Raritania

Remembering Law & Order: Criminal Intent

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:19:48 +0000

Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran for ten seasons (2001-2010), during which it aired 195 episodes. It is a very respectable run for a TV show by almost any reasonable measure. Still, there is no denying that this run pales next to that of its two predecessors, the original Law & Order (in fanspeak, the "mothership") with its rare two decade run (1990-2010), and the first spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), now in its twenty-seventh season on the air (1999-)--and that in this it was something of a disappointment for the producers. This was all the more in as the show's managing the ten seasons it did was partly a matter of their after season seven shifting it away from its original home on American Big Three network NBC to basic cable channel USA to get along on a lower budget in a milieu where a show could justify its staying on the air with rather lower ratings than network prime time required, in spite of which it only lasted three seasons more (the last of these a mere eight episodes).

Considering why that was it seems at least partly the case that it was a sign of the times. Appearing in 2001 Criminal Intent came into a market still somewhat more resistant to the franchise-milking taken for granted today. (Thus did we see in one episode of The Simpsons satirical reference to Law & Order: Elevator Inspectors Unit.) At the same time the show had to establish itself in a very different media world from the one that the original series launched in a decade before, or even "SVU" a mere two years earlier, with the reality TV and prestige TV booms newly but forcefully underway, and leaving less room for a procedural series, casual viewers easily inclining to reality TV's trashy ultra-lowbrow offerings of the former, the more "serious" viewers the snobby middlebrow offerings of prestige TV, and everything in between squeezed, perhaps especially where it was built on standalone episodes rather than trying to hook viewers with an arc in the hope that at least some of them would check out the next episode. Indeed, even the original Law & Order was doing less well, such that it ended its run the very same year that Criminal Intent went off the air, while no subsequent spin-off has fared so well yet. (Indeed, it seems notable that those entries that have stayed on the air for long have adapted to the expectations of the new market, not least in a greater tendency to arcs rather than standalone episodes, as seen in the more recent seasons of SVU, and the most successful of the newer series', Law & Order: Organized Crime, constructed around season-long arcs.)

Still, it seems entirely reasonable to think that what the show itself had to offer--its particular variation on the franchise's cops-and-prosecutors' theme--was at least partially responsible, that indeed the concept was a tougher sell in some ways, with this easier to appreciate if one considers the structure and tone that the original Law & Order established early on as the series' baseline. This had episodes beginning with a scene in which someone stumbles on the body of a murder victim, after which the episode focuses strictly on the professional activity of the two partnered detectives tasked with identifying and arresting the suspect and the two Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) tasked with the Prosecution, respectively. This is so much so that we rarely saw events from the viewpoints of any other characters but these as the viewer comes to know of the drama behind the murder from what the four principals see themselves, and what the people they talk to tell them, while the writers kept even the principals' personal lives deep in the background, rarely even referenced as the detectives concentrated on "whodunit" and the prosecutors on making the charge stick. In presenting all this the writers split their episodes evenly down the middle, devoting the first half to the detectives' side of the matter, starting with their visit to the crime scene where the body was found, following the detectives through the legwork of the investigation, and ending with their arrest of the suspect just before the commercial break at the midpoint, after which the episode transitioned to the ADAs' prosecutorial efforts to their conclusion, while constructing the whole around a succession of short scenes briskly, sharply, crisply cutting from one to the next with the title cards indicating date and place in that way suggestive of the meticulous attentiveness to the relevant and exclusion of the irrelevant, and economy, of a well-written police report, punctuated by the famous "doink" sound effect. This tightness of focus and construction, the pace and punctuation, imparted to the episodes a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts combination of efficiency, driving momentum and flashy style. The episodes also tended to plots "ripped from the headlines" that befit the flash, the more in as they so often had to do with the lives of the more privileged Manhattanites, the grit of the street, and those points where high life came into contact with low life, with all the contrast-heightened "high concept" texture going with that (the grit of the station or a venture into a "rough" neighborhood throwing the plushness of the rest of the show, with its expensively dressed upper class characters and their attorneys in plush homes and offices into sharper relief). At the same time, if the show typically presented its principals as upright and competent, they were not supermen, giving the often flashy narratives some grounding where the "human element" was concerned, which combined with the police report or documentary-like aspect to endow it all with a measure of verisimilitude.

By contrast the episodes of Criminal Intent dispensed with this intricate structure, events proceeding in a less formulaic, more variable fashion--with the detectives tending to hold center stage down to the end. (Thus instead of two cops and two ADAs being at the core it was two cops and one ADA at the outset, with the ADA often having little to do in an episode but tell the detectives they just didn't have a case yet, and then dropped altogether after season five.) Partially, but only partially, filling the vacuum created by the elision of the prosecutors' side of things we tended to see the other participants in the drama (the criminals, and those we were meant to think might be criminals) get a good many scenes of their own, without the cops or the prosecutors around, in which the makers of the episodes, true to the title of the show, Criminal Intent, endeavored to dramatize the personal intentions and motivations of the criminals. Consistent with this it was sometimes the case that the audience knew for a certainty who was responsible from rather early on in the episode, and sometimes even from the very start, leaving the detective with the job of finding it out for themselves and proving it to themselves (and the prosecutor), as the detective's half hour was stretched out into a whole hour, often with "whodunit" replaced by psychological "whydunit"--and backing up what the audience and the detective already knew in what was generally prone to become a psychologically-freighted "game of cat and mouse" between detective and suspect. As one might guess this accent on head games left less room for exploiting topicality--the appearance of which was in fact a red herring at times. (Watching the opening of the episode "Anti-Thesis" you may think it will be about the fight between Larry Summers and Cornel West, but could have dispensed with the bit while leaving everything really important to the episode perfectly intact.) And of course, with Criminal Intent not only did we get instead of "regular detectives" the members of an elite unit, the Major Crimes Squad, but in the show's original protagonist--for we could more easily speak of a protagonist here given the greater focus on his activities--we had not a "conventional" cop, even an exceptionally accomplished one, but rather, in spite of his being on a police force, a figure out of the Sherlock Holmes tradition of Great Detectives in Vincent D'Onofrio's Robert Goren. Constantly performing intellectual feats that at times can seem over-the-top (where Henry Higgins can tell which neighborhood a fellow Londoner came from by his accent, on the basis of secondhand information New York Detective Goren deduces precisely where an Australian picked up her Thai!), he was also consistent with the tradition in being highly eccentric, with line of work, temperament, reputation all combining to place them outside society to such a degree that it is hard to picture him having a "normal" life with a spouse and a family, or even close friends, or doing particularly well career-wise within an Organization (as Goren himself is all too aware).

Altogether one can easily picture all this having been less compelling for many. Formula, after all, can be constraining and after a time tiresome, but for those who like a formula, as long as they still like it, the repetitiveness, the predictability, can be part of the appeal, easing their getting into the goings-on, and making it easier for them to stay oriented even amid casual viewing, with that brisk, crisp flow of the mothership formula certainly helping hold their attention, and simplifying their following along. By contrast the episodes of Criminal Intent may have seemed comparatively shapeless, more uneven, certainly more measured in pace. Certainly, I think, it was more challenging for a writer to hold an audience's attention this way (or even just make it possible for them to follow along) than when using the earlier show's pattern, while the visual aesthetic was all too consistent with the approach, the set design, cinematography, lighting and editing choices of the show-runners went along with that less brisk, crisp, quality, giving the images a certain drabness (here the interrogations went on in a white, fluorescent-lit room that felt less like it belonged in a police station than in a hospital), as well as less sense of movement (thanks to a less mobile camera). If neither glamour nor grit were wholly absent from the episodes, they were on the whole less abundant, and due to the stylistic choices also less strikingly presented, such that one can speak of a "low concept" aesthetic--with form, again, aligning with content given the frequent choice of storylines foregrounding character and context neither particularly glamorous, nor gritty, as indeed they often skewed toward the marginal or the eccentric (as with a murder in the world of contemporary poetry in "Passions"). Meanwhile if Bobby Goren definitely had his fans he was not everyone's cup of tea, with some apparently finding his tics and his baggage off-putting, and this mattering all the more because this was so much the Great Detective's show, and Criminal Intent less able to lean on the other members of the cast, or the other elements that can enliven a piece of entertainment. Certainly this L & O series generally had less of the benefit of comic relief than the mothership (a significant point in the favor of detectives like Jerry Orbach's Lenny Briscoe and Jesse L. Martin's Ed Green). Meanwhile, precisely because this is the kind of thing that doesn't get said in respectable mainstream venues, even as Reddit fora and the like make clear that a great many people are thinking it, it is worth adding that taken as a whole the show was a bit light on sex appeal. (Law & Order was not and could not have been Baywatch where reliance on feminine charms is concerned, but the predecessors had certainly been prone to casting actresses who made many a male viewer running across the show stop flipping channels. It was not unfitting of the approach that this was less the case in this less glamorous take--particularly in the more consistent earlier seasons--but not helpful from a casual viewing standpoint.)

The result was that one was much more likely to be really on board with what the show was doing, or not, than was the case with the other L & O series'--while D'Onofrio's cutting back his involvement added another complication. The show-runners responded to his reduced participation by splitting their seasons between Bobby Goren and other detectives whose appearance entailed a deviation from the episodes' now-established tendency (the mothership's Mike Logan back to headline episodes that felt like original Law & Order minus the style, Jeff Goldblum's Zach Nichols offering "Bobby Goren Lite" with all the disadvantage implied in that comparison), changes not pleasing to all of those who had been on board. And so in the end even as a lower-cost production in the less competitive basic cable milieu Criminal Intent sputtered out fairly quickly--though like many an unconventional show that struggled in its first run it would seem to have enjoyed a long life in reruns in the years since it went off the air.

Did Old People Make Top Gun 2 a Hit?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Recently revisiting the matter of TV's JAG and its audience--its notoriously aged audience--and the way that military-oriented material of that kind is these days considered to be "dad thriller" stuff it seemed natural to also revisit the demographic makeup of the moviegoers who made Top Gun 2 one of the biggest hits of the post-pandemic period. After all, besides being a very dad thriller military action-drama this was a sequel to a movie from 1986 headlined by an actor who saw his stardom peak decades ago, and who was here playing not the cocky young jackass but the wise elder (as he was also increasingly doing in the Mission: Impossible series), with all that this implied for the interest of the young, which I suspect was hardly compensated by the inclusion of some young folks in the cast. (The age of the movie star ended before they came along, and no, I don't buy that 2022 Miles Teller was a substitute for 1986 Tom Cruise where pure and simple box office draw was concerned.) Moreover the studio went very, very hard for the nostalgia angle in a way that seemed to me risky given how '80s nostalgia was looking like it was by this point pretty well played out (if not toxic).

It would thus seem that the film was a lot more likely to draw its audience from among older viewers than young ones. People of the generation of, for example, Larry Summers, who was thirty-one when the original Top Gun hit theaters, such that he may well remember just how it was that the particular usage of the term "wingman" he made in a now-famous e-mail in reference to his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein originated. And this is in fact borne out by the opening weekend numbers. As the Hollywood Reporter informs us, on opening weekend less than 30 percent of the audience was under the age of 25, and rather less than half were under 35, while "38 percent [were] over 45 and 18 percent over 55"--in contrast with what we usually see for summer blockbusters, practically a Downton Abbey-type event). The situation was all the more remarkable given the slightness of competition for action movie fans young and old that particular summer (a factor, I thought then and still think now that Top Gun 2's extraordinary legs during the summer of 2022 had a lot to with the season's relatively thin release slate, such legs as much a cause as an effect of the young seeing the movie, because it hung around for so long).

Of course, I don't remember anyone joking about gray heads in the audience, and that doesn't seem accidental. In becoming a hit Top Gun 2 had a lot of help not only from those ways in which it was a plausible commercial prospect (iconic franchise with the star back in the lead role, flashy action, etc.) but also media Rah-Rah as the claqueurs claqued as they had rarely claqued before, with an obvious reflection of this the extremely favorable stance of the critics toward the movie on offer. After all, as some noted (usually not unaffectionately), Top Gun 2 was basically a reshoot of the first Top Gun--a movie that critics at the time dismissed in such ways as the remark in Steven H. Scheuer's Movies on TV guide that it was "the most vapid film ever to gross over $150 million," and the not uncommon view that it was less a movie at all than a two-hour Navy recruiting commercial. This has its reflection in how, as you see when you look at the first movie's Rotten Tomatoes page, the first one had a critics' score of 58 percent--and a still lower 56 percent from the "top critics." By contrast the critics' score for the new version that was Top Gun: Maverick was 96 percent--a 37 percent jump for basically the same movie!--while there was an even bigger jump in the case of the "top critics," whose score leaped from 56 percent to a near-perfect 99 percent.

That the do-over got so much more favorable treatment in 2022 than in 1986 may seem partly a matter of a generational shift as critical evaluation of commercial/music video-style high concept movies and of action movies in particular became more generous. (We are a long way from the days when Pauline Kael, looking at Raiders of the Lost Ark, described what Steven Spielberg was doing very lucidly while completely failing to see its appeal, and indeed that this was the future of popular American cinema.) Simply put, with Star Wars approaching the golden anniversary of its release, even those critics who actually know film, even the real veterans among them, with only rare exception, grew up on action movies and I suspect never lost their affection for them, taking their distinct "poetics" for granted, all as a broader "grade inflation" with respect to movie ratings likely did its part as well.

However, the change has been political as well. In 1986 militaristic jingoism and the right-wing values broadly associated with them, and very much evident in a film like Top Gun, were certainly pervading American culture--but not yet triumphant. The divisions the Vietnam War created in American society had not yet gone away, with those who saw the war as a colossal crime still having their say, and this informing the opposition to the escalation of American intervention in the wars ongoing in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and to the nuclear arms race and militarism more broadly (epitomized by the nuclear freeze movement winning the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize)--all of which had its reflection in film. Thus the year had Top Gun--but it also had Oliver Stone's Platoon, while Top Gun only had Cruise in the role because the actor who had been considered ahead of him for the role of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Matthew Modine, elected to pass--precisely because he did not want to do a war-mongering movie--in favor of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which hit theaters the following year and became a new classic. And indeed, if Cruise did take the role Modine turned down, just a few years later Cruise himself expressed the view that taking it up a second time would be "irresponsible" given how it had played as simple-minded militaristic propaganda.

As Jerry Lembcke shows in his book The Spitting Image, the selling of the 1991 Gulf War quashed all of that, handing total victory to the proponents of jingoism --with it saying something of the totality of the victory that NBC gave Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North roles on shows like not just JAG, but the sitcom Wings (!), in the latter case explicitly identified as indeed Oliver North to Brian Hackett, who vocally lauded him for his actions. Of course, in the wake of the lies that led up to and the catastrophe that resulted from the 2003 Iraq War (eventually recognized and condemned by the right as well as the left) challenge to this resurged, but it never got very far. The new anti-war movement never approached the fire of its Vietnam-era, and perhaps not even that of its '80s-era, predecessor, but in line with the tendency to count their chickens before they are hatched and the illusions the Democratic Party and the media succeeded in fostering around Barack Obama they packed up and went home after his election thinking the war was over--only to see it go on and on, deepened and widened with kill lists, with new battlegrounds in Libya, and Syria, and Yemen, and much else that continues down to this day. Of course, if the movement never recovered there remained a measure of leeriness about pop militarism, such that Tom Cruise's reticence about getting back in the cockpit was slow to pass, while even after the project finally got out of development hell Forbes' Scott Mendelson (no leftie publication, this!) wrote that "If the film is a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise, with no more nuance or commentary on the current military-industrial complex than its predecessor," then it would be not just "thin gruel," but "almost morally irresponsible considering the times we live in"--all as, I suspect, most of those thinking along anything like those lines would have dispensed with the "almost" in the "almost morally irresponsible" and just said "morally irresponsible." Nevertheless, such "morally irresponsible" "nostalgia-bait" and the "thin gruel" that Mendleson, speaking for many, thought such material must be, was exactly what Paramount delivered, not least in Mendelson's own opinion when he saw the movie, though this was not to criticisms but to hosannas from the press as a whole. In short, yes, the media was championing a jingoistic Top Gun 2 because it was a jingoistic film as what little political controversy was detectable in the mainstream press was over (in keeping with the eternal function of the culture war as a distraction from more substantive issues) whether the movie was "woke" or not as a right thrilled with a movie making no concession to those concerns of which even a Mendleson had recently been obliged to write being the hit of the year as their opponents lamely pointed to the "diversity" of the cast as "proof" that it was not the anti-woke delight they claimed--which rebuttal, if to be taken at all seriously, only goes to show that along with woke capitalism one can have woke jingoism and woke militarism. Amid all that there was reference to the number of older folks going to the theaters, but this was in a "Isn't it great that the older people more vulnerable to COVID--glad that's over, aren't you?--are going back to theaters? Surely the film market's recovering and we'll be back to pre-pandemic business in no time!" spirit, as against the "It's mostly old people watching this, younger people only being pulled in secondarily by the endless Rah-Rah amid a thin release slate" view that would not have been conducive to their narrative, their unity and vigor in promoting which seems to me as good an example as I know of just how much having the press in one's corner helps in selling a film.

The Guardian's 100 Best Novels List: Some Remarks

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

The Guardian newspaper recently published their list of what their readers voted for as the 100 Best Novels of All Time--not just English-language novels of the twentieth century, as with the widely cited Modern Library list, but novels, period, with the definition of novel in this case apparently the very broad one of "book-length work of prose fiction" (as against the narrower definition Ian Watt offered). I, personally, do not make much of these lists as judgments of literary worth, for "best" is a slippery concept, too easily and often confused with, for example, the frankly personal "favorite" and historically significant "greatest." However, they do interest me as a snapshot of how those who made the list evaluate literature--or at least think that one should do so at a given point in time--with this one no exception.

In discussing the Guardian's list let us get out of the way the fact that it is a very predictable product of a British newspaper in the early twenty-first century asking about the Greatest Of All Time. The list is overwhelmingly Anglosphere (79 of the 100 books are English-language works), and especially British (44 by authors from the British Isles, at least when counting naturalized Britons like Henry James). It also skews strongly toward relatively recent books, with only two of the titles from before 1800 (Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy), almost three-quarters of them (73) published in 1900 or after, half (47) after 1945, and almost a tenth (9) from just 2000 on. Likewise predictable it is thoroughly middlebrow in its choices, full of standard Greatest Of All Time picks that everyone is supposed to read but which almost no one does, while the few who actually read them often only say they love them, like James Joyce's Ulysses, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, predictably in the top ten, while in line with the canons of the literary priesthood in the English-speaking world today, Modernism and postmodernism celebrated as realism and especially naturalism are commensurately shortchanged. (Thus French greats like Stendhal, Balzac, Zola are not represented by even a single work, nor such American devotees of naturalism as Crane, Norris, London, Sinclair or Dreiser, while there is no Lewis, Dos Passos, Steinbeck either, all as pre-war Germans are represented solely by Thomas Mann, etc., etc..) Where all this is concerned it seems to me significant, and again predictable, that the older books, and the works from continental Europe, are limited to the best-known examples, and concentrated in the top spots where received wisdom probably counts for more than informed personal opinion in their placement (pre-twentieth century works making up a scarce quarter of the list, but accounting for six of the list's top ten, twelve of the top twenty, and just fifteen of the next eighty).

However, some of the rankings bespeak the modification of the predictable Anglosphere middlebrow list by a particular voting pattern. Most obviously there is how books by women get the two top spots, with George Eliot's Middlemarch a surprising #1, and Toni Morrison's Beloved #2, as Joyce, usually landing the top spot on priestly/middlebrow lists, landed just the #3 spot this time. More broadly, five of the top ten books were by women, nine of the top twenty, thirty-seven of the lot--much more than one usually sees on such lists. (By comparison the Modern Library's 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th Century list, on which one might expect to find more female authors than a Best of All Time list, had no books by women in the top ten, just two in the top twenty, and a mere eight in the hundred, with many specific titles that made that list ranking rather lower there than here, To the Lighthouse placing at #15 on that list rather than #4 on the Guardian's, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at #76 rather than #31, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence at #58 rather than #38, and not a single work of Toni Morrison's placing at all.) Likewise it is notable that Virginia Woolf was the most honored author on the Guardian list, with five of the top hundred titles (including the #4 spot, which she landed with To the Lighthouse), and four of Jane Austen's six novels making the list (claiming three places in the top twenty alone, with most Austen fans' favorite Pride and Prejudice at #9), and Toni Morrison having three as well. The science fiction reader in me noted, too, that three of the four post-1945 English-language science fiction titles that are not George Orwell's obligatory Nineteen Eighty-Four (#16), (science fiction, not weirdo postmodernism), were Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (#36), Octavia Butler's Kindred (#71) and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (#89). Meanwhile even the selection of male-authored books favored female-centricity. Thus of the five books in the top ten not by women two were, if male-authored, so focused on a female protagonist that the book was named for them--Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina actually ranking ahead of his usual "Greatest of All Time" selection War and Peace (the two placing at #6 and #7, respectively), with the same going for Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (#10).

As the mentions of Morrison and Butler--and the abundance of "post-colonial" works in the post-1945 collection from V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (#78) to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (#62)--indicate, along with the tilt toward books by women, often feminist in orientation, and frankly books one would conventionally expect to speak to a feminine sensibility generally, there was also heavy attention to works by "authors of color," and from the non-Western Anglosphere. Accounting for at least fourteen such works out of the hundred (compared with a mere half dozen on the Modern Library list), the works that are not here as well as those which are underline the emphasis. (Where genuine devotees of Joyce might have been expected to remember his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man one might imagine that a book which advertised its being about a man with its title was at a disadvantage--as for all the postmodernism about one does not see Vonnegut or Pynchon here.) In short, the Guardian's list is not just a presentist Anglosphere, British-centric, middlebrow list, but a very identity politics-minded and especially female-skewing list, as one may expect in an era in which the dwindling number of fiction consumers is supposed to be overwhelmingly college-educated women, whose education, acculturation, social position greatly sensitize them to the contemporary politics of identity. Of course, all this aligns perfectly with what one would expect of those sympathetic to the Guardian's editorial line today.

Network TV Time Slots, and the Fate of The Simpsons

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Those who recall the early years of The Simpsons' original run in the United States will remember that, save for a shift to Thursday nights for a few years, it aired Sundays, with the show from the fall of 1994 on a fixture of the television schedule at eight P.M.--in a period in which time slots still mattered greatly to whether a show was seen. They will also remember that that particular time slot was a highly problematic one from the get-go because that was the same TV season in which the network that aired it (FOX) also began airing football, one result of which was that the show was constantly preempted by Sunday football games. Indeed, in a given season one could not count on turning to their local FOX affiliate and actually seeing an episode of the show in that time slot until after the Super Bowl--February, basically, in spite of which the show's seasons came to the then-usual end in May.

The Simpsons was thus a show whose airing flew in the face of a network TV norm that had shows running like clockwork (22 episodes from September/October through May, etc.), and the strategy of making a show's viewing a habit (this the era of the once storied NBC Thursday night "Must See TV" and ABC Friday night "TGIF" line-ups). In the process this subjected a show that was not only hugely important for a new network endeavoring to establish itself on the scene as cultural icon and flagship, but also a past ratings winner, to grave disadvantage. That The Simpsons not only survived the constant mauling of its airing schedule through the first half of the TV season each and every year but thrived in spite of it is a testament to just how much the fans loved it, such that they stuck with it in spite of the network bosses' readiness to risk it, and them, for the sake of What-in-the-name-of-professional-football (which, when anything else gets in its way, always wins).

It also seems to some of those fans--and it is the fans who discuss it, primarily --that if the show endured the Suits' maltreatment for a good many years that cavalier attitude toward the show's scheduling eventually caught up with them. That for months into a season a fan wasn't sure whether there would be an episode on or not made that fan base quicker to wither when those fans lost the enthusiasm as the show's Golden Age ran its course, and the fans looked elsewhere for their entertainment.

Review: Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

I read Alec Nevala-Lee's group biography of the editor and writers at the heart of Astounding Science Fiction and Fact in its "Golden Age of science fiction" glory days (Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction) back when it came out with considerable interest. As one with some prior familiarity with the material I found it well-researched and lucidly written, making for a brisk and informative read--but also a very, very unbalanced one.

I remember that reading the book it seemed to me there was a great deal that I would have liked to know more about, like Astounding editor John Campbell's ideas about what science fiction is, and ought to be--and that far from breaking new ground here Nevala-Lee actually covered this very important matter less well than a good deal of other work I had previously seen (including, frankly, my own in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry). I also wanted to know more about an aspect of the group that had long interested me and regarding which I had thus far found little deep or comprehensive treatment, the way in which Campbell and many other members of his group, amid the World Crisis of the 1930s and 1940s, the years of Great Depression, the ascent of fascism, world war and the beginning of a nuclear age threatening far, far worse, were less interested in some kind of reconstruction of society as so many were than an elitist vision of exceptional individuals transcending the mass somehow as the only hope for the human race, with this "transcendence" extending to outright superpowers (for psi is certainly such). Nevala-Lee says something of these interests of the group's members in the book, can hardly do otherwise given how large they loomed in the not merely private but public thinking of all of them, but more in the course of stressing the foibles of the group's members, all as I suppose that were he really interested in this he would have changed his story's cast of characters slightly--perhaps brought in A.E. van Vogt, the author of the psi-themed Slan and the "Non-Aristotelian logic"-themed Null-A novels, as he left out Isaac Asimov (who was aloof from this particular craziness).

But he didn't. Because his interest, whether personal or commercial, was in the Biggest Names as seen by a later generation (according to which rule it had to be Asimov, not van Vogt, who got his attention here), and frankly in their failings as seen in the post-Gamergate, post-#MeToo, identity politics-in-overdrive era, emphasizing attention to this side of the issue even where he didn't break much new ground--except perhaps in the way Nevala-Lee marshaled his information and presented them to the audience (ditto). If few were surprised by Campbell's racism (certainly anyone who had ever read his conveniently republished editorials!), a good many more persons, myself included, were unpleasantly surprised by the presentation of Asimov in line with the post-Gamergate feminist stereotype of the predatory male nerd with all its very heavy weight of baggage.

I have seen no one question the claims that Nevala-Lee makes about Asimov's behavior in regard to women, and certainly have no intention of making any "It was a different time" excuses for it. (Indeed, I think that the antics reported about him weren't considered good behavior then any more than they are now.) Still, there is no questioning the extreme "presentism" of Nevala-Lee's broader attitude toward his subjects, which is evident in the small things as in the large, as when he criticizes the young Asimov for not having worried about the White maleness of fandom when he found kindred spirits in the Futurians fan club. Setting aside the extent to which he was applying a twenty-first century, postmodernist standard of "diversity" that even now not everyone accepts as fair or right to a group of young people circa 1940, the fact remains that at that time the small and essentially local New York-based group was living in a city that was according to the official statistics 93 percent White, and so rather less unrepresentative of the social environment they were living in than Nevala-Lee implies in his risibly sanctimonious tone--all as it was not then the common assumption that any grouping in which women were not represented at least in proportion to their numbers in society at large must be excluding them out of structural sexism first, last and always. Alas, such indifference to historical fact, and such moralizing, has always been central to the postmodernist package--and the response to Nevala-Lee's book makes it clear that its author was rewarded rather than penalized by the commentariat for such failings amid a broad assault on the genre's pantheon of icons, canon of works, traditional concerns, generally acknowledged line of development in the name of "inclusiveness." Especially given that the particular science fiction tradition of Campbell and his cohorts was by that point long in decline--perhaps by the time Nevala-Lee's book appeared (2018), already ended--it can seem a reflection of the disproportion between the objects over which people fight, and the investment they make in fighting over them, when the matter is the rancid politics of status.

The Graying of Fandom

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

If you follow such matters you may have heard these past few years of the "graying" of fandom--an appraisal literally based on the proportion of gray heads to be seen at science fiction conventions. This is most often remarked in relation to the tables at the conventions devoted to print science fiction—such that it is easy enough to see this "graying" as a matter of people reading less generally, with this especially the case with their reading for pleasure, and perhaps especially their reading science fiction for pleasure. This is partly because those who enjoy the genre have so many, many other options for enjoying what has been its popular draw--less science fiction as a genre of ideas than a genre of adventure stories of the kind that the literature-enviers sneer at. (Why read a space opera when you can play any number of them on your home console or desktop computer or cell phone?)

Still, it may be that not just the tables where authors are sitting have gray heads in front of them, but that gray heads generally are more present throughout the convention, with this having some obvious possible explanations as well. One is that in the age of the Internet conventions are less central to fandom than they used to be, online life having its spaces--its publications, its fora--which are a year-round convention for everything, as compared with the old days when getting to hang with like-minded fans was something one had to do in person. (If anything, the fact that young people are more cash-strapped and less mobile than they used to be may reinforce this--they just don't have the disposable income, and maybe not disposable time, required for a habit such as convention-going, all as that generation is increasingly accustomed to, and maybe more comfortable, socializing through its screens anyway. At the expense of indulging in a stereotype it may not be irrelevant that such traits as introversion, neuroatypicality and social awkwardness may be more present in fandom than in the population at large.)

Another is that people are less likely to become hardcore fans in the first place because in the existing, options-saturated, pop cultural milieu they have so much material in front of them that they tend to sample many pleasures rather than becoming connoisseurs of any one of them--anything like the old "Trekkie" scene unlikely to happen ever again. That the objects of their pleasure are available to them all the time in the age of smart phones and streaming may add to this, contrasting with how a show they only got to see once a week, which they knew all the other fans like themselves were watching at that same moment, which was thus "appointment TV" and a mass experience and an event, helped foster their enthusiasm. (So did the fact that if the media industry had always been crassly sequel and spin-off-minded, it was a long way from today's unhinged running of every franchise into the ground as standard operating procedure, as exemplified by the far past-their-prime Star Wars and Marvel machines, as if determined to burn out rather than sustain any interest it manages to raise in its products.) The older fan was formed in that earlier world--but the younger fan is likely to know only the world we have now.

Still another explanation is that the possibility of deep immersion is the possibility that deep immersion itself is becoming less possible for them as a cohort of young people becomes oriented instead to the "relatable." Consider how this has colored their tastes with regard to film. In contrast with earlier generations of filmgoers who delighted in movies whisking them off to another time and place, they want the drama, the adventure, to come to them, in a way that has made the period piece a tough sell--all as, one might add, the superheroes who seem most consistently successful with them are those who lives are closest to their own, like their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man with "everyday college student problems," as compared with outer space adventuring figures like Thor, Star-Lord and the Green Lantern. This is the very opposite of that enjoyment of absorption in another world that makes for the kind of fan who takes a great interest in the minutiae of the objects of their pleasure ("That Boba Fett guy, what's his deal?"), such that they write fan fiction about it, dress up as characters from it and are eager to share their passion with others like themselves. And if it was always the case that the more "relatable" figures probably always had the bigger fan bases, it seems likely that where popular taste is concerned the balance has shifted very far in favor of relatability among younger people--and in the process, away from the chances of winning the kind of deep affection among them that made fandom what it was in its heyday.

Tom Buchanan, "This Man Goddard" and Lothrop Stoddard

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Those who have read or watched an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby are likely to remember the figure of Tom Buchanan--the husband of our protagonist and narrator Nick Carraway's cousin Daisy, who plays rather an important part in the book's deceptively simple plot. This Mr. Buchanan is a creature of extreme privilege in the true, socioeconomic, sense of the term, a polo-playing, Hamptons-residing member of the leisure class, unbound but protected, protected but unbound to such a degree that he and Daisy could afford to be utterly "careless" as "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness" as they "let other people clean up the mess they had made," not they but others always bearing the consequences.

As it happens when we meet Mr. Buchanan he seems to have taken a turn for the pseudo-intellectual to go by his giving Nick, and the reader, a brief lecture about "this man Goddard" and what he had to say regarding the superiority of the Nordic race to which he rather smugly tells them they all belong. As those who happened to read the book in an edition printed for students with footnotes may recall the reference to "this man Goddard" and his book The Rise of the Coloured Empires was apparently a reference to Lothrop Stoddard, author of the then-recent The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), where drawing on the "biological" analysis of race by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) some years earlier he interpreted human history, and the post-World War I crisis of Western imperialism through which he and his readers were living, from the standpoint of the theory. As this allusion implies, Stoddard, and Grant (who was not only an influence on Standard, but actually wrote the introduction to his book), were very well-known and influential figures at the time, such that Adolf Hitler wrote Grant that Passing of the Great Race was his Bible (never mind that Grant rejected the racial categorization "Aryan" as misleadingly linguistic in favor of the more "biological" Nordic, inclined to pacifism out of fear that war was especially damaging to a Nordic race given to "Berserker blood rage," and thought an overwhelmingly Alpine Germany racially inferior to a much more Nordic Britain--and even France--among much else irreconcilable with Nazi ideology). And of course the books and ideas of Stoddard et. al. played their part in politics at home, contributing to the nativist racial hysteria of the 1920s that saw the "Second" Ku Klux Klan wax powerful, and the U.S. government slam the gates shut in immigrants' faces and keep them so for decades.

Of course, it may seem that the theorizing of Mssrs. Stoddard and Grant has since fallen into obscurity--not least because of what their big fan Adolf Hitler did in its name--all as in spite of the resurgence of the far right this past half century, I cannot claim to have noticed anyone calling for renewed attention to those figures, as a great many biological racists continue to find it safer to hide behind "culture" (even as they treat "culture" as so unchangeable it may as well be genetics), and even the avowed biological racists argue for other positions in other ways. Certainly one does not see them worry about the ability of particular races to establish themselves in particular climates in Grant's zoological fashion (i.e. Race A does very well in temperate climes but in the tropics grows indolent and fails to reproduce itself, where it is the opposite with Race B). Nor does one see what was so important in the racism of their time, their conscious sub-division of the White--Caucasian--race into the groupings of Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, as they parse the respective merits and demerits of these groups. (Thus did Grant weigh the superior "stamina," "stability and steadiness," and fidelity to country, family, law, "loyalty and truth" that made of Nordics superior fighters and rulers--so long as the "Berserker blood rage" did not get the better of them--against the likelihood of "[t]he Mediterranean race . . . probably [being] the superior . . . in intellectual attainments.") Indeed, the schema itself can seem awkward for today's racist given that not only do these cling to intelligence above all as their justification for their prejudices in a way with which Grant's claims sit uncomfortably (the qualified superiority in "stability and steadiness" by which Grant set so much store would seem cold comfort to today's I.Q. worshippers), but that the Mediterranean category necessarily includes peoples on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean that they openly despise so much that they go into paroxysms should anyone point out they are Caucasian at all--and indeed one may reasonably suspect this is the real reason why it is fashionable today to drop the concept of "Mediterranean," and prefer instead of "Caucasian," "European," cutting those groups out of "the club." (Thus have latterday race theorists stood Grant on his head--instead of abandoning a linguistic-cultural category for a biological one, turning back to culture/geography in line with their bigotry of the moment, all as many supposedly all-seeing and knowing "anti-racists" appear either oblivious to or complicit in the far from innocent redrawing of boundaries.)

Still, if much that Grant and Stoddard taught has been discarded even by those who might be most expected to be attracted to their thinking, these ideas did not simply vanish from the world in 1945, something of their thought enduring, such that reading those authors we encounter alongside the apparent relics of another time a great deal that is familiar in our own time. Not the least of this is the way that standing behind their deep racism was an even deeper hatred of human equality generally, of egalitarianism as such, with all this even clearer when I turned to Stoddard's subsequent book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (1922), and its explanation of revolution. As Stoddard had it revolution was a matter of the biologically inferior lower orders in society, which bear the burdens of civilization's complexity without partaking of its benefits, and finding the burden heavier than they were willing to bear, rebelled against civilization itself and smashed it--this all that he could see in the history of political revolution. Meanwhile it never seemed to occur to Stoddard that, even if one accepted his view (which I do not hesitate to dismiss as nonsense), one way to safeguard civilization might be to do what could be done to lighten the burden on those lower orders, and give them a share in the benefits, precisely because this went so much against the grain of his hatred of equality, which was if anything deepened by the revolution which weighed most on his mind in that period, the "ten days that shook the world." Likewise there is Stoddard's reaction to the then-recent invention of the I.Q. test, specifically his evident ecstasy at having a seemingly scientific way of "proving" the superiority of some groups and the inferiority of others in line with his "scientific" conceptions, thus also "proving" the undesirability of letting in more immigrants and the necessity of persons deriving from the country's "better" stocks to, even at the cost of sacrifices of personal comfort, raise larger families.

There is also the matter of the authors' prejudices against specific groups. There is the characterization of Latin America as the zone of the "Red" man, with the region's disorders a supposed warning to the world of the dangers of racial mixture, a process in which the virtues of the constituent elements fall by the wayside, while retaining only the weaknesses of the races mixed together, compounded by the lower mental stability that must go with the dissonances that go with there being two different human natures in the same person. There is his consideration of the Islamic world, which he acknowledged (with rather more forthrightness than today's racist) was not a racial group, with members of every race, and much of it undeniably White in any phenotypic sense (Stoddard specifically acknowledged that "Persians and Ottoman Turks, are largely white")--yet at the same time insisting that the Islamic religion hopelessly sundered even the (fairly considerable) White portion of the Islamic world from the rest of the (otherwise generally Christian) White race, even as this religiosity somehow did not divide them from the religiously far more removed Hindus of South Asia, such that he lumped Islam, and Hinduism, together in a "Brown Race," all as he made an exception for the (White) "Browns" of Northwest Africa," which he held would be brought back into the Western world's fold by the colonization of their region. (In short, biological race was everything, except when it wasn't--though there were exceptions to that too, which he apparently made less for any really convincing reason about Islam somehow being less of a divider between Northwest Africans and White Westerners than because he hoped Western colonization of the Maghreb would be a success, which was more plausible if the "natives" could be assimilated.) Stoddard's treatment of Russia was comparable. He regarded it as another part of the White world sundered from it by a non-biological factor, the Communist revolution that terrified and disgusted him more than anything else, though of course in light of his theory of revolution he discussed that revolution as consequence as well as cause of the event. Thus he made much of the Russian people's supposed inferior, unfitted-for-civilization nature ("Russian folk nature . . . made up chiefly of primitive racial strains, some [of them, like] the Tartars and other Asiatic nomad elements . . . distinctly 'wild' stocks which have always shown an instinctive hostility to civilization")--and actually tried to use Leo Tolstoy to "prove" it! (Yes, Stoddard actually caps that particular pile of incoherence by quoting chunks of War and Peace to show that that man of immense culture, one of the most accomplished literary figures of the epoch, is evidence of the Russian people being less capable of civilization than other peoples, and especially the "truly" White.)

All of this remains very much with us, be it the racist's very often having a hatred of equality running deeper even than their racism, or the perversion of the tool that is the I.Q. test into the cult of the I.Q. test so hellbent on justifying societal inequality through reference to supposed innate differences in talent, and the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, nationalistic attitude that has indeed enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. One does not have to strain to hear the echo of the theorizing of this generation of "scientific" racists in the present-day mainstreaming of theories of a "Great Replacement" and calls that people of the "right" backgrounds sacrifice everything else for the sake of larger families. So too the North American racial irrationality toward Latin America that has a particularly ironic expression in the United States regarding residents of that region who are in ancestry, phenotype and culture indisputably Caucasian, White, European, Western or whatever else your preferred term as other and less than that, such that so much is made of categories like "Hispanic," and "true White" means "Non-Hispanic White." So does it also go with the equation of Muslims with a "Brown Race," such that if religious bigotry is not always synonymous with racism "Islamophobia" and racism are virtually inseparable, as bespoken by how a Western news media ever true to the tradition of Julius Streicher tirelessly depicts Muslims as Der Sturmer caricatures, with any exception that somehow enters into public apprehension an anomaly that must be explained away at once, and due solely to similarity to the stereotype in phenotype or dress Hindus and Sikhs end up victims of anti-Islamic hate crimes, with few even remarking the bigot's confusion (distinctions among the "Browns" not worth bothering with in their view). And so has it been in regard to Russia, with anti-Slavic and anti-Asiatic racism part of the Anti-Communist package, all as in a geopolitical contest with even a Russia under a ferociously Anti-Communist leadership Western intellectual orthodoxy has not hesitated to resurrect the relevant prejudices. The result is that while reading Stoddard and Grant is far from enlightening in the conventional sense of the term knowledge of their noxious work can and does illuminate some of the sources of the poison of our politics today.

"A New Life," and The Evolution of JAG

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

After following a TV show through a lengthy run returning to its first episodes I often find them looking and feeling awkward compared with what came later. After all, the writers, the actors, the showrunners were at that point still figuring out such things as who their characters are, and what tone they want to strike. Still, the makers of a pilot for a TV show have every incentive to "put their best forward" given a pilot's importance in determining whether their show ever makes it into production, and the great likelihood that this will be their introduction to a TV audience if it does--even if what the makers think may be their "best foot" may be subject to argument, and revision. And so it went with JAG in its two-part pilot, "A New Life." The show, famously pitched by its creator Don Bellisario as a cross of Top Gun with A Few Good Men had for its protagonist Lieutenant Harmon "Harm" Rabb as an F-14 pilot who, grounded by night blindness, got a law degree and joined the JAG corps. In the line of that particular duty the Navy flew him and his partner Lieutenant Caitlin Pike out to an American aircraft carrier in the Adriatic helping enforce the no-fly zone over Bosnia to investigate the death of a female F-14 backseater who had just come to media attention after an engagement with Serbian fighter planes that promised to make her the U.S. Navy's next poster girl--and a superstar to those championing the participation of women in combat unit.

Taken altogether the pilot was not high art, nor of any great intellectual heft. Seeing all this the viewer will have no more sense of what was going on in Bosnia, or even just America's part it, than when they started watching. (Indeed, that Captain Thomas Boone--a character the show expects its viewers to reverence--sneeringly dismisses Serbs with the racist epithet "camel jockeys" says a lot about the sophistication the show displayed and expected of its audience in such matters, and one might add, the very hard limits of political correctness in its heyday.) Nor will the viewer come away with much sense of the complexities of the then hot topic of admitting women into combat units. (In line with the popular military drama of the time the show is of course squarely on the side of the integration of combat units by gender, but we never see real exploration of the rights and wrongs and complexities of the matter, all as the evident sexism is a case of stodgy old guys mostly too professional and too politically astute to ever let it really get in the way of the job, and isolated bad apples among the young guys whose sexism "just is" rather than anything more deeply rooted.) Nor does the audience get much grasp of the Navy's legal system. (It can seem relevant that through the series' run the narration with which the episodes begin identifies a JAG's job as "investigating, defending and prosecuting the law of the sea," whatever that is supposed to mean--the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, maybe?--when the JAG corps' task is actually "investigating, defending and prosecuting" the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which sounds less romantic but has the virtue of actually being factually correct. At any rate, like with nearly every legal procedural ever made the law is the last thing on the writers' minds, what the audience gets instead the usual legal eagle amateur detective work with some legal jargon thrown in.) Accordingly the show's "best foot forward" is actually conformity to the crass requirements of network television in a sensationalistic plot centered on a charged murder investigation, and relatively high--even feature film-ish--production values, with this extending to a lot of action by small-screen standards as the flyers do their thing. (The pilot opens with a dogfight, has a transport shot down in the middle, and a recon mission through deadly ack-ack setting the stage for the big finish as all the way through we have the hurly-burly of a carrier cutting through the waves as roaring aircraft take off and land continually on the way to and from missions where they perform the requisite aerial acrobatics.) There is also quite a bit of sex here with the murder victim involved in an illicit relationship with an unknown crew member entailing trysts in unlikely places that have speculation and innuendo running wild, the flirtations between the leads, and even a bit of skin when Raye Hollitt of American Gladiators fame (not just athlete and actress but popular pin-up), pausing in her cabin between a sortie and the gym to change her clothes and refusing to be diverted from her purpose by an intruding Rabb firing questions at her, goes on to do just that (in a scene shot and edited to stay within the bounds of '90s-era prime time network TV's censorial limits, but effective all the same).

Of course, the show could not deliver all of that from week to week. The showrunners could hardly follow up the combination of topicality with the political and sexual charge of the pilot episode's murder case twenty-two times a season, while if the immediate follow-up to the pilot dealt with another naval adventure scenario in the hijacking of a nuclear submarine the series would be mostly landbound, with the action-adventure aspect only rarely again as flashy as it was in the opener. The series also played down the sexuality considerably, with Rabb's play for Caitlin in the pilot not characteristic of his later way with the ladies (indeed, Andrea Thompson's Allison Krennick was rather more aggressive than the fighter jock in their episodes together), and anything quite like Raye Hollitt's display not to be seen again, all as beautiful and appealing as the female cast consistently was, this was still a show about lawyers, not lifeguards. And of course after the show relocated from NBC to CBS, where the management was more accommodating of Bellisario's preference for "less Top Gun and more A Few Good Men," as the show became more "CBS" broadly. Given that JAG was and remained a military legal-action drama it could never quite be Touched By An Angel, but it still softened considerably from what it had been in the edgy, flashy, action-packed, sexy two-hour pilot as the skirt-chasing fighter jock went through nine seasons of "Will they, won't they" before finally settling the matter of the nature of his relationship with his new partner, Catherine Bell's Sarah Mackenzie, all as, far from testing the censors with scenes like Hollitt's the showrunners sometimes played down the "impression" the actresses made even when fully uniformed. (Thus where in the season four intro they use a clip in which Rabb and Sarah stand to attention--with the line of Bell's ample bust very apparent--in season five they zoomed in the shot so that it ends up cropped a little below her shoulders, apparently deliberately.) Not inconsistent with the reverential tone the show struck toward its subject, it nonetheless played its part in how it came to be known as a show for older folks as younger viewers more inclined to edgy fare gave it a pass.

Ruling-Class Artists on Strike: A Few More Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Recently reflecting on the Hollywood double-strike of 2023 it seemed to me there was something to be said of the irony of the writers and actors whose careers had been given over to churning out right-wing economic propaganda protesting the havoc wrought on them by the forces for which they had propagandized so breathlessly for so long. Filling our theaters and home theaters with the clash of foils and the musical thunder of grand pianos as they depicted the stately homes of the wealthy and "refined," elevating the language in the script when those who had money and position spoke in a fashion that could not but seem ridiculous to anyone who paid attention to the em dash substitution-filled stupidities of their real-life counterparts, made so much reference to "Harvard" one would think it was 1635 and no other university yet founded in the country, one strives in vain to think of a cliché of elitism and snobbery they have not embraced and endorsed and promoted a million times over as they wrapped up their economic heroes (Entrepreneurs! Billionaires! "Geniuses" from "Tech" and from Wall Street and the tippity-top of the tippity-top professions!) in every moronic piece of shorthand impressive to the feeble conventional mind, while offering little but insult to the "99 percent," screaming in their faces that they were inferior to the rich who were so much "smarter" than they, and so much "better" than they (the shorthand for intelligence in the minds of the stupid not at all coincidentally or innocently also the shorthand for wealth), all as they had no one but themselves to blame for the wretchedness of their own lot (which they did everything possible to make them feel was indeed wretched as they made affluence if not wealth seem like the human norm), with what passed for progressive their telling them that if they thought otherwise that was just "entitlement" as they burned incense to mammon in his present-day neoliberal form. People of conventional views use words like "aspirational" to describe this garbage (the more in as they round out the right-wing package with their endless extolling of the spirit of Horatio Alger and the Edisonade tales, giving the impression of a world awash in "self-made men" who have gone from rags to riches as they tell you "You can do it too!"), but a far more accurate characterization would be "class warfare from above" on the cultural and intellectual front, the more insidious because so few notice that it is propaganda (because, after all, it's only propaganda when the left does it, and whine as some might about Hollywood, when it came to this matter there weren't many lefties here!).

Of course, even in this irony-addicted age few if any of those with any platform to speak of confessed to seeing any irony in the spectacle of the destruction of those who made Hollywood run being ruined by the neoliberalism they so vehemently propagandized for--either because they were sympathetic to those who work in Hollywood as they struck to defend their rights and interests as workers and held that to be the important thing, or frankly because they didn't have much sympathy for people in those occupational categories at whom a great many are prone to scream "GET A JOB! GET A REAL JOB!"--and, as their kind typically do, approved those same economic forces themselves, and considered the "collateral damage" of their workings who protest "whiners" undeserving of consideration. But some of them must have noticed the irony nonetheless, the more in as at the time what portions of the media attend to such realities at all paid a more than usual amount of attention to those dwelling in the proverbial "Slums of Beverly Hills."

Considering these it wasn't as if "everyone" didn't already know that not everyone in Hollywood lived like "a movie star." The image of the aspiring actor or writer working tables or driving a cab as they wait for their "big break," and maybe skipping meals as they do so, is well-known. But the images can also be obfuscating. Because people look at it and think, well, those are people trying to make it, the "wannabes" who are probably mostly "neverwillbes" frankly because they don't have talent--claims to which, like "superior intelligence," people of conventional mind refuse to believe in in the absence of "a signal success," as they are (complacently, callously, self-servingly) sure that those who "deserve" to make it will make it, after which everything is gravy--as those who have tried to tell them it just ain't so make little impression. (I certainly doubt that Chris Pine's many references to the "blue-collar acting family" for whom Hollywood is "like a steel town" did much there--the clumsiness of his diction and imagery, perhaps not entirely his fault in a country where discussion of labor and class are so taboo, not helping.) But amid the strike we saw a good deal about just how badly off many of those we would think of as having "made it" actually were after "making it," with Kimiko Glenn showing just how little one gets from having been in forty-four episodes of one of Netflix's biggest all-time hit shows, or, as Daniel Bessner showed in his piece in Harper's, even creating a hit show. And those supposed to be Living the Dream just working stiffs like the rest of us, millions of people knowing their faces but unable to make rent as the old equation between celebrity and escape from the wretchednesses of being a nobody that is inseparable from the desire to be a celebrity loses all meaning.

Of course, the public being what it is, and the discourse of the epoch being what it is, a single expression of the truth coming atop a thousand fresh repetitions of the lie that the conventional wisdom usually is, which is promptly buried by a thousand fresher repetitions of the lie, tends not to make a great impression on many minds. But perhaps the attention to the bigger picture, for all its limitations, made an impression on the very impressionable people that artists, in Hollywood just like everywhere else, happen to be. Only time will tell about that.

If generative AI doesn't put them all out of work first.

Ruling-Class Artists on Strike

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

During the Hollywood strikes I certainly regarded the actors and writer taking that action with sympathy--the more in as the conditions of their work have deteriorated so badly, in part because of the extreme imbalance of power between themselves and the executives who call the shots, which said executives have exploited to the full. Gush as the business press does about the streaming business, the artists who created what it has become fashionable to call the "content" without which it would not exist have derived very little benefit from it, precisely because of how their employers had got the better of them in so many prior battles, all as the advent of generative artificial intelligence threatens them with the virtual annihilation of their professions within the space of a few short years, the more quickly insofar as they fail to secure some claim to profiting from their contributions to it.

Still, watching their world fall apart around them, sympathetic as I was, I also found myself thinking that there was the very real extent to which they helped bring it all down upon themselves. After all, as Daniel Bessner's brilliant piece in Harper's about the situation in Hollywood circa the 2023 strike made clear, the developments in Hollywood in recent decades were the same as what was happening all over the world in the neoliberal age. The destruction of those regulations that protected workers and small operators, including those regulations that legally safeguarded their right to bargain collectively. Aided by that deregulation, and the loose monetary policy that was to characterize the era, the consolidation of business in fewer and fewer hands, as these in turn came to be dominated by shareholder value-minded short-termist idiots who want their money now, Now, NOW! even if that meant wrecking the company irreparably as the price of a fat payout this quarter of the kind for whom Jack Welch was such a hero. The ascent of global labor arbitrage that hollowed out the old industrial center as it sent production to wherever costs were lowest and subsidies most irrationally generous (because for all the libertarian claptrap they speak the neoliberals' objection was to welfare for humans, not welfare for corporations, for which they are ever holding out their greasy hands). And ultimately the great widening of the gulf between those who, as "investors" were in a position to profit from the rising profits and asset values that resulted, and the people who actually had to work for money who did not.

Just how did Hollywood's artists address that in the works they created? By worshipping what is dishonestly and meanly called "success" and all that goes with it as they validated and glorified the elite in its assorted forms, and showed contempt for working people, one category of human that these singers of "representation" had no interest in "representing" on the screen. (I think again and again of what Peter Biskind wrote in Seeing is Believing, that self-made millionaires are as common in the films of the radical right as the masses in the films of the radical left. And you know full well who made it seem as if self-made billionaires, above all self-made tech billionaires, are a dime a dozen in such "elitist porn" as Silicon Valley, and all of them magnificent superhumans--even as many of these professional enshittifiers of everything they touch personally did their bit for making life hell for those who work in Hollywood as they got in on the production game with their brain-dead "move fast and break things" swagger.)

Of course, the artists do not run Hollywood, the executives do, and therefore cannot bear the full responsibility for Hollywood's having so much been a giant factory for (save on those few issues of lifestyle-identity liberalism to which coastal elite types such as themselves are so committed) right-wing propaganda. It is even the case that some of them have produced works that did not line up with such propaganda, opposing it, sometimes with intelligence and force--and at risk to their careers. Compared with the era before McCarthyism, compared with the era of the "New Hollywood" that led to another, quieter, round of purging in the name of putting auteurs in their place, what one could in Upton Sinclair's terms call "hero artists" are few in Hollywood, but they are not wholly nonexistent. (At their best such figures as an Oliver Stone, or an Andrew Niccol, or the Gilroy brothers Dan and Tony, for example, seem to me to be just a few of those who have earned respect as such.)

Still, it is the "ruling-class artists" who have prevailed, with these rarely producing what they do out of pure careerism, serving willingly, as they make clear at every opportunity, while persecuting those of their fellows who do not do the same--making life that much more hazardous for those who do follow their consciences when it is not the safe thing to do, and a disgusting hypocrisy of their presumed respect for the "free speech" that seems to me a duty of everyone who would call themselves an artist. And I do not think that it slights life's complexities to acknowledge that as a group they have been complicit in making that neoliberal situation that has them learning the hard way what empty claptrap the privileged lot of the "knowledge worker" was all along.

What Does Egalitarianism Really Look Like?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

What positions would a person genuinely espousing egalitarian principles hold?

They would hold that no person is "better" or more "important" than any other--not only not on the basis of such matters as race, sex and gender, but wealth, position, family background and all associated with them.

They would hold that rather than a society where a small elite is unbound but protected, and the great majority are bound but unprotected, a society must bind and protect all equally (with, I suspect, most of those who would espouse an egalitarian view wanting all to be as little bound as possible, and protected as much as possible).

They would hold that a society is to be judged by how it treats the "least" of its members, to the extent that anyone was "less" than anyone else--and the last apt to be decreasing all the time.

They would hold that fact and reason are to be respected above Authority, and that no one person or group has a monopoly on knowledge.

They would be alert to the difference between what a person may get hold of, and what they actually earn, especially in an arrangement so haphazard as "the market" at whose altar so many worship.

They would hold that those in "public service" are truly servants of the public, rather than their personal ambitions or any interests to which they might sell themselves, and be held to that obligation.

They would hold that with great power comes great responsibility, and really mean it, while understanding this to mean that the superior talent the believer in "meritocracy" so relentlessly makes much of brings greater responsibility, rather than excuses to lay claim to a bigger share of the prizes--with that responsibility extending to helping the least capable up rather than stomping on them.

They would hold that in the face of a far from unavoidable injustice shrugging that "Life's not fair" is a non sequitir and an evasion.

They would hold that swaggering is a thing to be laughed at as they would laugh at the antics of primates in a nature documentary rather than a thing to be done by humans--while equally objecting that anyone should be required to bow and scrape before another.

Looking at our politics, our media, our culture, just how often do you see anyone enjoying a "platform" of any size express, let alone abide by, any of these views? I think you are far more likely to see the culture we live in barraging us with the extreme opposite attitude on every score--and suggest that people remember that the next time someone shoots their mouth off about society having become too tolerant, too fair, too coddling, of its members.

Nikolai Gogol, Robert Howard, Theodore Dreiser: Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Reading Nikolai Gogol's "Taras Bulba" I remember thinking "This feels like something Robert Howard would write," something of the wild, swashbuckling spirit and pulpy briskness of a Conan the Barbarian adventure to be found in this classic of nineteenth century Russian literature (one reason, I suppose, why our literary critics esteem this tale less than they do works like "The Nose").

However, after that occurred to me I quickly thought of all the ways in which "Taras Bulba" was very unlike a Howard tale. Gogol's saga of a Cossack colonel and his two sons riding off to battle the Poles over their insult to the Orthodox Church was a story of family, tribe, faith, all those traditional conservative touchstones that had little purchase on Howard's imagination to go by how little present they were in his own stories. Family? Where Conan, for example, is concerned we know nothing of parents, siblings, childhood--such that it always seemed to me a great unfaithfulness to Howard when those continuing his adventures or adapting them for the screen did present such elements (as L. Sprague de Camp did in his pastiches, John Milius did in his 1982 film, the 2011 remake of that 1982 film did to a still greater degree). Tribe means scarcely more, and faith less than nothing, with this the case notably even in Howard's tales of the Crusades, like the obvious proto-Conan that is Cormac Fitzgeoffrey (he, too, a tall, formidably muscled man with a square-cut mane of black hair who can throw a lance like a javelin). Men like Fitzgeoffrey may have come to the Orient with sword in hand, but they were by heritage and temperament only lately and superficially Christianized pagan barbarians after adventure, fortune and glory rather than the causes of Popes, Emperors and Kings.

Indeed, taken altogether Howard's heroes typically appeared before us as fully formed forces of nature, almost as if they had come into the world that way, and as lone, grown--exceedingly formidable--men seeking their destinies not as members of a nation or even as a band but individuals in a milieu far away from any origins they might have had. In the course of those lives many of them gain thrones, but even sitting them sit them alone (brooding with their chins on their fists, as it were), while if it seems clear that some of them had some issue (we are given to understand that Conan is a descendant of King Kull of Atlantis, and that the very libidinous Conan, after he had become King Conan of Aquilonia, ultimately made Zenobia his Queen at the close of Hour of the Dragon) any marital or family life they had is something about which Howard, for his part, is silent.

A certain sort of bourgeois nitwit of a critic sniffs at such extreme individualism in characterization, but it seems to me very understandable, and that not as some failing of an artistic imagination as such but as reflective of how young men such as Robert Howard was so often experience the world, perhaps especially in America, especially if they do not come from the kind of great privilege that so many of our "art lie"-peddling cultural gatekeepers do. Like most people they had a family of some sort growing up, yes, but having grown up they go out into the world to struggle in it alone, and usually fail or succeed alone, in surroundings that ever feel in important ways alien, while that aloneness does not change even if they become "family men" because in fighting to support that family they are still on their own. And indeed where the train of thought I discuss here began with Gogol it ended with Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy. Another underappreciated masterpiece which really does live up to its promise of relating a distinctly American tragedy, that book likewise saw its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths struggle on his own from the start of the narrative to its close. He had a family, we know all about it--the mother and father who raised him and siblings he grew up amongst, the more distant relations who had so prospered in Lycurgus, New York--but even when he was with them he was always alone in the ways that counted, down to the end of his adventure not as ruler of a kingdom but in an electric chair for the crime that in the end he actually flinched from committing, executed for what he was not in a tale where society can seem to be one of "that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight" who people the land writ large.

The difference between how a Conan and a Clyde ended up seems to me to underline how both their writers, from their very different perspectives, in their very different ways, responded to, indeed indicted, the alienations of the early twentieth century America in which they both lived--in each case, superlatively. Howard's response was a romantic retreat into the past as it never was, through which he produced one of the greatest wish-fulfillment figures--the greatest Gary Stus--ever put on paper. By contrast Dreiser devoted a lifetime's study to that which alienated him, manifest in his creative as well as his nonfiction output, and in the process, as David Walsh had it, "presented more clearly" than any writer before or since "[t]he true pathos of the petty bourgeois, his manipulated dreams, his aspirations to prestige and good society, his willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself, his self-mutilation and self-abnegation in the name of 'advancement,' his terror and wonder at the workings of the ruling class," and altogether, "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society." And of course, for all that superlativeness neither stands very high with the literary Establishment, though again for different reasons--what a Howard does in their view to be taken even less seriously than what a Gogol did in "Taras Bulba," and Dreiser a "dead dog" in their view because they take what Dreiser did all too seriously, and see it as anathema, with on both scores a "Henry James . . . describ[ing] in minute and stylish detail the emotional relations of articulate middle-class people . . . more their cup of tea."

How Cyberpunk Went From Cutting Edge to Retro

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

The meaning of the term "cyberpunk" is more variable, if not contested, than most people realize. To those steeped in the history of science fiction, and especially science fiction as literature, it denotes a postmodernist turn in the treatment of hard science fiction, along with David Pringle and Colin Greenland's "radical hard sf" and Rudy Rucker's "Trans-Realist" fiction contemporaneous with it. Hallmarks of this are that fiction's combination of fixation on the self with skepticism about the salience of the concept of a stable "self" to begin with, an anti-historical sensibility suspicious of objectivity, comprehensibility, coherence and progress, and an attraction to the devices of Modernism that endured after the hope that those devices would "enable the traumatized survivors of a broken world to make sense of life again" the way its proponents claimed would be the case--such that first picking up William Gibson's Neuromancer I felt like I was reading Ezra Pound in neon lights. Yet for most people it refers to a particular set of images and themes, by no means unprecedented before the '80s (many will point out that you can see a lot of this in stuff going back to the '50s, especially the work of people like Alfred Bester), and not even evident across all of the work gathered together in the more prominent collections of the stuff (as a read of Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades anthology shows), but at least identifiable with the works of some of the core of the "club" (like Gibson and Sterling, along with others like Rudy Rucker and John Shirley and Pat Cadigan)--a near-future world where the neoliberals realized their utopian (for others, dystopian) project of privatizing and deregulating everything, corporate power is supreme and the nation-state has lost its relevance, and technologists' focus is on the microchip and the genome and the marriage of the two, and the story apt to be told from the perspective of those inhabiting the dark underbelly of this future to the point that that future can seem to be all dark underbelly.

A distinct tendency in the '80s by its end the field broadly assimilated many of its elements--hence "post-cyberpunk," which kept much of what it offered, but was prone to be less unreadably postmodernist, and less dark underbelly. And eventually it went from being assimilated into science fiction generally to looking and sounding and feeling like something out of science fiction's past, especially insofar as the near-future came and, if in some ways looking like what it had described, in others looking very different indeed, enough to make it seem like the imagining of people in another place and time, just as had been the case with prior waves, prior movements, in science fiction's history--with the techno-economic model of the day seeming to me particular relevant. The "inventor's fiction" of the "Gernsback era," the fiction of the Golden Age, were the imagining of the future in people living in the "Fordist" era, reflecting its understanding of the present and the expectation of the future they had on that basis. Cyberpunk reflected the expectations of a world that people were told was moving into the information age by figures like Alvin Toffler (whose writing was, indeed, acknowledged by Sterling himself as an important influence on them).

The fact that Gernsbackian/Golden Age science fiction was fiction written by people actually in a particular era, and that cyberpunk was written by people who were led to believe they were moving into a particular new era, is an important difference between them that, I think, made a difference in the fullness of the vision, and its staying power. Fordism, in the sense of the productivity revolution of the electrified factory churning out the materials of "auto-subtopia" and its associated consumer culture, actually happened, and, however much academics of wearisomely contrarian mind nitpick the usefulness of the concept of Fordism, changed the world profoundly in ways that remain with us still--and our imaginings with them. The flying car and the robot servant so famously associated with the science fiction of that time were an adaptation of the automobiles and electrified household appliances so central to Fordist production--which in spite of the far from innocent sneers of some broadly remain part of what people expect of tomorrowland. By contrast the information age's failure ever to appear (yes, you are reading this online, but the information age as a Toffler described it meant much, much more than the existence of the Interweb) meant much less potential to imagine what a further development of it might look like, which would seem to have much to do with the narrowness and fragmentariness of the conception that left us wondering just what all the people who weren't hackers and information brokers and others of their ilk do with their lives as we read those stories.

Writing the Culture Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

In my writing on current affairs I have tended to favor those issues where it is possible to build an argument on the basis of abundant data, the "harder" the better. The records of particular governments. The performance and structure of economies. The definitions of much-used terms. Here there are formal, concrete actions--like legislation and executive orders we can read for ourselves, and which we can read others' interpretations of. Here we have statistical data regarding such matters as investment, assets, profits, trade, growth, debt and much, much else. Here we have textual evidence--the content of books, articles, essays widely recognized by the participants in a discourse about that idea or tradition as being of relevance to it. Thus arguing over the character of the economic policies of a Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, whether or not there is such a thing as a neoliberal economy and what it may look like, whether the U.S. has "deindustrialized" and "financialized," or what terms like "centrism" may be taken as denoting, there is a basis for some sort of reasoned and evidentiated case. I know full well that these issues are scenes of much cynical propagandizing within a context where emotions and the idiot quotient run high, all as our times are not known for reasonableness or civility in the examination of arguments presenting an understanding of these matters other than our own, but for all that one can make a proper argument for their position, however much the idiot scum who dominate so much of our discourse may fail to accord it the respect due it, as one may hope that at least some of those who will see it will be more evolved persons capable of fair-minded judgment, justifying one's taking the trouble to put it out there.

The culture war is as far away from that as one can get from the chances for this kind of argumentation. The evidence is "softer" and more diffuse, the texts rather more abstruse (especially should we risk the quagmire of trying to connect the often unreadable prose of postmodernist theoreticians with the conduct of the kulturkampfers who have weaponized their theories with as much crudity as ruthlessness to the point of making them household terms--to the frustration of those of us who had hoped never have to deal with them after we left the lecture hall). Still, if all this might very reasonably be thought a cynical distraction from those "hard" issues that really matter in an "It's the Economy, Stupid" world (I admit that this is the way my own prejudices run), those who have been determined to produce that distraction have, to absolutely no one's credit, been exceedingly successful in making them unavoidable--such that however much one despises political hacks' grandstanding about the symbolic to divert the public from what actually affects people's lives and sleazy use of wedge issues to get people at each other's throats in the hopes of their party's coming out ahead in the scrum, they cannot not acknowledge it, if only to say why it does not deserve to be acknowledged, and plead with the public to not fall for it for the umpteenth time, with their efforts unrewarded by any conspicuous success on this score, such that they are forced to make a renewed effort in the hopes of getting people to focus on the real conversation they would much rather be having. And so to absolutely no one's credit (not even my own, I think) I have ended up writing about these things all the same--like the usefulness of Richard Hofstadter's ideas about "status politics" as a way of understanding these conflicts, about their interaction with the content of popular culture in manifold ways, about what the language we have come to use in these clashes really means, and about just how much it all mattered (or didn't) at election time. I personally hope that I will not be at this for very long. But then, when I took up the challenge of trying to discuss neoliberalism in a more rigorous way than people were doing back when certain political hacks were pretending to the world that the concept had no meaning I didn't think I would still be at that particular, exhausting, game in 2025.

Grand Hotel and Hollywood Today

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Looking back on the Golden Age of Hollywood classic Grand Hotel I have been struck by how here we had a major studio (MGM) base a major feature film on source material ultimately derived from a fairly recent Austrian novel (Vicki Baum's People in a Hotel) while keeping its German characters and German setting rather than Americanizing them--then went on to have a box office hit and a Big Picture winner, with, so far as I can tell, no one thinking anything about the fact, perhaps not so surprisingly given that the year before the Big Picture winner had been based on another then-recent German-language novel, Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Meanwhile a couple of years later we got Hollywood's take on (German) Hans Fallada's story of a German clerk and his wife struggling to survive hard times as their country sinks into the Great Depression, Little Man, What Now?

In discussing this I do not want to downplay Germany's exceptional position at this time as an economic player (greater than it has ever been since), or the extent to which it was more than it would be afterward at the forefront in world culture, or the cultural connections between America and Germany generally, and Hollywood and Germany particularly. (One should remember that twice as many Americans can trace their ancestry to Germany as can trace it to England, and the arrival of many of these in America had then been much more recent, as seen in the way baby names like "Herbert" and "Bertha" were far more popular, with all that meant for familiarity with the language, the culture, feeling toward it.) All in all, it was a striking testimony to an openness on the part of Hollywood, and its American audience, to tales of other people and places, in Grand Hotel or Little Man, What Now?, quotidian tales of contemporary life such as we have not seen since, while All Quiet on the Western Front is still more remarkable as an anti-militaristic film whose story was told from the viewpoint of soldiers of a country that the U.S. had fought--and frankly, demonized--a scarce decade later, as it put the enemy front and center while treating those soldiers sympathetically and empathetically as human beings. (Can you imagine Hollywood making a movie which treated a recent, or even not so recent, enemy the same way? Certainly with any enemy the U.S. fought a war against since 1945?) And the tendency did, in respects, extend beyond Germany and even "the West," to go by the Hollywood version of The Good Earth. A novel by an American (Pearl S. Buck), adapted by Americans, for American viewers, this film, however much some may find it problematic today for these respects, could not have been the critical and commercial success that it was without American viewers having been capable of taking an interest in the lives of characters from a rural China even more remote to their experience.

By contrast with the Hollywood that made such films, and the American audience that saw them (for all their undeniable prejudices and other limitations) today's American film industry and audience seem a good deal less cosmopolitan than they were in that earlier era, less open to and interested of tales by and of other peoples and places. I will not presume to explain the whole development, but it seems to me plausible to think of the obsession with "relatability" as a condition of capturing and holding the interest of people seems relevant. The demand for what is relatable is a demand for what is personally familiar from the standpoint of one's limited life experience--and a tendency to coldness toward what is not immediately recognizable as familiar. There is nothing new in the desire for relatability, but that it should be the sin qua non that it is today implies at the same time the weakening or absence of a great many other things. An appreciation for the existence of a common humanity. An interest in what is not relatable, what is different, precisely because it is different. And implicit in that is a narrowing of sympathy and empathy, a stunting of the imagination, a decline of curiosity about the world and a greater self-centeredness. It all seems to me to be in line with the decline of a literacy that developed the imaginative and empathetic faculties (it may be telling that the films I mentioned here all had their origin in books), and the sense of being overwhelmed by the stresses of a decaying social order, and the tribalism that is so much a part of the epoch with all the mean-spirited Othering that is part and parcel of it, and makes of the rhetoric of "diversity" not respect for the variety of life and humanity but a cynical demand for "more" for one's own group. And altogether both cause and effect are not simply unfortunate, but exactly the opposite of what the world needs right now.

The Hollywood Movie Remake Racket

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

As those claqueurs and courtiers of Hollywood who may be collectively spoken as the entertainment press never fail to remind those who would criticize the tendency of the U.S. film industry to remakes these days, remakes have always been part of the industry's history. What these worthies do not rush to similarly remind them is that remakes were more easily justified in an earlier, different Hollywood. After all, in the studio system's early days the bosses thought of films not as works of art, or even "intellectual property," with all the possibility of lasting value, artistic or commercial, implied in that, but disposable commodities they frequently gave little thought to preserving, as ephemeral as a single performance of a play that might have a long run--perhaps the more plausibly in as there was such a vast output of films at high speed and low cost, and the art and the business were so much in flux. The rise of the talkie made silent films nearly unsalable, and the advent of the Motion Picture Production Code (i.e. "the Hays Code") meant that many pre-Code movies no longer met the requirements of censors a very short time after they were made. And so it was plausible to remake a silent film as a talkie, and a no longer "suitable" pre-Code film as a Code-compliant film to have a version that could be safely screened before the public. Indeed, in a time when the face of a star on the poster was a key selling point (often, a very large part of all the ticket-buyer knew about a movie), and stars flickered out fast, there was a case for remaking a movie from ten years ago with new stars--extending the play analogy, it seemed like merely recasting a play--with all this that much more the case in as the public did not have such easy access to the old versions. (Thus did we end up with three film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon in a decade--with the third of them, the one helmed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, the only one even genuine old movie-lovers are likely to have seen.) Later, the advent of widescreen formats like Cinemascope and Panavision, and color, made it plausible to remake spectacles like the historical epics of the black-and-white era to give them the visual benefit of those technologies (especially where, as with a Ben-Hur, the old version happened to be silent), all as the final fall of the Code in the late '60s opened the door to remaking movies that previously could only appear on the screen in bowdlerized form because of the extreme restrictions regarding the treatment of matters such as the law, sexuality and race. (Thus did the studios, post-Code, remake such noir classics as The Big Sleep and The Postman Always Rings Twice, two adaptations of classic crime novels where central elements could not be put on the screen because of such restrictions. The remakes, which did take advantage of the relaxed censorship, were not great artistic or commercial successes, but the point is that there was a case for the endeavor.)

All of this ceased to be plausible a long time ago, as there have been no innovations in film as fundamental as sound, or even color, or changes in standards so important as the rise and fall of the Code, while in a post-star milieu the idea that an old film will be made commercially viable by simply reshooting the old thing with new actors is not persuasive--with all this that much more the case with older films increasingly accessible in the age of multiplying cable channels, home video, and eventually streaming. This does not, I think, rule out any and all remakes. One can always argue for a remake if they think it will bring something new to the screen--for instance, by providing the kind of more faithful or otherwise more satisfactory adaptation that prior efforts failed to yield (as could be argued for when thinking of those old noir classics). Certainly I would regard a remake of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (previously filmed twice, by Josef von Sternberg and George Stevens, neither wholly satisfactorily) would be a valid idea. At the other end of the artistic spectrum I would think a new Conan the Barbarian film that was really faithful to Robert Howard's writing would also fit the bill (because, much as I share many others' fondness for the 1982 John Milius film, faithful it wasn't). But in the main that is not what we have been getting, the pattern instead one of crass cash grabs driven by the desire to exploit the name recognition of past hits, with wokeness at times served up as an excuse. (Like so much else of what people laughed at in the 1990s the old In Living Color sketch satirizing Ted Turner's "colorized classics" is no longer parody and satire, but conventional wisdom.) Most of these cash grabs fail--deservedly--but in a Hollywood where ego is colossal and brains are in short supply as simple-minded strategies for keeping the revenue coming fail they are holding on to the idea for dear life all the same.

Remembering Law & Order: Criminal Intent: "Anti-Thesis"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

It would seem that for a variety of reasons Law & Order: Criminal Intent left rather less of a pop cultural footprint than other shows in the same franchise. Still the show, which did in the end manage to air nearly two hundred episodes over its ten seasons, had some notable features. One was that in contrast with other L & O series', and especially the "mothership," its principal Detective Robert Goren was conceived not as, for example, another Lenny Briscoe, but rather a Great Detective in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. As is also the way with Great Detectives Goren had his nemesis, with the Moriarty to his Holmes--and I suppose, also the Irene Adler to his Holmes as well (his nemesis also the one who would for him always be "The woman!")--one Nicole Wallace.

The two first met up in the second season episode "Anti-Thesis," which title had a double meaning in Wallace being the criminal "antithesis" to Detective Goren, while also evoking the academic milieu in which Wallace had established herself--Wallace a Professor of American Literature at the go-to campus for the Law & Order universe's writers, the imaginary "Hudson University," where the episode opens (prior to the discovery of the body and the cut to the credits of the L & O formula) with a confrontation that, as is so often the case with the series, incorporated material "ripped out of the headlines" in obviously allusive fashion. In this case said headline was obviously the battle between then-Harvard University President Lawrence Summers and then-Harvard Professor Cornel West, with here "Professor Franklin Winthrop" chewing out "Professor Roland Sanders" for, among other things, having recorded a rap album that Winthrop, like Summers, held to be "an embarrassment" to the institution.

As this being Wallace's debut suggests, this episode really isn't about them, or about the Summers-West conflict, and indeed that is pretty much it for these two characters, but there does seem something to be said of how the episode presented the stand-ins for these two well-known public figures. The writers certainly do not flatter Summers--Winthrop coming off as at best narrow-minded and overbearing. However, I dare say that Cornel West got the worst of it, this stand-in for him presented as a swaggering thug, a mere gangster with tenure, with the far from subtle effort to make the impression underscored by the way he pointedly set the very rap album Winthrop chewed him out for playing in his office after saying his piece as Winthrop went on standing in front of him.

Of course, writers have evoked stereotypes such as this as a way of subverting them--presenting the image and then showing its falsity. In our time, however, it seems that the consensus view is that that particular technique is no longer acceptable, even if a progressive intent clearly lies behind it. Consider, for example, Frank Norris' classic of American naturalism McTeague. In that book he presents the most appalling Anti-Semitic stereotype in Zerkow (the caricature so over the top that after encountering it I wasn't sure that I cared to read much more of the book, feeling that I was holding something repugnant). Yet we see later that the thoroughly Nordic McTeague, in similar circumstances, ultimately conducts himself in the same (horrifying) manner, driving home very effectively the view that contrary to the fashionable theorizing of his day "race" is irrelevant, human beings regardless of heritage acting the same way in the same (destructive) circumstances. Yet, rightly or wrongly, today's reader of Norris is unlikely to acknowledge the book's using the caricature to such effect, only the caricature's unacceptability. And whether or not one would see this as having given them an excuse, the writers of "Anti-Thesis" gave no impression of having such an intent, just evoking the racist stereotype for the sake of a "red herring." Distasteful then it would seem less acceptable now; the more disappointing given that they had often displayed a measure of liberal conscientiousness in comparison with the "hardhat" politics to which the police procedural inclines; and perhaps reflective of how what we call liberal is apt to prove more centrist than anything else, with all that implies for their attitude toward a Larry Summers and a Cornel West, respectively, and how ready they are to play less than fair with the latter as they treat the former with a gentleness he does not deserve no matter how the economy-wrecking, poors-hating Friend of Epstein disgraces himself.

Of America's Being "Captivated" by the Nancy Guthrie Saga

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

We see it again and again. The national news media picks up some relatively minor story involving some crime that, while horrible for those personally involved, it would ordinarily not treat as a story of more than local interest because the story happened to involve someone who was nationally famous, or at least nationally famous-adjacent, and covers it all day everyday ad nauseam as that news media insists that the country is "captivated" by the story, can't get enough, that indeed the media themselves are captive to the overwhelming interest of the country in following the story.

It is, of course, a pack of very stupid lies, the truth the absolute inverse of what they say, the public captive to the media's feigned obsession, just as it was back when it was "All O.J. Simpson, All the Time." Speaking for myself, I was already sick of hearing about Simpson when he was fleeing the cops in that White Bronco mere days after the murders of his ex-wife and her lover, and, already that deeply disgusted by what I had seen of the not-so-bold new age of tabloid TV and infotainment that bespoke a country aware that it was having a nervous breakdown in that way that gave the cultural life of the 1990s its particular quality, as I watched the Bronco slow to a halt what I was thinking is "We're never going to hear the end of this @#!%&*! story, are we?" And indeed we didn't, no matter how much many of us didn't care to hear any more as the media talked endlessly about how "captivated" we all were all the way down to the tale's ignominious, justice-for-sale, race card-playing conclusion, with the press repeating the not just false but idiotic line when Mr. Simpson recently passed away, saying again and again how "captivated" we all were as, with rare exception, only people like me with no more than our unread little blogs for a platform, called out the lie, apparently to no effect whatsoever.

As it happens I remember only so much about the bigger context prevailing amid the Simpson coverage. Certainly I remember that this was a time in which, rather more than now, there was acknowledgment of the country's economic and social pain amid deindustrialization and other troubles, and that in early 1994 Bill Clinton's characteristically shameless betrayal of his promises to do something about them was already apparent and infuriating much of the public, but I don't recall whether there was a particular subject on the national mind that they were trying to change. By contrast there certainly was one when the news media shifted into its "All Nancy Guthrie, All the Time" mode. Those who can remember the events of four months back should be able to appreciate full well that this was an especially blatant and stupid case of changing the subject the way the media always does when public anger is rising over an issue--the resolutely anti-democratic press we have loyal to its mission not of informing public opinion but managing that opinion. Thus did the news become "All Nancy Guthrie, All the Time" after the intensification of the protests against ICE in the wake of the shootings of Renée Good and Alexi Pretti, the "change of subject" deflecting attention from the actions of ICE, the protests and everything to do with them, such that even though nothing changed, attentiveness to them has never been the same since. And then they went on giving us "All Nancy Guthrie, All the Time" amid the march to war with Iran that should have rated a good deal more mention than it did in the mainstream press, only those alternative outlets that the centrist champions of the mainstream endlessly denigrate, vilify, slight, even attempting to tell the public what it needed to know about a story that really affects their lives. Then after the war was on, it was only in those outlets that the public got anything other than the mushroom treatment (or worse) in which the mainstream media specializes, and to the lowest expectations about which it lived down as the war proceeded--and continues to live down to said expectations, to this very day, as that war rages on, with said media shamelessly banging the drums no matter what the public thinks of the matter, because, again, it is the audience captive to the media, not the other way around.

It's bad out there. Really bad. And with the Ellisons and their equally fascist cohorts from Silicon Valley striving to make themselves Kings of All Media every sign points to things getting worse that way, not just where their personal writ reigns supreme (as it does over at CBS, a news outlet whose online presence can these days seem to be devoted to promoting the Daily Mail-like tabloid racist filth that is the dishonestly named "Free Press"), but across a news media landscape that has done nothing but prove me wrong when I thought it hit rock bottom again and again until our arrival at this terrifying point in time.

The Outer Limits Does "Family Values"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Like Stargate: SG-1 and Tales From a Parallel Universe (which later became Lexx) the '90s-era revival of the '60s-era science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits appeared on Showtime amid the decade's boom in original live-action science fiction television production for cable, the newcomer over-the-air networks, and syndication. And like those other two shows, as Showtime lost interest in the genre and opted instead to tread the path HBO blazed with shows like the prestige TV era-launching The Sopranos, the revival of The Outer Limits found a new home on what was then still the Sci-Fi Channel. Airing there for one more season, the first episode the channel aired was the Tom Arnold-starrer "Family Values."

In this episode we meet a harried everyman named Jerry Miller (Arnold's character) who is clearly overwhelmed trying to juggle the demands of work and family--as we see when he is forced to leave work in the middle of the day to go to his daughter Candace's school because of her latest suspension. (Candace, a standard pseudo-mature "bad" girl trying to "grow up too fast," was caught smoking, and afterward gave Jerry only grief about it as if the school wronged her by forbidding her to smoke on their grounds.) However, watching TV late one night Jerry sees a commercial for "Gideon Robotics"' latest household robot model, the "Gideon 4000," and decides to buy one to help around the house. Jerry's family is initially less enthusiastic than he is about the purchase, but in short order the one they all call "Gideon" proves much more than a mechanical house-cleaner, confronting Jerry's wife Brooke over her drinking problem, and then on a night when Jerry and Brooke are both out, halting Jerry's son Russ and his friends' room-wrecking roughhousing, and saving Candace from what was fast turning into a very dangerous situation with her boyfriend. Afterward, showing that he can be Nurturing Parent as well as Strict Parent, Gideon coaches Russ in baseball as he encourages him to set aside the violent video games in favor of pursuing a spot on his school's baseball team, and Candace in singing as he gently guides her away from the things that got her into trouble to being a primly dressed model student with her mind on her studies, and her role in the upcoming school play. However Jerry grows uncomfortable as Gideon shows him less deference than before, and even supplants him in the family's life--the more obviously in that the family now actually has a family life (Gideon taking his place on a family picnic of the kind they never had, sitting in his armchair with the rest of the family as they watch television together the way they didn't do before). Increasingly threatened, Jerry makes an effort to get rid of Gideon that culminates in his attempting to physically destroy the robot and discard its remnants in a dumpster well away from home, but the next morning finds Gideon back in his house, and now laying down the law to Jerry, telling him in so many words that the Gideon robots "represent control, discipline, respect, values you forfeited or never had," just like the other "fathers failing their families all over North America" and producing a society more "dysfunctional" and "chaotic," and that he is now the head of the family, permanently. And that is that, the next scene, the episode's last, showing Gideon and the Millers sitting down together to dinner with Gideon at the head of the table from which he reprimands Jerry for his having neglected to wear a necktie to dinner, then leading the group in saying grace as the image melts into one of the Millers' next door neighbors being led in saying grace the same fashion by their own Gideon, and that image into the image of a third family in the same situation in a montage implying that this is happening all over the continent in those other North American families where fathers have similarly failed and "control, discipline, respect"-representing metallic hulks out of Gernsbackian-Golden Age science fiction art have now taken over to lead the nation back to a romanticized image of the 1950s.

Especially as this is an episode of the '90s-era The Outer Limits (with its penchant for stories in which some technological development goes badly for those involved with it) there is room to read the story as merely a "cautionary" tale about how technology may reflect the values and agendas of its creators and not the customer who unwittingly brings it into their home, rather than making a social comment about the necessity of traditional patriarchal authority. Indeed, the closing narration tells us that "Before allowing a machine to take over a part of your life, make sure that you know the true price you will be paying"--especially as the little we see of Gideon Robotics implies that the company's primary interest is not making sales (hence the bizarre terms of the contract on which it let Jerry try out the robot in his house--which require his wife, who had no part in the robot's purchase, to sign off on a return of the robot, and the indications by story's end that Gideon is not some individual robot "acting up" but doing what it seems he was supposed to be doing in all this).

However, the episode's writers also seem to agree with Gideon's essential diagnosis of the situation, and approve of much of what he does. In spite of the episode's allowing room to think that Gideon's helpful, nurturing side was a piece of manipulation to win over the family to his deference with Gideon's firm but gentle touch masking his agenda of "control, discipline, respect" that makes getting a Gideon appear to be a first step toward Gilead, even in the final frames Brooke, Candace and Russ seem not oppressed by the heavy hand of an overbearing patriarch, but healthier, happier, flourishing, and all of them crediting Gideon with having brought that about. Jerry is thus apparently alone in his misery--his displacement and anguish at it the only unambiguous downside of the situation, perhaps the price of the "upside" for everyone else, with this reading of the situation seeming the more plausible for his having no answer to Gideon's accusations against him, which the show simply allows to stand unchallenged as if they were irrefutable, even if they hardly seem to be so--especially if one recognizes the simplistic nature of the episode's attitude toward Jerry's inadequacies as a father figure. If not an ideal father the plain and simple fact is that Jerry is not out womanizing, for example, but rather blamed for working so much that he cannot attend to his family's affairs so well as he would like--while if something is made of Jerry's golf games we know that on at least one of these occasions the game appears in some measure a work responsibility, as it is his company's Vice-President with whom he will be golfing (in this as in so many other ways work not ending when one is "off the clock"). The episode's opening narration speaks of the "sacrifice of family to the altar of ambition," but the episode falls far short of showing us that this is what is going on, the claim actually contradicted by the fact that during this episode we see Jerry leave work not once but twice to deal with an apparent family emergency, and that he at least attempts to have family dinners. The accusation also slights the hard reality that in a society where workers are insecure and have little protection from the demands of their employers, the more in as business has succeeded in imposing on working people a work culture that regards employees as living to work rather than working to live and anyone expecting anything else as simply lazy scum. Epitomized by the swaggering douchebag overlords of Silicon Valley bragging about their "hardcore" company cultures, it is also the case that ceaseless rounds of layoff and "up or out" career tracks are the order of the day in far less ostentatiously "hardcore" work environments, while even where they do remain in their jobs the cost of living has pressed harder on workers' incomes pretty much every year for as long as anyone can remember with all that means for the pressure on workers to pursue raises and promotions. The practical result is that for those in jobs like Jerry's, without which he would not have been able to keep his family in the upper middle-class comfort so taken for granted here as in just about every other piece of media we get, the line between "being ambitious" and "just trying to stay out of the unemployment line" is effectively nonexistent, and the accusation that one is "sacrificing family" for work that, frankly, is a sacrifice made for family, not merely light-minded but a case of victim-blaming. In fact it seems relevant that Gideon has no such responsibilities, being a "breadwinner" apparently not part of a father's obligation in his conception (all as Jerry's contributions to the household--as its sole breadwinner--get him no consideration from Gideon). Altogether Gideon, and the script, treat Jerry's failings as a matter of shortcomings in "personal responsibility", not least the entirety of the responsibility of keeping the household in line extending to Jerry's (stay-at-home) wife Brooke, it seemingly his charge to keep her in line as much as the children.

That made for much more than the usual surprise even in a series which relies very heavily on the ironic twist ending. Certainly, contrary to the nonsense about Hollywood's "liberalism" television's content tends to be very right-wing indeed, whether in its exalting the affluent and mocking the poor, glorifying the security state, whipping up racist and xenophobic fears, or siding with "faith" against reason. However, anything touching gender has tended to be a different matter, with those who do criticize Hollywood from the right on solid ground when they point out that it makes men generally and fathers particularly look like fools--and indeed treats the would-be traditional "pater familias" with disdain, exemplified by Al Bundy's then-recently displacing a Jim Anderson as the archetypal TV dad. For a show like The Outer Limits to valorize a heavy patriarchal hand as a necessity without which a home will be in chaos and society will fall to pieces (with which right-wing messaging the treatment of Jerry's work, the advocacy of authoritarianism, the touch of hysterics about "out-of-control kidz," the hint of religiosity, were all entirely in line) was rather less expected, sufficiently so that, even if it was just one episode of a past-its-peak anthology series running on a relatively little-watched basic cable channel in a period before the web came to be as awash in pop cultural commentary of the most minute kind as it now is I would have still thought it likely to rate some remark (perhaps the more in as it was the opener of a new season on a new channel). If there is any such comment out there, though, I haven't seen it, perhaps because the show just wasn't on too many people's radars, but also likely because Hollywood's more right-wing messaging tends to go right over the heads of those who would interpret contemporary culture for the rest of us , with all that implies about the fitness of the "professionals" for the job.

Blogging on the Dead Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Reviewing this blog's numbers at the time of this writing (December 2025) I find that in 2023 and then again in 2024 my page view count exploded. The twelve-month December 2024-November 2025 period actually saw me get more page views than I got in all the preceding years between that point and the establishment of the blog way back in 2008. Indeed, during that twelve month period my better days saw me get more page views in a day than I got in just about any month before 2023, while in single months in 2024 I got more views than I previously received in whole multi-year periods.

Yet the evidences of actual humans being responsible for that explosion of traffic just aren't there. Comments? Cutting out the ever-more abundant spam unmistakable as anything else (like the comments completely irrelevant to what I wrote that contain links obviously intended to promote somebody else's web site, deleting which is a regular chore now) I'd say that, relative to the page views, they're down by more than ninety percent. Contrary to the glib, stupid claims about social media being magic for everyone online it was never a big source of views for this blog, but delivers even less now, while it is rarer than ever that I seem to get anything from backlinks anywhere. Meanwhile there is my data from Google's search engine, which accounts for only one of the ways in which traffic reaches this blog, but certainly where the overall Internet is concerned perhaps the most important. It seems these days that I am getting more "impressions" on Google, a multiple of what I was getting two years ago--but the ratio of clicks to impressions has plummeted such that I may be actually getting less clicks now than when I was getting only a fraction of the impressions I have been getting lately.

Why bring all this up? Because of the relevance of the hard empirical data I have summarized here for the argument over whether we are ever less likely to encounter, or be encountered by, an actual human being online in the way we so often used to do, and much, much more likely to meet the bots generating not just absolutely but relatively much, much more of the traffic online than before--which argument this data overwhelmingly supports. I also bring it up because that, in turn, has a good many implications, not the least of them that, if my experience is typical then one would imagine a great many persons becoming discouraged in the activity and giving up on it altogether.

Is there evidence for that? It seems to me that a great many bloggers I used to follow have long since cut back on their posting--bloggers who used to post something every couple of weeks now putting up a new post every half year or so. Or ceased to receive updates, or even disappeared altogether from the web (such that a good many blogs that used to be in the blogroll on the right side of this page have been deleted). Yet the information I have been able to come up with tells me that the number of blogs has not decreased. People are putting less effort into blogs--but there may be as much blogging as ever because they have artificial intelligence applications generating content for them, lowering the costs of producing "content," which keeps them at the game. In the process we have ended up with a situation in which an increasing proportion of blogging is machine-generated content produced for an audience that now overwhelmingly consists of . . . machines. Whether they are promoting a business, authors attempting to win an audience for their writing, enthusiasts merely trying to share an interest, this is not their intention, but it is the result, a situation where in place of what we once grandly called "the blogosphere" where millions of humans were saying their word to the world, what we have is in the main bots writing for other bots. In contrast with the more narrowly utilitarian web of essential services, and commerce, where real humans are constantly active, this side of the web seems ever closer to what we speak of when we refer to the "dead" Internet--all as the dead Internet seems to me to represent the death of something else, the desperate, doomed, hope that the Internet we got, for all its limitations compared with the Internet we should have had, democratizing the creation and distribution of "content" in some degree. As more and more people realize now, it hasn't, the oligarchs of Big Media in its various forms exercising ever more control over what people see, hear, read and believe, all as democracy--and freedom--and truth--are not only the last things on whatever passes with them for minds, but things they actively strive to eliminate from the world.

"The Not So Good War": Robert Ludlum's World War II

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Looking back on the profusion of bestselling spy thrillers set during World War II in the 1970s it has seemed to some, myself included, plausible that the popularity of World War II as a setting for such thrillers was that it seemed a less fraught period in which, in contrast with a period where in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Frank Church hearings, détente, and much, much else, and any pretense of there being a consensus about the goodness of the West's security states against villainous Soviets was rather less tenable than it had seemed some years earlier, people could still broadly agree on who were the "good guys" and "bad guys." (Certainly this seems to well describe Ken Follett's blockbuster The Eye of the Needle, with its good guy Britons vs. bad guys Nazis plot, all as those more enduring novels then set in the present, like John le Carre's Karla trilogy, or Graham Greene's The Human Factor, tended to take a more jaundiced view of the West's relations with the developing world.)

Still, looking at Robert Ludlum's use of World War II in his books one gets something other than a flight into patriotic simplicities--his plots typically having American business in bed with the Nazis. Thus did it go in The Scarlatti Inheritance, where a scion of an American industrial dynasty used his family's fortune to bankroll the National Socialist Party at an early stage of its development. Ludlum set the first part of his later The Gemini Contenders during the war--but then ties that legacy in with the very present political struggles between a power-mad and militaristic Army officer and his liberal brother, while in The Rhinemann Exchange, Ludlum's only novel set entirely during World War II, American industry made a Faustian pact with its German counterparts. (U.S. industry needed to deliver a gyroscope to the Army for its bombers, which it did not have but which the Germans did have; while the Germans needed diamonds for their missile program, to which the Americans had superior access; and each sought to trade what they had for what they needed, with all that implied about America's own elite in even those romanticized times.) One could also see it all tied together in what is in many ways the high-water mark of Robert Ludlum's more intensely Anti-Establishment work, The Chancellor Manuscript, where his protagonist Peter Chancellor, nearing the end of grad school and about to embark on a career as a professor of history, sees his career derailed by the machinations of the country's "secret government" Inver Brass precisely because they do not want his dissertation's investigation into the financing of the Nazis, and what it said about "a number of the most honored industrial names in America"--an investigation to which he was drawn, Chancellor's own thoughts tell us, because of the infuriating "parallels with the present" of that episode with the present at the height of the Vietnam War (1968) that made it all too clear how "Nothing had changed . . . the lies of forty years ago still exist[ing]" and leaving him with the duty of telling the story, something he did even after his academic career was quashed. At the suggestion of the Inver Brass functionary whose job it was to prevent Chancellor's revelations as history he proceeded to a career as a novelist in which he told the truth in the guise f fiction--a metafictional touch that, perhaps playfully, perhaps not entirely so, invites us to wonder how much of what we are reading is history as the members of that secret government itself begin to contend with one another over possession of the files of J. Edgar Hoover. The past thus appears no different from the very fraught present--and indeed a reminder that far from the discontents of the moment being exceptional and passing, the Establishment was always rotten, and its agents in the moment working to elide memory itself where it was an obstacle to their objects.

The Endurance of Martin Scorsese's Critical Reputation: A Few Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

Looking back at New Hollywood it is common for film historians to remark how those filmmakers whose stars shined mostly brightly during those years saw their output decline sharply in quantity and quality afterward, such that they seem epilogues to stories that ran their course in the '70s, and often before its end. The comparative newcomers so identified with that moment are the most obvious--Bogdanovich, Altman, Friedkin, Coppola, Cimino, Ashby--though the careers of older filmmakers who had been part of the tendency, like Penn and Lumet, went the same way, with much the same sayable in varying degrees of figures like Pakula, or May, or Beatty, or Schrader. Where there was commercial success it did not go with great artistic accolades--with a Nichols never again enjoying the cachet he did when he made his splash with The Graduate, and Lucas remembered mainly as the creator and overseer of the Star Wars universe, rather than someone who had been involved in movies like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.

In the end the only New Hollywood superstar I can think of who really retained their standing as an Important Filmmaker after the close of the era is Martin Scorsese. It would be nice to say that here was someone who defied the odds, but it may be that his career endured not because of the ways in which he was really just not all that much of a rebel. If politically sophisticated film critics like Peter Biskind and David Walsh are attentive to the limits of New Hollywood's filmmakers' critical gaze at the world and capacity to translate it into art (having only "rudimentary alternative ideologies," Biskind wrote, they ended up mainly offering "deconstruction" of existing genres), they still recognize the "oppositional" stance and what it meant for their work and for society, that the tolerance for it was fading fast in the press and the studio executive suites and other places which matter, and that they paid the price for it (Kris Kristofferson, for instance, very clear about how they all had it in for Cimino after Heaven's Gate). However, as one sees when they compare the films of Scorsese with those of Coppola, Scorsese's fascination with criminals was less radical than "petty bourgeois," and it was easy enough for him to shift from tales of small-time gangsters to films like The Aviator, a right-wing paean to the high-tech "innovator" and "entrepreneur" so celebrated in the immediately preceding years, the makers of which were quite prepared to do considerable violence to the facts to get the Message across (from their transforming Katherine Hepburn's family into the stuff of radical chic cliché, to presenting rich and powerful oligarchs as if they were beleaguered "little guys" fighting to hold their own against "government"). Doubtless this contributed to Scorsese's being able to go on working as he did, and enjoying the praises that he did--certainly to go by how eight of his films become Best Picture Academy Award nominees after the close of the New Hollywood period (in the years 1990-2023), a record with which not one of his contemporaries really compares, and which seems only underlined by how, in David Walsh's estimate, Scorsese's repute as "the 'greatest living American filmmaker'" seem an accolade he won "to a certain extent by default."

Of Herman Wouk and James Jones: A Few Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

One doesn't hear much of the writers Herman Wouk or James Jones these days, and still less comparison of the two. Still, such comparison was once common, and for good reason. Both Wouk and Jones were young men in the Depression era who served in the Pacific campaign in World War II. Both became Big Names at nearly the outset of their careers with novels they published in 1951 that were inspired by their wartime experience (Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, Jones' From Here to Eternity) that were each one of the top two bestsellers of the year (Wouk's book #2, Jones' book #1 on the Publisher's Weekly list for that year), claimed a major literary award (Wouk's getting the Pulitzer, Jones' the National Book Award), and shortly made into an Oscar-winning film classic (in 1953 and 1954, respectively). It may be added that both writers repeatedly returned to the theme of World War II in their writing over the next two decades (Wouk in the epics The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Jones in The Thin Red Line and the unfinished Whistle), which Hollywood adapted for the screen in high-profile fashion, while remaking the films based on their earlier work (New Hollywood star William Friedkin most recently remaking The Caine Mutiny for Showtime). And enduring as their cultural presence was in this way, both writers' admirers thought that their author is less read than he ought to be, in part because he never got his due from the critical elite, partly because they wrote in a fairly straightforward fashion that made them accessible to and popular with a general audience rather than gleefully crapping all over conventional narrative in service to the Great God Unreason in that way so beloved of the middlebrow today.

Still, along with the similarities there were differences, key to which is how each of these writers treated the war, and it might be added, American society, in their first book and those that followed it. Wouk was sufficiently to the right to uphold tribal taboo on principle, sneer at civilians as the moral inferiors of soldiers, and even stand for flat authoritarianism in the key revelatory scene in The Caine Mutiny that left many appalled and bewildered (not least the sociologist William Whyte, who discusses the scene critically in his book The Organization Man as exemplary of what he feared was becoming of post-war American society). By contrast Jones took a far more critical stance toward society, toward the armed forces, toward the war itself.

All of this has had its reflection in just who has felt the authors in question to be underappreciated. It is for the most part neoconservatives like David Frum and John Podhoretz whom one finds celebrating Wouk these days (John, interestingly, going so far as to lengthily apologize in the pages of Commentary for his father's less than flattering review of one of Wouk's books six decades earlier!)-- while if it was less gushingly enthusiastic, the Guardian's obituary for Mr. Wouk was highly respectful. By contrast the Guardian, reviewing a recent musical stage adaptation of From Here to Eternity--some elements of which musical one would expect to have led to a very positive review given the attitude of the Guardian's editors toward such matters--took a dismissive "Why dredge all that up now?" attitude toward the play's critical treatment of the armed forces. As all this goes to show, it is not even in the more "liberal" corners of the mainstream but on the "real," and rather marginalized, left that one finds a really critical attitude toward Wouk, or a more admiring one toward Jones.

Of course, if one is more likely to come across admirers of Wouk than Jones, their laments testify to Wouk as well as Jones being little read today, one can argue that (aside from that fact which cannot be stated enough, that fewer and fewer read much of anything today, let alone books) the view of the war and of life Wouk championed has had its standard-bearers--that even if few read his novels, the books, film, video games created by Steven Spielberg, Tom Brokaw, Stephen Ambrose and the makers of the Call of Duty series, if not directly influenced by Wouk, at least carried forward his broad vision of the conflict as they shaped the understanding of World War II and America today. (One can go so far as to say that with them coming along in the 1990s the job of promulgating such a view had been picked up by younger persons better able to champion it in a culture very different in many ways from what it was in 1951 than Wouk was.) In the process the view of the war, the armed forces and all associated with them espoused by figures like Jones--or Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut, or Joseph Heller, or any number of others whose experience and painfully won understanding has not fit in with the Greatest Generation/Band of Brothers narrative--has been all but buried so far as the popular consciousness is concerned, a fact likely of considerable consequence in the war-torn twenty-first century.

Barry Lyndon Speaks the Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon is a famously unreliable narrator--as Thackeray's own footnotes comparing Lyndon's recountings to the record attest. However, amid the self-justifying and self-glorifying lies of the tale's exceedingly vain and foolish protagonist there is a good deal of truth about the larger things in the world, not all of which one has to read between the lines to detect, some of it told us plainly by Barry himself. Exemplary of this is what he says of the Seven Years' War in which he personally fought in the army of "'the Protestant hero,' as we used to call the godless old Frederick of Prussia."

As Barry tells us, "[i]t would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the causes of the famous Seven Years' War in which Europe was engaged," as it is not only the case that the war's origin was "complicated," but "the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning." What he does know, however, is the killing and petty thieving and worse of the battlefield where, contrary to nonsense about bygones ages of chivalry, the fighting is done by "starving brutes . . . nursed in poverty, entirely ignorant, made to take a pride in deeds of blood--men who can have no amusement but in drunkenness, debauch, and plunder," such persons the "shocking instruments that your great warriors and kings have been doing their murderous work in the world," so that while the England of his day sang the glories of rulers like Frederick he thinks only of "What a number of items of human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that sum-total of glory!" when, not least, thinking of what he had personally been part of on the march. Indeed, Barry's crimes look rather small next to those of the monarchs the conventional glorify as they condemn Barry's behavior.

Thackeray's satire of the self-seeking and snobbery of the genteel in Vanity Fair can seem rather tame stuff today, "radical" only from the standpoint of a past generation and even then less so than some of those contemporaries of his with whom he is so often compared (like Balzac)--but words like these still cut today, and perhaps the more now than they might have a few years ago as the reality of war, war on a grand scale, impinges ever more heavily on the minds of all but the most obtuse today.

What Ever Happened to Velcro Strap Shoes?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:46:56 +0000

In a prior post I remarked the "sandalization" of footwear and the inanity of the explanation of this as a matter of the fashion industry accommodating itself to "consumer demand" for cheap, casual, convenient footwear reflective of a more easygoing, less uptight, less unequal and hierarchical society. Rather it seems a matter of the business getting the consumer to take what they want them to take, which is "less for more" in the form of flimsy footwear at high prices, all as the aesthetic reflects the "leisure class" mentality of "conspicuous waste" (very expensive flimy shoes whose owners advertise not just their being able to afford the "pecuniary damage," but their plush lives requiring little foot protection, etc.), the ascent of which reflects the reality of a society which is more unequal, barbarically so, in a manner that makes the "market populist" obfuscations of the neoliberal era look ever more unconvincing.

All of this would seem underlined by what vanished as the sandal (and especially the flip-flop) became ubiquitous, the Velcro strap shoe. All the rage back in the '80s these seemed to represent a great advance in making shoes simultaneously well-fitting and sturdy, and convenient to put on--much more so than, for example, shoes with laces the wearer must tie. However, their moment didn't last long. Looking into the matter it seems only fair to point out that their solution was imperfect, given that over time Velcro straps come to work less well--wearing out more quickly than, for example, "lower-tech" solutions. Yet that does not seem the whole of the matter, as one could picture the shoes being designed so that the Velcro straps are conveniently replaceable--the user, after performing a switch (a bit of hassle which would save them a lot of hassle later on) tossing aside the worn-out piece of Velcro, but keeping the rest of the shoe. Others point to how the very convenience the shoes were supposed to provide was mocked as something befitting small children and the elderly but laughable in an able-bodied adult--but again that explanation is less than satisfying. After all, if the Velcro strap shoe seems like a "lazy" shoe in the eyes of the moralizing idiot who thinks any convenience is somehow unvirtuous, the sandals that so proliferated in the 1990s, particularly thonged ones, were if anything even "lazier," people slipping them on and off without even bending down to strap themselves into their shoes. Granting this some may say that however much that was the case the laziness was less obvious, such that the sandal-wearer got the benefit of the doubt that way, but this seems pretty thin as well--and altogether the most plausible reading seeming to me to be that industry just found it more profitable to sell those sandals than to sell those more materials- and workman-ship-intensive Velcro strap shoes, and certainly any such shoes where the straps would be replaceable.