profitability, with this one helped by name recognition and perhaps also '90s nostalgia (pop culturally a whimper next to the bang made by '80s nostalgia earlier in the century, but all the same, seemingly something they could work with).

At the same time I have been struck by the films of yesteryear of whose remaking we hear not a breath. If the high price tag and tough sell to domestic audiences have not wholly inhibited Hollywood in regard to the remarking of period pieces, musicals, and movies that are both (thus did the studios greenlight 2016's Ben-Hur, and 2021's West Side Story), it is still the case that Hollywood is less ardent about remaking such movies than it is films in, for example, the sci-fi action genre--perhaps the more in as the politics of the time have an inhibiting effect on do-overs of great hits of yesteryear. Certainly one imagines the sneering that would be directed at South Pacific from certain quarters in light of its number "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught," all as the fact that the opinions of those who are outraged by criticism of fascism or the presentation of the Nazis as bad guys count for more than they did just a few years ago is not at all encouraging for any remake of The Sound of Music. Meanwhile, if for all that Hollywood's excitement about LGTBQ+-relevant projects remains robust, that is nowhere near enough to entice it to a remake of From Here to Eternity, given the source material's unflattering portrait of life in the American armed forces--and that in the era of the celebrated "Greatest Generation" on the eve of its fighting "the good war."

In a lighter vein one may be struck by how Hollywood's propensity for remaking romantic comedies has also declined. Thus where in the '80s we saw a new version of His Girl Friday for the era of television news (and the Drug War) in Switching Channels, and the '90s had do-overs of such films as Sabrina and The Shop Around the Corner, one would be hard-pressed to find anything comparable in its recent output of major feature films made for theatrical release. The genre in particular seems an awkward one for a Hollywood that seems content to leave such fare to home entertainment given not only the romantic comedy's limitations as a moneymaker (one doesn't get sequels and merchandising here, while for a multitude of reasons the form doesn't travel the way big action movies do), but its awkwardness for an industry that can, however inconsistently, be as piously woke regarding gender as it can be ultra-reactionary and bigoted on a great many matters of race--and still more, class--all as the sensibility that could "get it right" just isn't there. (How far we are from the age of Howard Hawks, and Billy Wilder, and Ernst Lubitsch, the old "Lubitsch touch" not even to be dreamed of in our era of music video makers who mistake themselves for auteurs, and pseudo-mature edgelord indie directors! How far we already were in the day of the remakes that did get made!)

Indeed, in considering these movies from the 1960s, the 1950s, the 1940s, it also seems to me that the passage of time has not only meant increasing difficulty in adapting the classics for what we sometimes euphemistically call "a contemporary audience" given changes in what the cultural gatekeepers consider acceptable, but also the plain and simple fact that with a crass capitalization on name recognition a key rationale for the strategy the fact that the "contemporary audience," to which the screen classics of that era are a closed book, doesn't know the names deprives the remakes of their hook. In considering all this too it also seems worth remarking that in its relentless remaking of past hits this leaves Hollywood drawing upon a narrower stock of source material--and in the process only makes the tendency the more obvious and grating.

The New The Naked Gun and "Get Woke, Go Broke"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:27:59 +0000

Those at all attentive to pop cultural controversy these past few years are likely to have encountered the phrase "Get woke, go broke," or its more popular derivative, "Go woke, go broke." Actually emanating from the science fiction community (which as I argued recently has been having these cultural battles since at least the 1950s, as you can see for yourself reading Earl Kemp's fascinating artifact, Who Murdered Science Fiction?) right-wing science fiction author and political commentator John Ringo coined the phrase in the wake of the controversy surrounding his appearance at a convention (in light of the content of his "Ghost" novels in particular). At least in the usage which has gained traction since then, the premise of the claim is that wokeness is something elites are foisting on a public uninterested in or broadly opposed to it; that "woke" propaganda ruins the artistic and entertainment value of any material it touches; and that offended and annoyed consumers will promptly punish the purveyors of woke material by refusing to pay for it. Of course, wokeness is a slippery term often used as simply a pejorative rather than a descriptor by the right in reference to things they do not like, possibly for any of a number of reasons. However, it is fair to say that even they are most likely to use the term in reference to what the word may more usefully denote, the call for social justice as specifically conceived by the advocate of postmodernist identity politics on behalf of those society has marginalized, particularly on grounds of race and gender.

Considering the recent "reboot" of The Naked Gun I wondered at the response of those inclined to the "Get woke, go broke" argument. Granted, the film did not have race-lifted or gender-swapped characters in the manner of, for example, Paul Feig's much-criticized remake of that other '80s comedy classic Ghostbusters. Still, it is notable that the film cast as the remake's female lead and femme fatale a 58-year old actress who has recently embraced a feminist public image (certainly evident in her recent comeback film, The Last Showgirl) extending to what came across as a personal rebellion against makeup--with this the case on camera in this film as well as off of it, and one might add, the camera generally treating her very differently from how it did her predecessor Priscilla Presley, distinctly post-#MeToo and post-Wonder Woman in its attitude toward "the male gaze." There is the changed attitude toward the gags, which like the original film contains plenty of crudity, but with the more sexually-themed bits pointedly eschewing away from playing off of female sexiness to stressing male discomfort and humiliation. (There is no cop car driving into a female locker room in the opening credits, and certainly anything like Frank Drebin's misadventures on the ledge of a certain tall building are unthinkable here.) If anything, the contrast is even more pointed when one compares this Pamela Anderson film to the Naked Gun film that so prominently featured her fellow '90s sex goddess Anna Nicole Smith, with regard to a film's sheer delight in glamorized pulchritude (and one might add, the humor it was prepared to mine from its part in the goings-on, down to Smith's last scene in the film)--all of which, going by the comment I have seen on the Internet, remains much appreciated.

In short, if these aspects of the film are more subtly woke than many of those things that set off alarm bells among the anti-woke it was still, as a new take on a beloved franchise that when compared with the original can seem thoroughly accommodating of present-day identity politics the new Naked Gun would seem exactly the sort of thing to agitate them--the more in as the first film's cowriter and director David Zucker had plenty of critical words for the project, and the movie's box office seems a far cry from that of the original, and what might have been hoped for by producers doubtless hoping not for a single hit but a franchise, in a summer and a year where if there were certainly other targets about there was none that towered over the cinematic scene the way, for example, Barbie did back in 2023. However, rather than having a field day with it the film's wokeness was scarcely remarked--with one explanation, perhaps, that besides fans of the old Naked Gun films ignoring what was so obviously an unnecessary remake, or treating it rather lightly when they did see it, their antenna for such things may have become less sensitive. Perhaps acclimated to the cinematographic and comedic tendencies of more recent film in spite of themselves (Hollywood's been so ungenerous to the male gaze for so long they don't expect of it what they used to), it can also seem that the dissectors of pop cultural wokeness are also paying less attention for having simply declared victory in the War on Woke, and if not altogether moved on, then at least ceased to bother in the absence of bigger grounds for argument than that.