Raritania

The Quirks of Clancy's Ryanverse on the Screen

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Tom Clancy's heyday as a novelist was unquestionably in the 1980s, but the "Ryanverse" he created remains an on-screen presence decades later with Amazon's Jack Ryan series only recently wound up and much more of the Ryanverse supposed to be in the pipeline (not least, a film extending the series). As one might expect in all those decades the franchise has had its share of little oddities from the standpoint of cinematic and pop cultural history.

There is the way that, after making The Hunt for Red October Paramount decided to film Patriot Games with an older actor for what was supposed to be the prequel--a sixteen-years-older than Alec Baldwin Harrison Ford, pushing fifty as he played the "younger" Ryan after edging Baldwin out of a lead once again. (The prior time was in Working Girl, just a couple of years earlier.) There was the irony of star of the avant-garde, countercultural, post-punk Manhattan nightclub scene, face from edgy films like The Hunger and quirky ones like Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right, and audience-tantalizing narrator of HBO's sex-soaked Shock Video: Turn-On TV documentaries (how un-Clancy can you get?) Ann Magnuson playing that stereotype of espionage history and fiction, the lonely secretary susceptible to exploitation by a foreign "Romeo" in Clear and Present Danger (which, of course, is as un-Ann Magnuson as it gets). There was the odd notion of pairing William Shatner with Harrison Ford in the unrealized The Cardinal of the Kremlin. (Captain Kirk meets Han Solo! Great for publicity, great for jokes and laughs--but probably not what those who wanted the film taken seriously were hoping for.) There was how Harrison Ford's Air Force One could be mistaken for a Jack Ryan movie because Ford was playing the President that Ryan had just become in a big techno-thriller film. There was the decision to turn The Sum of All Fears into a rebooting prequel with Ryan as a "rookie," in spite of Ryan's seniority having been central to the resolution of the plot's central crisis--and one might add, the fact that Ben Affleck was so well-received in the role. (These were the now all but forgotten days before Gigli, and the horrible blow that far from brilliant but probably-not-really-worse-than-a-multitude-of-crappy-post-Tarantino-indie-crime-movies film dealt to many of the reputations involved, from which some bounced back--because, really, who could hate Jennifer Lopez on screen?--though alas poor Affleck never completely escaped the backlash even two decades on.)

There was the decision to reboot the franchise yet again in 2015, way, way after the brand wasn't what it used to be, without even a book on which to base the story--this entirely original tale simply using Ryan's name in the B-movieish title, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, while the producers' apparently thinking that making Ryan a rookie again would make it look less "dad thriller," cast Chris Pine as Ryan (instead of Captain Kirk meets Han Solo as Jack Ryan, it was Captain Kirk playing Jack Ryan!) with Sir Kenneth "Shakespeare for the Masses" Branagh not just playing the Russian villain but helming too--and the whole thing ultimately demoted from the would-be summer blockbuster launch the past three Ryanverse films got to a January dump month release. There was the long sequence of unlikely "Mr. Clarks," from Willem Dafoe to Liev Schreiber to Michael B. Jordan (the last in a Without Remorse perhaps unavoidably changed out of all recognition given that even in the '90s the original had been a piece of nostalgia). And of course, after all that, there was the idea of making Jim from The Office the Jack of the series that has been the most recent incarnation of the franchise. (Cue the jokes about Dwight being green with envy, a portrait of life at CIA headquarters where the cast talk to the camera in between office hijinks, and the Jim Halpert stare.)

One would expect it all to have been somewhat more remarked, but again, the brand (in spite of Amazon's recent success with it) just doesn't get the attention it used to, all as I'm not sure how many of those who comment from any sort of significant platform actually looked at Clancy's books--not just recently, but ever, such that I wonder just how many people looking at Patriot Games realize that it was a prequel. (Thrillers of this type tend to see their readerships erode fast and far when their profile drops, all as people are just plain reading less in general, and especially doing less light reading for entertainment.) Indeed, these days it is mainly old folks paying attention (it seems the streaming audience for Jim Halpert's turn as Jack Ryan is skewing strongly gray), the young, I imagine, knowing Clancy as a brand name in video games more than books, movies or TV. Still, the situation also reflects the way things get knocked around in adaptation, the vagaries of artists' careers (don't we want performers to be able to stretch themselves and surprise us?), and how strange such entertainment can look long after their day has passed (Jack Ryan, like so many other such figures, a creature of the Cold War, and only reminding us of that as he dealt with the aftermath of the conflict in a novel like The Bear and the Dragon).

Will There be an Audience for James Bond in 2028?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

As the pandemic proved to be a lingering phenomenon I came to expect that it would mean a long-term structural change for the cinematic market through its changing of habits and shuttering of theaters. I doubted that expectation for a while after seeing what big hits Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun 2 and Avatar 2 became, and thought that the return of a pre-pandemic-style release slate in 2023 would see the business bounce back completely or close to it--then as 2023, and 2024, and now 2025 proceeded, saw that there had indeed been long-term structural change, with American box office grosses down 40 percent from their 2015-2019 level for two years running and the international market too taking what seems an equally bad hit. With Americans now going to the movies about twice a year instead of the 3-4 times seen before tentpoles became a much riskier proposition, the fate of franchises like the recently triumphant Marvel Cinematic Universe exemplary of the situation. An occasional blockbuster of the conventional type can make as much as ever it did (as the aforementioned films show), but underperformance was much more common than before, with the list of undeniable catastrophic flops mounting (The Flash, Captain Marvel 2, etc.), as the successes proved to be more targeted and frankly fresher hits (from a Taylor Swift concert movie, to our video game adaptations, to an Oppenheimer or a Sinners)--with this going even for movies that may at first glance look like ordinary blockbusters, like Deadpool & Wolverine, a colossal success by even pre-pandemic standards and indeed a real-terms best performance for the 25-year old X-Men/Deadpool universe.

None of this bodes well for the current plans for "Bond 26," which going by everything said about it is intended to be another big-budgeted tentpole aimed at a general audience of exactly the kind failing to pay off, all as this particular franchise looks especially chancy given the increasingly exhausted look of the "spy-fi" genre (consider the decline of the Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises), all as Bond appears even more vulnerable than 007 these days.

No comparable franchise has leaned so heavily on nostalgia for so long as this one has (falling back on it to help prop up a reboot whose runners initially tried to cut their links with the original series, from Skyfall forward), while it was painfully apparent from the audience response to No Time to Die that the young had pretty much long since lost interest in that particular hero, a fact that contributed to the movie's having the lowest real-terms North American gross of a Bond movie since Licence to Kill way back in 1989. (Indeed, it seems fair to say that while the reboot undeniably pleased a lot of critics and made a lot of money, where that important measure for a neverending franchise that is winning a new generation to the character is concerned it has to be regarded as a failure, and a predictable one given that where it wasn't running on nostalgia it was running on borrowed ideas.) The result is that when 2028 rolls around very few of those in the two "24 and under" quadrants are likely to have any personal recollection of seeing a Bond movie in an actual theater, with all that implies for any appeal based on prior attachment. Meanwhile it is hard to picture anything making this figure, way back in 1962 already an update of what was in 1953 an update of the already then very stale stuff of Duckworth Drew and Bulldog Drummond, "relevant" today, even the route of self-awareness and self-parody that, for example, worked so well for 2024's Deadpool movie long since exhausted here, nowhere left to go with the big screen spy parody, or even parody of this particular spy (whose adventures had their touch of parody from the start, with Charles Feldman already having Peter Sellers essay the role way back in 1967).

Indeed, the extreme challenge of making a Bond movie salable now on the scale that it needs to be in today's saturated yet contracting market--something M. Bezos might have considered before plunking down so much money for control of the franchise, but hey, why actually think in an age in which Ms. Bernanke, Yellen and Powell decided that speculators and other asset-mongers should have free money forever, the cost to everyone else be damned--is probably why even with the project supposedly underway for half a year, with two prominent producers (Amy Pascal, David Heyman) and a Big Name director (Denis Villeneuve) attached, we have yet to see made public the slightest hint of anything resembling an actual idea as to what they all mean to do with the franchise that will let them deliver the hit the real-life would-be world-controlling billionaire with his own personal space program expects. (The combination of cacophonous noise with the utter lack of signal in fact seems to have had talk of the much smaller event of a new Bond video game "trending" online to a degree it would ordinarily not have done because between the contentless publicity for the film and the cynical copy of the articles about the game they were made to think the Bond of Bond: First Light had actually been cast as the Bond of "Bond 26.") My guess: rather than holding back until the time is right to deliver a big and brilliant surprise Ms. Pascal of Sony e-mail leak fame, Mr. Villeneuve and company are going to give us more pretentious, downbeat, James Bond. In the process this will likely only underline how unbelievably tired the game of making not just Bond movies but shamelessly milking any and every franchise out there has become as, befitting an epoch of rentier dominion, those defending the decision point to "back catalog value" as offering at least a silver lining to the big dark cloud that will hang over the series runners when the receipts are in.

Has the Ceiling Fallen for Superhero Films?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

2025 was supposed to be a year of recovery for Hollywood generally, and the superhero film genre particularly, with Marvel seizing on the undeniable smash that Deadpool & Wolverine was at the box office in the summer of 2024 with a new Captain America, a New Avengers, and a daring reimagining of the Fantastic Four (third time's the charm!), while Warner Bros. was launching its reboot of the DC universe with Superman.

Of course, there were those who were skeptical about the bullish press--as I was about the year generally, the superhero film more specifically, and particularly the claqueurs' insistence that the Deadpool movie was proof that "Marvel's back!" But as the fact that you have come across this view not in the Penske Press but on a blog of the type very much an endangered species in the Internet's Maximum Era, no one of real weight in Hollywood or the claqueurs who dutifully represent their views to the world at large cared to air such an opinion in public. Of course, as usual these days the Establishment view proved wrong, the view of the dissenters right, as all four superhero movies disappointed. Even with prices in 2025 about 25 percent higher than in 2019 according to a Consumer Price Index that almost certainly underestimates it the movies made between $382 million and $617 million, and took in less than $1.94 billion altogether. Putting it in 2019 terms the biggest success didn't quite make the half billion dollar mark, while the average take was more like $400 million, versus the billion-plus bucks that were commonplace at the time.

There is no way to spin that as a success by comparison with the grosses superhero films so regularly scored not just in Marvel's Phase Three glory days, but the "real" grosses of such films through the twenty-first century as you recall when you look at the consistent successes of Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man, as well as the X-Men, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Aquaman series' at their strongest commercially, and for that matter, the colossal financial investment of the studios in all of these films that makes a lot more sense when that billion-dollar gross is a possibility. But that was how things went during the year--even with most of these films frankly being well-received by critics, and those moviegoers who bothered to show up, so, no, the lame "There's no superhero movie fatigue, just bad superhero movie fatigue" line won't fly, while the admitted backlashes against both Captain America 4 and Superman probably ought not be overrated as factors in this decline. (We've seen worse before, not always to much effect.) This is all the more the case in that it is all too consistent with what I have been saying over and over and over again, namely that the long-eroding box office has shrunken structurally and sharply post-pandemic, that if you want people to show up to your movie they really have to be excited for it, and that large more casual audience tentpoles used to be able to draw in with some regularity just cannot be counted upon anymore.

"But what about Deadpool?" the doubter may splutter. Again I insist that Deadpool did so well in 2024 not as a "four quadrant" tentpole for everybody but as a movie playing to a very enthusiastic, if also very large, cult and giving those fans what they want rather than trying to be a broader crowd-pleaser. In the absence of Deadpool-like devotion the ceiling would seem to have definitely fallen for the superhero film, with (I know full well it's a small data set, but it broadly aligns with my calculations about an overall market just 60 percent the size of the 2015-2019 average) $600 million about as good as it gets. Should American superhero films get their old opportunity in the China market (and that doesn't seem out of the question post-Zootopia 2) they might do better than that by supplementing their earnings elsewhere with more money from this market. Still, the game has changed, with this reaffirmed by the fact that it isn't just superhero films but big action movies of all types that are suffering, as we see with Avatar 3's take down significantly from that of the prior film in the series (which itself had a gross way down from that of the original), and the troubles of the spy-fi genre as seen in the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible movies (and it seems fair to say, the slowness with which the next Bond movie is coming along). And so rather than tentpoles the studios would do better to target smaller movies at smaller audiences and, by racking up lots of relatively large profits keep their businesses in business--a practice which does not necessarily rule out superhero movies, of course, even big-budget ones (it worked with Deadpool!), but makes the strategy that has prevailed for so long an ever-bigger money-loser likely to just put more red ink on books that already have so much of them that Hollywood as a whole can seem to be going the way of Enron.

The Compromises of '90s TV

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Back amid the mostly "new network," cable and syndication-based '90s boom in science fiction television some have spoken of as a "golden age" for the genre in that medium--though one might do well to remember that this was, from the standpoint of those who value science fiction's more cerebral uses, at least as much a matter of quantity as of quality, there having been a plenitude of fare that was more lowbrow in nature. Indeed, in 1998 Gardner Dozois remarked in the "Summation" of the "year in science fiction" with which he introduces the editions of his annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies that the principal theme of science fiction television at the time seemed to be "Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt," for even as an identity politics-minded Hollywood's attempts to make female-led action movies a commonplace at the level of big-budget feature film fizzled (exemplified by Geena Davis' two flops, 1995's Cutthroat Island and 1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight) there was an abundance of such material on the small screen. As Dozois' phrasing in regard to "Women Kick Male Butt" indicates, this meant, from those more favorably disposed to the development, shows about "strong" and "empowered" women defying gender norms as they gave what some held to be an underserved female audience action-adventure "in their own flavor," with protagonists to which they could relate and who could embody their fantasies--all as those less favorably disposed (less often heard from in the "respectable" mainstream) saw this as a stridently "political" presentation of stories and images of "masculinized" women constantly fighting, defeating, dominating, humiliating males physically and in other ways amid much feminist Rah-Rah, with this not only going for their enemies but the helpmeets to which the "good" male characters were emasculatingly reduced in a misandrist and man-bashing spectacle. Still, along with the "Women Kick Male Butt" aspect there was the matter of the Women doing the Kicking being "Beautiful," with feminists delighted at the kicking of male butt by women less delighted at the way that the women doing the kicking so consistently conformed, often in very great degree, to conventional standards of feminine beauty and sexual attractiveness--the more in as many men were not unappreciative of the fact.

Thus looking at the combined package--"Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt"--it would seem no one was completely happy, but at the same time there was "something for everyone," and pleasing all of the people some of the time was what mattered in that media market. Thus did the vampire-slaying Buffy Summers' being a blond "Valley Girl," and the Warrior Princess Xena by any standard a very beautiful woman who was by no means desexualized, not bar feminists from singing hosannas over both characters--to the point of, in Buffy's case, starting a whole academic field in honor of the phenomenon! Meanwhile, if the gender politics were not what men might generally prefer, it was still action-packed television that didn't take itself too seriously, with a plenitude of "eye candy" for the male viewer, and as a result a fair number of men did watch.

Of course, such please-all-of-the-people-some-of-the-time compromises today seem a thing of the past. There is the fragmentation of the media that has producers so often going for a deep appeal to a narrow part of the audience--pleasing some of the people all the time--with changes in mainstream feminism factoring in here. If feminism would have been happier about "Women Kicking Male Butt" without the accent on the "Beautiful," and indeed even in the '90s sometimes quite vocal about disliking particular developments from that standpoint (they were delighted when the Star Trek franchise made the captain of the Voyager a woman, but rather less pleased when Jeri Ryan joined the crew in a catsuit in season four) male gaze-quashing feminism has become hegemonic within the mainstream media post-#MeToo. The particular concession to male viewers that was making the female protagonist of a show which might otherwise have had questionable male appeal conventionally sexy was thus far less acceptable to the makers of respectable opinion, and less often seen in an era in which less a Buffy the Vampire Slayer than a Bridgerton seems to exemplify the female-led and female-oriented small screen hit--the more in as action-adventure, even if there is still plenty of it about on television, just doesn't make the splash it used to, regardless of the gender politics of a given show. Part of that may be the media's fixation on Midcult "prestige TV" as the "cool thing" for a quarter of a century now, part of it the fact that really big new franchises have become impossible to launch in the current long tail-crowded, hyper-saturated, ultra-fickle and risk-terrified media environment, and part of it, I should think, that action movies are so abundant and easy to access these days, all as there may be a sense of exhaustion about the form given how much of it we have had, and how little innovation it has seen in a long time. Thus it seems exemplary of the situation that the tiresomely ubiquitous Phoebe Waller-Bridge (The Suits like her! They really, really like her!) is working on a new iteration of Lara Croft for the streaming market--but also exemplary that whether it is well-received or not in the present milieu it is hard to picture it making the same pop cultural splash that, for example, Waller-Bridge's Fleabag did, for better or worse.

The Politics of Star Trek, 1966-2005

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

In discussing Star Trek (I have in mind the entire saga on the small and large screens from the pilot "The Cage" to the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise) I have argued for its being a marriage of the tradition of Wells-Stapledon-type "scientific world-view"-minded science fiction with the tradition of pulp space operatic adventure identifiable with the work of writers like E.E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton. My view has been that this has been on the whole an interesting and fruitful combination, but there are also ways in which it has synergized less than ideally, not least politically. The Wells-Stapledon tradition is squarely leftist in the proper sense of the term--a bearer of the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially the possibility and desirability of humans applying reason to the material and social world to improve human social arrangements and humans' lot generally because of the existence of a common humanity, the capacity of human beings to think and act rationally, and the potentials for applying scientific knowledge to tame material and moral problems, be it relieving material want through greater productivity or freeing the human mind from ignorance and its terrors. Indeed, the Wells-Stapledon view holds that given the complexity, delicacy and resource-hunger of industrial life, and the destructive as well as liberating potentials of existing technologies (e.g. can states go on making war when the weapons have become so destructive?) it is not merely possible and desirable but necessary that humans use these potentials to move the world beyond an economic life of Bernard de Mandeville grasping meanness, tribalism, superstition in the way some sneer at as "utopian." By contrast leading lights of the space opera tradition have not only often been right-wingers (as was the case with Smith), but in such aspects of that tradition as the "frontier mentality," the Otherness of aliens, the stress on armed conflict and its constant conduct in such fiction to the point of genocidal extermination, the stress on old-fashioned individualistic two-fisted heroics and technical "genius" with its obfuscations going far beyond babble about "reversing the polarity," and their propensity for dressing up old genres such as Medieval romance in high-tech trappings, has bequeathed a legacy of deeply right-wing storytelling.

Thus on the one hand we had in Star Trek a united Earth that proceeded to help build a United Federation of Planets, not least in collaboration with the rationalistic Vulcans. We see that, at least at the level of everyday human wants such as food and shelter scarcity is no longer an issue--and that if humans are not without their faults or foibles, individually or in groups, and not wholly free of the danger of falling back into the bad old ways (as seen on Turkana IV) they are on the whole healthier, more rational, more capable of bearing responsibility than their twentieth or early twenty-first century counterparts. The Star Trek: The New Generation episode "The Neutral Zone," where the crew of the Enterprise meets humans from our time just awakened from the cryogenic sleep that kept them alive in the interceding centuries, exemplifies this. As Jean-Luc Picard tells that arrogant embodiment of the bad old ways Ralph Offenhouse "We've grown out of our infancy." Indeed, though it is rarely spelled out as such the Federation is apparently a Wellsian World State, and as socialist ("People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions"), cosmopolitan and rationalist as that implies, on an interstellar scale reminiscent of the polities of the later chapters of Stapledon's Star Maker.

However, if this is the premise of the series, and it sometimes figured importantly in a scene or even an episode, the stuff of the typical episode of Star Trek was not really rooted in that. Rather than attempting to depict life in such a society it rarely showed us so much as a glimpse of the ordinary life of a citizen of the interstellar World State of the Federation. Instead it concentrated on the quasi-naval Starfleet dealing with the less utopian or rationalistic galaxy beyond it, in adventures that tended to hew to space operatic norms. There was the emphasis on military confrontation with other galactic polities--the Klingons, the Romulans, later the Borg and the Cardassians, in just the first sequel series. (Indeed, it was a confrontation with the Romulans in the Neutral Zone between them and the Federation that was the backdrop to Picard's encounter with Ralph Offenhouse and his contemporaries from our time.) Even when there wasn't a war or military confrontation on there was a lot of attention to feudal pageantry and general barbarism--the warrior culture of the Klingons in particular, all as even the irrationalism Vulcan rationality doesn't always keep in check was memorably foregrounded in episodes like "Amok Time"--and the existence of a different, less attractive, alternate timeline for humanity and the Federation hinted at in "Mirror, Mirror." (Cue the battle theme!) Moreover, as it progressed much of this became more rather than less prominent, with The Next Generation devoting more time to the martial side of Starfleet's activity than the Original Series as Worf's inclusion in the cast foregrounded Klingon barbarism, Deep Space Nine a war story that for many glittered most brightly in the darker patches where Starfleet officers behaved rather unlike Starfleet officers (it says something that the episode "In The Pale Moonlight" was such a hit with fans), Voyager a saga of the ship's crew making their way home from cosmic terra incognita predictably inhabited largely by hostile barbarian types, such that this "voyage home" tended to consist of the crew enduring one year-of-hellish battle with such enemies after another. After that Enterprise retreated from the 24th and even 23rd centuries to offer a prequel that repeatedly went the same path (most obviously in Season Three's arc). So it went with the movies that, after the cerebral Star Trek: The Motion Picture, inclined to increasing action from The Wrath of Khan forward, with it seeming notable that if the box office trend was generally downward number eight (First Contact) represented a bit of a rebound, with this at least partly a matter of the movie being Die Hard on the Enterprise. Indeed, even in the more intellectually serious episodes looking at another society we saw not the "world that works" that the Federation had become, but those societies that didn't work, and indeed didn't work in the same way that our own society is clearly not working, with its exploitation, its oppression, its irrationality, such that that is what viewers might remember most--all as our glimpses of life on Earth could sometimes seem a cheat. (Thus is it the case that when Captain Picard visits his brother we see not 24th-century San Francisco, say, but a French vineyard whose owner rejects modernity to the point of refusing to have a replicator in his house, looking at which we may feel we have gone centuries back in time.)

Amid all that one could be forgiven for not paying all that much attention to the show's better tomorrow, let alone how we arrived at it, the more in as practical politics required the showrunners to not get too vocal about that. This was, after all, a show presenting a Wellsian-Stapledonian utopia amid the height of the Cold War, when even what passed for "liberalism" was apt to be conservative if not reactionary--all as Anti-Communism never ceased to be the "national religion," and the flak was always there to make sure Star Trek's showrunners never declared too loudly for progressive values, or too obviously critical of the present day. (Hence the commentariat's quickness to attack a Star Trek show whenever it presented its satire of the ultra-capitalist Ferengi, all as, reflective of the politics that prevail on the web, one very quickly comes across those hastening to declare for the supposed virtues of their social system and society generally.) The result was that one could just take what progress there was as a matter of hazy optimism about "progress" divorced from any more worked-out social views, and not too disturbing to--or even be oblivious not only to how we got to a better tomorrow, but the fact that we had done so at all, attending to the more sensational episodes and thinking it just standard space opera stuff--with all the political baggage going with the war and barbarism and "backwardness" while the humanistic, utopian, cerebral stuff not even on their mental radar. (Indeed, much as I admire New Wave science fiction titan Harlan Ellison, reading his literal hundred page-long rant in his book about his experience writing the episode "City on the Edge of Forever" and the rancorous aftermath of his efforts, it seemed to me clear that this very intelligent and able writer just "didn't get it," all as evocations of the show in popular culture tend to slight the humane and intellectual aspects. The film Galaxy Quest, for example, was in many ways a memorable parody of the show, but it didn't even acknowledge this side of it, instead sticking with the martial, war-fighting, running from alien rock monsters-type stuff as if that was all there had ever been to it.)

This not infrequent mismatch between the premise of Star Trek (and I might add, what the show delivered at its most ambitious and thought-provoking), and the stuff of a typical episode (maybe, too, the episodes that made their deepest impressions on pop culture in such ways as the oddities of Vulcan mating habits, or the significance of Mr. Spock's beard), may seem predictable. After all, imagining everyday life in a "utopia" (indeed, anything much different from the writer's own world), let alone endowing that with a dramatic interest that would be meaningful for an audience of millions week in, week out, year in, year out, is a far from simple task. We may expect that such a society would still have its conflicts and its drama, but they would be different from those of today--a society that has progressed beyond barbarian to something truly deserving of the term "civilization," from "infancy" as Picard had it to something closer to adulthood--with the result that in our present state even if we can try and imagine them intellectually (as Leon Trotsky certainly tried to do in Literature and Revolution) we would likely end up with just hazy notions, rather than anything we can "imagine to saturation" in that way desirable for dramatization, and still more dramatization that could really touch a broad audience, making them feel those conflicts in the same visceral way they feel those of our present life and time. (What do the troubles of grown-ups mean to those still in their infancy?) Certainly I can't imagine any media corporation being willing to bet real money on the ability to do that. The result itself cannot, especially as they were making a space opera, the show's makers often reached for space opera stuff, perhaps encouraged in this by the fact that action-adventure is always an easy sell, and indeed the pressure to take that course greater as time went on simply because of changing audience expectations. (Those who write professionally of the TV today can be very smug when they compare the television production of our era and its audience to those of prior decades, but the evidence seems to favor the position that today's viewer probably has less patience or literacy than did his predecessor of the 1960s, with all that meant for the requirement of more Zap, Boof, Pow! per minute of air time, as editors cut even romantic comedies for Hallmark as if they were action films.) Still, however one explains the situation the result cannot be gainsaid, and that seems to me something to remember as we see--bizarrely from the standpoint of left-leaning fans, who admire the show's humanity, utopianism and socially critical perspective--right-wingers likewise lay claim to a show that stands for everything they stand against.

Genre Life Cycles and Science Fiction in 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

When I first considered the idea that cultural genres may follow life cycles--emerge, develop, stagnate, decline, even "die"--and what this theory suggested about where science fiction (or more specifically, the particular Anglosphere print science fiction tradition that became consolidated as a genre in American fiction magazines in the 1920s) it seemed to me that science fiction was already in a fairly decadent phase. Most of what I had to say about that in the essay I ended up writing for The Fix still seems persuasive to me two decades later, affirmed by the way that where the absence of great new movements or subgenres or themes for some time had already been conspicuous all these years later that situation simply did not change.

However, some things did change--not least the proneness of the genre to "decadent phase"-screaming output. As John Barnes put it in his essay about the matter, in the late and declining phase a genre tends to become an "inside joke" or "treasured family story" for its fans. So did it go in the mid-to-late '00s when we were saturated with the allusive and metafictional, with playful evocation of or subversion of its classics, in which nostalgia for science fiction's past played a very great part. Amid all that Ernest Cline's Ready Player One's hitting the shelves in 2011 could seem a monument to the tendency, the more in as it was such a hit that Steven Spielberg was soon helming a film adaptation. However, by the time the film hit theaters in 2018 the attitude toward Cline's book was bitter hostility that, as that hostility's hyperbolic nature implied, was much less about Cline and anything he actually did than what he through no fault of his own represented, that nostalgic wave, which all these years later we can clearly see was drawing to its end--the output of nostalgic science fiction now well behind us, and perhaps much else with it. After all, if nostalgia is a hallmark of a genre's twilight years, might not the end of nostalgia mean that the genre's twilight years have passed as well? That the genre is no longer coming to an end but ended, no longer dying but dead?

It does not seem unreasonable to think so--that this particular tradition has run its course, and the genre is in its "undead" phase, as Barnes had it, not unlike those zombies science fiction helped popularize until they were one of the more prominent pop cultural phenomena of the past quarter-century as it goes on and on without showing signs of truly living (new novels appearing, for example, but just the same old thing produced for a declining fan base). Still, if that is the case, as seems to me possible, I do think that, as the case of Cline suggests, there was more going on than just the working out of the aforementioned life cycle. If the analogy with living things is indeed useful in understanding a literary or cultural genre, then it may be worth remembering that genres like other living things do not exist hermetically sealed off from their environment, that indeed their life cycle is inseparably bound up with that environment from beginning to end--with the fact that environmental circumstances may cause people to age and pass more quickly than they otherwise would especially relevant. Some of this, I think, had a direct bearing on science fiction's creative stagnation—that the technological and economic stagnation evident since 2007, the worsening eco-catastrophe, the pandemic, the wars, and the complete contempt government and the powerful showed the public and its concerns about the world's problems added greatly to the highly unbalanced diet of pessimism that encouraged science fiction's already hypertrophied and suffocating dystopian inclinations. However, those same years had unsalutary effects of other kinds as well, with the case of Cline especially telling. The release of the film version of Ready Player One, and the career of its author, fell afoul of a backlash against nostalgia less because fans were angry with nostalgia as such than because nostalgia had become an object of the country's status and "culture" conflicts, with supporters of identity politics aggrieved by their view that science fiction's pantheon, canon, concerns, received history, marginalized many a group--though that is far from all of it. There is also the fact that print fiction as such has been increasingly marginalized within contemporary culture broadly, to such a degree that behind the facade of stupid boosterism one has good grounds to suspect that the publishing industry is in crisis, with all this seeming to many evidenced in a generation gap within science fiction fandom that can almost seem to make the identity politics' crowd's concern for the tradition moot. As the preponderance of gray heads at the conventions shows, whatever the kulturkampfers may think, younger people these days care no more about Isaac Asimov than they do about Gone With the Wind, BECAUSE THEY DON'T READ. This combination of cultural conflict, with the marginalization of print with all that it means for the continuation of a genre of print fiction, has meant that the sense of a tradition, a discourse, a fan base, has dissipated to leave science fiction in a very different position from where it was not just in 1947, 1977, but even 2007, such that one can much less speak of a genre at all.

Remembering the Fiasco of Crazy Rich Asians' Asian Release

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

The entertainment press has preferred to remember the 2018 romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians as a great success. The reality, of course, was more complicated. The film was undeniably a big domestic hit in America, taking in a--for a romantic comedy--sensational $174 million. Yet the film, if made for American audiences first and foremost, was one that Warner Bros. also hoped would be a giant hit in Asia broadly and the vast mainland Chinese market particularly--indeed, that the film would prove "the exception to the rule" that such "comedies . . . are too culturally specific" to cross over successfully.

The result is that it seems only fair to consider that side of the matter in appraising the film's commercial performance. And in doing that it seems fair to start with just why the producers expected the movie to be a great hit in those markets, which seems to be their perception that the movie was profoundly novel in its having an "all-Asian" cast. However, the attitude of some Asian-Americans may be one matter, the attitude of Asians in Asia another. This is most obviously the case in the fact that if for Asian-Americans (or at least, Asian-Americans who watch nothing but Hollywood content) a film with an all-Asian cast has been an extreme rarity, for residents of East Asian, living in a region with a burgeoning output of film and television, this has not been the case. One may add that romantic comedy specifically is a strong presence in that output, such that Hollywood making a romantic comedy with an al-Asian cast is simply not a big deal there in itself, that kind of story one their own industries can and do tell--constantly. (For a very small taste of this, just check out the sheer number of versions of live-action adaptations of Yoko Kamio's classic manga Hana Yori Dango in the Wikipedia listing devoted to them.) Meanwhile the particular material Crazy Rich Asians offered was more problematic than the aforementioned Hollywood geniuses realized--or could. From the standpoint of a certain kind of American petty bourgeois seeing members of "their own group at the top"--seeing them among the rich, stupid, vulgar elite of the modern world, or better still the whole of the rich, stupid, vulgar, elite in some corner of that world, ruling it, and thus by way of them able to vicariously look down on those not in "their own group" as social inferiors is supposed to be inspirational, "aspirational," and outright cause for ecstasy. (Yes, there actually was a certain amount of explicit acknowledgment of this mean-spirited side of identity politics in discussion of the film, entirely uncritical of course.) That not all members of any group really think that way is not something the identity politics-minded mainstream acknowledges. Still less does that mainstream acknowledge that people in other countries may think differently about the matter, in spite of the cultural differences staring them in the face.

Thus much as the commentariat loves to describe China as "Communist" when demonizing the country, they did not actually think the meaning of that through to the point of considering how in contrast with a country where Anti-Communism is the "national religion," in one ruled by a Communist Party for as long as almost everyone alive can remember, for all that party's long record of (in cases, nothing short of colossal) idiosyncrasies, compromises, backtracking, mistakes, crimes, hypocrisies, "Communist" ideas may have some purchase on the minds and sympathies of the Chinese public (Communism having survived its mishandling by Communists, so to speak). Especially given that in that country history (not least, the longest record of peasant revolts of any country on Earth) and demographics obfuscate the matter of class rather less than in America. Especially given that many in and out of China attribute the rises in the wealth and well-being of the Chinese far less to the "entrepreneurs" whose worship is mandatory in many other nations than the firm hand of a Five Year Plan-making state that, by refusing to put on a Friedmanesque "Golden Straitjacket," industrialized a formerly very poor country to a G-7 level--producing the one great success story of the age in regard to development and poverty reduction, however much those of neoliberal sensibilities pretend the situation is otherwise.

Likewise if those emphasizing Chinese Otherness love to speak of Chinese "Confucianism," they forget that Confucianism is not favorably disposed toward a life devoted to individual material gain, merchants, and certainly not a society ruled by merchants, and indeed that much of Chinese history has been a struggle between Confucian scholar-administrators anxious to preserve order and the desire of the merchants to increase their wealth and power (one reason why Western commentators are so often disdainful of Confucianism), with those eras of the merchants' ascendancy identified with hard times for the poor, the spread of slavery, backwardness, chaos--and that this too may color the audience's attitude. Indeed, even in complete ignorance of both Chinese Communism and Chinese Confucianism the fact that capitalistic reform has created in China a very unequal society with its own stupid and vulgar billionaires publicly shooting their mouths off in ways that make clear that they, like their counterparts everywhere else, think the rest of their country and humanity exists only to serve the needs of the super-rich (like Jack Ma), and that much as the American press lionizes them for it the Chinese public generally does not find this endearing--such that China's young people disgusted with the Rat Race and protesting the "996" work culture in such ways as the "Lying Flat" movement--is something they should have noticed. If it has hardly been a complete barrier to the appeal of upper-class glamour (far from it, as even a small taste of the country's film and television shows--again, see Hana Yori Dango), it still raised the likelihood that rather than the spectacle of a bunch of plutocrats living off of the exploitation of the whole rest of the planet being rich and stupid and vulgar and arrogant in Singapore (which, by the way, is to non-Singaporean Chinese another country, a fact overlooked by filmmakers little interested in the cultural differences between the Chinese of the mainland, and those of the Chinese "diaspora," and even different parts of the diaspora (like the Chinese-American heroine, and her Chinese-Singaporean lover and his family) being a thrilling uplift they would be bored, annoyed, even repelled.

At any rate the film failed miserably internationally, not least in Asia, and especially in China, as the hard data shows. Crazy Rich Asians made 73 percent of its money domestically--a very high proportion these days, even more than was the case for such a domestically-oriented, not-for-the-foreigners film as Clint Eastwood's American Sniper with its 63 percent. The second and third biggest markets were actually Western, Anglosphere, Australia and Britain, accounting for another 10 percent by themselves. By contrast the film made a mere $13 million in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia combined, with mainland China kicking in a mere $1.6 million from its whole run, barely enabling it to make not the top 10 or top 20 or even top 100 highest-grossing movies released in China that year (ranking #183), and the lot contributing just 20 percent of the movie's less than towering international gross (some $65 million). At least initially the media registered the impossible-to-deny failure, and even began to talk about some of those basic facts relevant to the situation they had previously ignored, notably the un-specialness of an all-Asian film to an Asian audience not exactly crying out for an Asian-led romantic comedy from Hollywood, and its seeing the movie exactly for the shallow-minded Western product it was in its relation to their values and understanding of their culture, the equivalent in "comedy of manners" terms of what Panda Express is to Asian cuisine according to one commentator. (I have no recollection of their acknowledging how Asians and especially Chinese might be less than thrilled by the particular class politics so prominent in American discussion of the film, but then one could hardly expect the American press to acknowledge that in a public way, can one?)

The result was that the supposed great milestone for Asians on film can in hindsight seem not just a piece of identity politics-pandering crapola pretending to be more than that, but one that may have succeeded even less at the dubious goal of such pandering than at the perhaps even more dubious one of producing just another piece of foreign exotica for Westerners. It was also a considerable letdown for the bean-counters. But all this was quickly marginalized by an entertainment press that has succeeded in establishing a narrative of success as the conventional wisdom about how the venture fared. (Cultural sensation! Blockbuster! $240 million worldwide!) Entirely in line with its tendency to the most upbeat possible reading of the outcomes for identity politics-minded movies in the inverse of "Get woke, go broke" (recall, for example, how amid enthusiasm for woman-led action movies their talking up Mad Max: Fury Road had people thinking the middling performer and ultimately money-losing project was actually a colossal hit?), in the process not only confusing the remembrance of how one particular film performed commercially, but also affirming some unhealthy misapprehensions about such film projects and the portrayals of other cultures--not least the misapprehension that Hollywood as we know it does these things successfully. Thus did they pave the way for other disappointments of much greater financial consequence. (There was, for example, what Disney did with its live-action version of Mulan. There was what Disney-Marvel did with its Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.) A bunch of executives in C-suites in the more privileged enclaves of the Southland understand other countries? Their every word and deed shows that they don't even understand the metropolis, let alone the country, in which they have led their lives of profoundly undeserved privilege, even judged by the standard of how well they do what is generally recognized as being their jobs. After all, even with every year's box office reports driving home the lesson that if they want profits they had better study that market carefully and deliver movies about which the public will be enthusiastic enough to come to the theater they instead stick to their milking of tired franchises, brushing off the losses with references to "back catalog value" that smack of a foolhardy speculator's house of cards--not coincidentally, I think, given that foolhardy speculators are the ones calling the shots in Hollywood in this age of "shareholder value"-minded stupidities and "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley nitwittery.

Kooky Captains, Glasses, Wokeness: The Starfleet Academy Backlash

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

For me the Star Trek saga properly ended in 2005, with the last episode of Enterprise, if not earlier. (Certainly its best days were well behind it by that point.) This is especially in regard to what made it more than just "another" space opera, the humanistic, socially critical, utopian dimension of the show. The J.J. Abrams cinematic reboot set that aside as it focused on summer blockbuster action, prequelisms, nostalgic appeal, and legitimating itself as part of the Star Trek canon with its use of the parallel universe concept that Hollywood executives have seized on and run with ever since as a prop to their ever-more lumbering franchises. Subsequently Paramount's reboot of the franchise on television crapped all over the humanistic, utopian, socially critical aspect of the show as it eagerly seized on the darker elements of the universe. Thus do we get the grimdark Star Trek: Discovery's devotion of so much time to the Mirror Universe, the decision to make a whole series about the Section Thirty-One the showrunners introduced amid the Federation's bitter war in Deep: Space Nine, and perhaps most striking of all the whole premise of Star Trek: Picard, where the Federation is treated as having been rotten all along, so much so that within Picard's own lifetime it had rotted away to the point that we seem to be getting Turkana IV on a galactic scale in a pointed contrast with what we saw in The Next Generation. Thus where amid the right-wing turn in world affairs so evident by the '80s The Next Generation, the conception of Jean-Luc Picard appeared an act of defiance against the Oliver Norths and Gordon Gekkos, the later Picard represented abject surrender to them and all they represented as, to the ecstasy of all those who had despised all that was humane or progressive in the show (the Ralph Offenhouses call the shots in our time, and the thought of a world beyond "hunger, want, the need for possessions" all "eliminated" is their biggest fear and hate ), it fell in line with the misanthropic pessimism mandated by the leaders of "respectable" opinion, and the despair of so many of those who had ever espoused anything else. Certain that the world cannot go on as it is--they agree with the Wellsian-Stapledonian-scientific world-view vision on which Star Trek was founded up to that point at least--they have also lost all hope that the world can ever be anything else (they agree with the misanthropes to that extent), and as a result all they can picture is ecological and social collapse.

All this continues with the 32nd century-set Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which can seem very much of the moment in its vision of the Federation fallen apart yet again due to technological disaster, with the drama about the survivors picking up the pieces--Luddism added to the unhappy mix in the idea of the "Burn." At the same time, just when one might have thought from the right's crowing over and many others lamenting the death of wokeness that American culture was sparing a little more time for other things the din of battle between the woke and anti-woke over the content of pop culture rises again. Thus do we have a conspicuously kooky and quirky lady in the captain's seat in Holly Hunter's Nahla Ake, and Gina Yashere as her First Officer Lura Thok, with such personae as Tig Notaro as an Academy instructor rounding out a cast that makes it clear that "diversity" was not a kobayashi maru after all--and in the supposedly wokeness-is-dead period went all in on it, with the review pages laudatory (88 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes), as at least a highly vocal portion of the viewership is the opposite. (The audience score stands at 43 percent--a gigantic gap being attributed to review bombing that, even if one may be unsure that it is representative of the audience, at least testifies to some having very strong feelings about the matter.)

Starfleet Academy thus begins to look like it is doing for Star Trek what The Last Jedi did for Star Wars, through comparable creative choices prompting comparable reactions. Thus do we have a franchise that was traditionally male-led not merely putting a female captain at the helm of a ship (hardly controversial stuff thirty years after Voyager) but presenting a more broadly and fully female-dominated ship in a piece of feminist "cultural appropriation" of what was long an object of male fans' affection (as The Last Jedi did with Star Wars). Thus do we also have it making the Person in Charge conspicuously quirky in a manner rubbing a good many fans the wrong way (the way Last Jedi's Admiral Holdo did). Going beyond the parallels to the Star Wars franchise, one may add that, in line with the sensibility prevailing in the medium, there isn't much inclination to make male fans any concessions in the way of the visuals, with this "matriarchy" not having, say, a catsuited Deanna Troi or Seven of Nine, or even the inclusion of any actress comparable to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Rebecca Romjin in the cast, with all that means for the "male appeal" as instead "diversity" and "body positivity" carry the day. Indeed, I suspect that this is what all the fuss about the glasses one female character wears is about--not that spectacles have been wholly unprecedented in this universe (Admiral Kirk wore them in the earlier movies), but rather that (given American attitudes toward glasses wearing) this is yet another dismissal of conventional beauty standards and the male gaze in a show the detractors think already too woke to bear.

Why Don't We Hear More Mainstream Criticism of Reality TV?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

The question that is the title of this post may strike some as odd. After all, does the reality TV genre not get subject to a lot of criticism? Do people not perceive it as not merely fake in a way belying the term "reality," but trashy--and exploitative of participants and audience alike? Do they not pour abuse on "stars" of the form such as the members of the Kardashian family?

There is no denying all this, but also no denying that the criticism has been marginalized within the conversation--brushed aside, and even the object of counterblasts, by a press that on the whole treats the phenomenon with respect. Thus even as Dr. Jacob Johanssen testifies to British parliament that "[i]n academic research, the content of reality television is almost exclusively discussed critically," the media dig up "academics" who criticize the critics for the sake of garbage such as Vice's story claiming that "Scholars Say if You Hate the Kardashians You Probably Hate Yourself," such that the deeper and more trenchant criticisms of the genre generally going unheard--and of course, without any effect on contemporary culture whatsoever, the sordid enterprise continuing to lumber on untouched by the criticisms.

That seems to me to warrant some remark. And in this three factors seem relevant. The first and most obvious is the extreme tameness of the press, especially the entertainment press, which is overwhelmingly dutiful to its role of courtier and claqueur to the media business to which it is so close, and indeed apt to be a related party if not a subsidiary. Exactly as might be expected in this Pohl-Kornbluth dystopia in which we live the entertainment media is deeply invested in reality TV (representing as it does a colossal share of their output now, not least because low costs and easy product placement contribute to higher profit margins than it has on scripted fare), and said courtiers and claqueurs are thus obliged to be supportive. In that role they may be allowed to criticize a particular show, or even say something critical of the whole genre, but never in such a way as to seriously and meaningfully attack the bosses' enterprise, not least because the less serious and meaningful attacks at least allowing the illusion of a genuine dialogue, and a safety valve for the resentments some feel, who seeing such statements can feel validated and therefore, if only in a small way, relieved that someone agrees with them and move on with their lives as nothing changes. Indeed, on close inspection one may find that those critical sneers at reality television may in fact be just so much "permission," or even encouragement, to watch "ironically," which still conduces to the viewership sustaining the wretched machine.

There is, too, the matter of just whose values reality TV tends to affirm, and whose values it tends to offend against. Consider the competition shows, for example. Presenting the pursuit of "success" as a tough but fair contest in which merit gets one ahead and those who lack it have only themselves to blame as it exalts those who have "made it" as smarter-than-everyone-else and thus earned the right to sit at a very high table from which they get to not only judge but abuse the inferiors aspiring to even a very little bit of what they have, the Message with which it beats its audience over the head, with its elitism and its moralizing, its cruelty and obscurantism, its often on-its-sleeve exaltation of capitalism and economic individualism, is enough to make a leftist retch, but aligns perfectly with how the conservative pictures capitalism to the world, and perfect propaganda for their vision of economic life. So does it also go with the shows that are this era's equivalent of the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, one psychological study showing that brief exposure to reality TV shows of the Kardashian type makes the viewer identify with the rich, and feel less sympathetic to the poor, and less supportive of programs that help them. For those of progressive sympathies this is proof positive that reality TV is making the world a worse place. But for the right as it presently exists in America--the blatantly, crassly, elitist business right that, without the respect of the classical conservative's recognition of the necessity of some consideration for the least fortunate for social stability's sake, let alone any sense of paternalism or noblesse oblige toward them--this is an excellent reason to support reality TV. The conservative may not be delighted with the medium. (How would the traditionalist preacher of "family values," especially one of certain ethnic and social backgrounds, feel about his daughter living her life in the manner that Kim Kardashian lived hers? Becoming famous in the way that Kim Kardashian did? Need I remind you of a certain video without which few of us would know the name "Kardashian?") But they LOVE the message. And their opinion is as weighty within the mainstream as the opinion of the socially-minded progressive is not, with all that means for this side of the dialogue.

And of course there is the matter of identity politics. Again, in spite of the illiterate and quite stupid insistence that identity politics is left it is in fact anything but, what is today called "wokeness" very much of the right in its philosophical essentials and its practical positions on the issues (hence there being no dissonance in "woke capitalism"). Indeed, it is fair to say that identity politics offends the cultural traditionalism of the avowed, traditionalist, conservative not by confronting them with an alternative set of values the way the left does (rationalistic, universalistic, egalitarian, as against their dismissal of reason, stress on difference, insistence on hierarchy, and demand for respect for the associated institutions and traditions), but by confronting the traditionalist conservative with an Other acting on their own conservatism. It being the case that reality TV's themes (the daily lives of rich girls, dating shows, etc.) and fan base tend to skew female (perhaps by a margin of two-to-one, maybe three-to-one with the soapy "lifestyle"-type shows), and its biggest star being a woman whose course through life has been highly charged from a gender politics perspective (the aforementioned Ms. Kardashian), it is unsurprising that the identity politics crowd rushes to the defense of the form. Thus is it the case that if woke gender theory-espousing feminists cannot be thrilled with much about Ms. Kardashian (many in fact despise her undeniable sex symbol status), a great many of them are ever ready to attack her detractors, to the point of accusing anyone who hates the Kardashians of being a "misogynist" (displaying a looseness in language akin to that of right-wingers tossing about "Communist"--again, not a stretch given identity politics' essential conservatism).

This combination of interest, power and ideology--this iron triangle of business, right-wing politics and identity-mindedness--is why the criticism of reality TV is slight next to what it might be (and in the view of its detractors, what it ought to be), with the alignment remarkable not for its uniqueness but for its pervasiveness across contemporary cultural life.

The 2025 Hollywood Box Office: Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

At the end of 2024 considering the prospects of the North American box office in 2025 I wrote that it looked like a case of "a pre-pandemic slate being released into a post-pandemic market." I also wrote that this would "make 2025 look more like 2023 than it will 2024" with respect to the number of underperformers, especially at the big-budget end, due to the "tentpoles" coming out in a market some 30-40 percent smaller than it was before in real, inflated-adjusted terms, such that not only were there more movies chasing a pool of ticket-buyers no bigger than it was in 2024 (or 2023), but also that the terms of the game had changed qualitatively. (Simply put, with people on average going to the movies two rather than four times a year the big tentpoles were less likely to pull in the less-committed filmgoers critical to raising their takes to blockbuster levels, any one movie of whatever type now a tougher sell.)

In particular I was dubious about the superhero films given the weariness of the genre generally, and the DC and Marvel brands specifically, and in particular that the rush to claim "Marvel's back!" after Deadpool & Wolverine was at best wishful thinking given that that particular film ("R-rated, 'edgy,' 'meta'") was a poor litmus test for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and perhaps even another indication of public weariness with the franchise and the genre given that one of the pleasures it offers fans is its Ryan Reynolds-flavored flippancy toward them. (Indeed, I said in so many words that not Deadpool but Captain America: Brave New World would be the real test of audience interest.) I can't say that I was optimistic about Mission: Impossible either given the poor performance of its predecessor (and the exhaustion of audience interest in the spy-fi genre more broadly), while I expected interest in the Jurassic World franchise would continue to erode. I also continued to hold that that success, and certainly profitably, would, in line with what I have referred to as "high concept 2.0," require not Disney-style ruthless milking of any franchise they can get their grubby mitts on in the expectation of everyone showing up but more careful targeting of films at portions of the audience, appealing more deeply rather than widely, a strategy at times containing room for big hits--for instance, by way of video game-based movies seizing on the enthusiasm of the young for particular games, or an occasional Deadpool (the 2024 film a targeted success rather than a "4-quadrant" blockbuster that owes its profitability above all to an intense following which has been much more evident among a key demographic rather than mild across-the-board interest), but often a matter of smaller movies that a particular slice of the market really wants to see succeeding in getting them to the theaters and in the process turning a relatively big profit on a small gross, a pattern most familiar in horror, but evident in other genres as well, and often characterized by its not always abiding by convention and expectation (like, alongside Deadpool, the Blake Lively-starrer It Ends With Us, the $25 million production actually the sixth most profitable film of 2024 on Deadline's list). I declined to pick winners or losers at this end of the market, frankly because such things are harder to spot on the basis of the few details those of us outside the business are likely to know about next year's movies so far in advance--but also because so many of even the smaller films were just more remakes and sequels that "nobody ever asked for," with all that implied about a paucity of winners at least.

Now 2025 has run its course. Did this reading of what 2025 would be like actually hold up? Well, the year was indeed remarkable for underperformers at just about every level, with the superhero films from Captain America 4's Valentine's Day weekend release forward bearing out my view of their collective prospects--with this only further affirmed by how James Gunn's Superman and the MCU's Fantastic Four: First Steps got positive reviews and relatively high audience ratings (both those films enjoying scores of 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at this time), indicating that their underperformance could not be dismissed in the "Not superhero movie fatigue, just bad superhero movie fatigue" way to which Establishment commentators are so prone. I can also say that neither the latest Mission: Impossible nor Jurassic World films defied my expectations (the newest Mission: Impossible bettered its predecessor's series' low gross, but not by very much, while the latest Jurassic World movie testified to the long-run decline in the franchise's grosses), while I might add that if I did not say anything about Avatar 3 back in 2024 it also seems consistent with the picture I sketched. (The movie has broken the $300 million barrier domestically, and the $1 billion barrier globally, but its likely final gross still represents a big drop from what Avatar 2 managed, all as even that film's gross represented a big drop from the original's gross way back in 2009, even before we adjust the figure for inflation.) Meanwhile smaller-scale letdowns were evident across the map, in those sequels no one asked for, from the 28 Days Later, I Know What You Did Last Summer and M3GAN franchises in the horror genre, to the retreads of Karate Kid and Tron and Anaconda, all as through the fall entertainment news writers scratched their heads at how every weekend another one bit the dust.

Unmitigated successes were less conspicuous, especially when one gets away from, for example, the horror movies that succeeded (the Final Destination and Conjuring sequels, and present critical darling Zach Cregger), and the second half of the film adaptation of the musical Wicked (which did no worse but also no better than would be expected on the basis of the first half's reception the year before). Still, A Minecraft Movie's being the number one hit of the year (and also the lesser success of the Five Nights at Freddy's sequel) testify to the continued salability of video game-based movies, while if there was no breakout success of a more idiosyncratic kind on the scale of 2023's Barbie or Oppenheimer Sinners, a genre-bending period musical with an R-rating, undeniably did well (domestically at least, the North American success didn't really carry over to the international market), while F1: The Movie also has a claim to being a hit of a more idiosyncratic type, if less obviously so (in its, if a generic and even rather flat sports film narratively, affording a different sort of visual spectacle in its racing sequences from what summer blockbusters tend to offer these days). One may also point to the successes of anime-based Japanese imports (most obviously the latest Demon Slayer film), and the not dissimilar limited theatrical release of KPop Demon Hunters, as likewise testifying to the readiness of audiences to come out for something they find genuinely exciting. All the same, the successes fell well short of making up for the underperformances, with the result that the year ended with a North American box office gross far below what the analysts hoped--not just the $10 billion that theatrical industry magazine Boxoffice Pro described as the "best case" scenario, the $9.3-$9.7 billion they thought more plausible, or the $9 billion that was the more cautiously optimistic Deadline projection representing conventional wisdom, but 8.655 billion, dismay about which is ubiquitous at this time. ("Reaching pre-pandemic levels of box office is beginning to feel impossible" Ryan Scott laments--to which I answer, "Beginning?"). Also ubiquitous was the inevitable scapegoating as studio executives, as shameless as they are stupid, continue to whine about the effect of a far from airtight and ultimately failed strike from two years ago with their courtiers in the press relaying their shabby, mean-spirited charges and evasions of responsibility in the same uncritical fashion as the rest of their ever more disgraced profession.

Altogether it was so predictable, and remarking it so much a matter of repeating myself, that I was not tempted to write about it all during the year, just getting in a word now and then--while I actually wondered if I ought not wait until after the Oscars and Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament too before getting in a say about 2025 as well, simply to have more that would feel worth saying. Still, I do think a few things can be said to make this assessment at least a little more nuanced than a big pile of "I told you so" (however much the crass and vulgar idiots in Hollywood's C-suites, and their courtiers in the entertainment press, deserve it)--and the reader can likely guess as to what those things might be from the movies I haven't mentioned yet. One thing that I think can fairly be said is that if tentpoles are suffering then it is the case that--when we consider the two big types of them--the lavish family films of the animated type (and live-action remakes of them) are holding up better than the splashy action-adventure superhero-spy-fi-space opera type. After all, if the year had major flops in Elio and Snow White it also had Zootopia 2, and Lilo & Stitch--and a lesser success in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon (perhaps because family animation is something rather wider than a "mere genre," and perhaps too because the very young audience all this is aimed at are the only ones who can't think "I've seen this all many times before"). It also seems the case that a battered Hollywood, after in rather high-handed fashion dismissing the Chinese market for many years (remember Galyn Susman's sneer at the country?) the Hollywood studios are pinning their hopes on China again, with Disney's Bob Iger making a rare international trip to China in advance of the release of Zootopia 2, helping pave the way for Disney's film grossing an extraordinary $583 million in that market (two-thirds again what it made in North America, figures to which Hollywood hasn't come close in that market since before the pandemic).

Still, otherwise Hollywood remains stupidly stubborn about adapting to the new market, to go by what I saw in the data last year trying to keep a tighter rein on spending, and now fight a little harder for that access to China they realize they really need, but otherwise stick to their standard operating procedure six years after the pandemic dealt their industry a blow from which it, like everything else in the world, has not recovered, however unadmitted the fact. Anyone in doubt about that is advised to check out what's coming our way in 2026--and 2027, when it seems that we can expect more superheroes (Avengers, Batman, Superman, etc.), more sequels to big animated movie franchises and live-action adaptations thereof (more Ice Age and Shrek and Frozen, more live-action How to Train Your Dragon), more animated superhero films (Spider-Man and the Turtles), more Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, more Universal Dark Universe creature movies and more of the Quiet Place series, and of course, more sequels and remakes of very, very old movies that likely mean little or nothing to the present generation (more Gremlins and Miami Vice, and even a second remake of The Thomas Crown Affair starring and directed by Michael B. Jordan because of all the things he could be doing now he chooses this). Amid all this I expect that the box office in 2026 and 2027 will be as underwhelming as it was in 2025, and that the discussion of the fact will consist of the same idiocies we have been hearing spoken these past many years as Hollywood's courtiers remain faithful to their task of telling the public what the industry wants them to say to it.

The Limits to North American Fan Discussion of Anime: Further Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Previously discussing the limitations of North American fans' discussion of anime my first thought was of the limits to their access to the material and its cultural background--most of it a closed book to them, limiting their ability to register and interpret the patterns, continuities, allusions, traditions, topicality, of the content they see in the medium and much, much else with it. Yet alongside the practical matter of access there is the willingness and ability to use it, which one ought not take for granted. To put it as politely as I can I entirely reject the irrationalist and anti-rationalist abasement of so many before "difference" that sneers at the idea of a common humanity, and the postmodernist view that makes us all hopeless captives of pathetic little subjectivities, with language itself supplying the bars that keep us locked in--but I also think no reasonable person should be complacent about the ease with which we can understand other cultures, or even a good many persons' appreciation of the considerable mental and cultural work required to even begin and try to gain an understanding of artifacts of another culture on terms besides their own (with the aforementioned obsession with "subjectivities" not helping). Indeed, I suspect it is more difficult for some than others, and especially hard for us in North America, in part because of plain and simple insularity--how due to a host of practical circumstances that are not a failing or fault in any sense North Americans as a whole are simply less exposed to foreign languages, foreign countries, in part because they have been more accustomed to export than import popular culture, making the frame of mind, the habit, less familiar. However, it also seems partly a matter of the turn that North American culture has taken in our time--in the direction of the culture wars, and a preoccupation, indeed obsession, with the politics of gender along certain lines that even those rejecting them still engage with in rejecting, and in particular the prevalence of what may be called "woke gender politics" (as with feminist/queer theorist views of the "social construction of gender," "patriarchy," "heteronormativity" and the status of the LGBTQ+ that they see as problematic and desire to redress), which may not be terribly helpful in understanding other societies, especially outside a limited portion of the Western world (as Emmanuel Todd, for his part, reminds us again and again). With these obsessions muddling even journalistic coverage of high politics (consider the extreme attention to the French President's marriage, and the latest twist in that attention with Candace Owens' turning Austin Powers on us), it certainly carries over to how American commentators of the mainstream approach matters like anime, and the manga on which it tends to be based.

Consider, for example, how Japanese publishers of manga deal with the matter of the "four quadrants" of the market for entertainment casually acknowledged even in the United States created by its fourfold division along the axes or age and gender. Conventionally the magazines that are the first scene of a manga's printing identify themselves with one quadrant, as indicated by the well-known labels seinen and josei, shonen and shojo, with said labeling tending to carry over to the anime adaptation from them. Just to preempt the addicts of straw man argument, I will acknowledge that no one pretends that this is a perfectly tidy system of division, that there are no gray areas, anomalies, exceptions, all as some manga and even some magazines hew closer to the borderlines than others, where gender as well as age are concerned--while there are female readers for male manga, as well as vice-versa. Still, as everyone who can understand and respect the difference between a generalization and a sweeping generalization should be able to appreciate, generalization does not have to be completely perfect all the way down the line to be sound and useful, and for the most part the classification system holds up. Thus does one not expect to find Fruits Basket in Jump, or Chainsaw Man in Hana to Yume--all as on close inspection the anomalies are not always that. (For instance, seeing a comedy about a bunch of high school girls in a male audience-oriented magazine some will scratch their heads, but those familiar with how such stories are written for the female magazines will notice that when in a shonen, or a seinen, they are not handled the same way as in a shojo--the situations, the sense of humor, even the art style apt to be different, not least with the sort of romantic content female readers conventionally get in their fiction likely absent, eschewed in favor of wacky comedy. It's simply a comedy about high school girls that male readers might find funny, and so not really out of place.)

Of course, this does not align well with the presumptions about these things among mainstream North American commentators. To demarcate some magazines as aimed at a male audience rather than a female audience seems to them in line with the essentializing, the stereotypes, they desire to combat (that men tend to be a certain way, women a certain way, and each enjoy certain things accordingly). Making matters worse still they take the view that cultural production by, of and for males has historically been more prestigious and better-remunerated than that by, of and for females (a view that a glance at the bestseller lists will not set at ease here, male-authored and -oriented titles dominating), while they also look askance at those things that men conventionally enjoy (be it male heroics they denigrate as "toxic masculinity," or male gaze-indulging "fan service" of exactly the kind that makes them censorious, while even the "centering of a male perspective" is enough to make them take offense). Indeed, the existence of a distinctly male space labeled as such is something they are accustomed to think of as a male bastion to be stormed, and transformed. Thus are such commentators likely to dismiss the categorizations rather than try to understand them--to indeed make straw men of them in their contempt--while fixating on those aspects of manga/anime culture that they find more salutary, most obviously material directed at female readers, dealing with LGBTQ+ themes, or both. Consistent with their ideology, it is far from making for a serious understanding of the form on the part of the commentator or their readers, with Publisher's Global's Shaenon K. Garrity's piece of a few months ago ("Girls to the Front of Manga Readership") exemplary of the tendency and its significant shortcomings.

After All These Years the Entertainment Press Still Doesn't Get It

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Considering the profound changes in the film market since the pandemic, and the press coverage for them, I sometimes wonder if I am not overly harsh in judging the entertainment press as oblivious to said changes and what they mean for at least the commercial side of moviemaking. Then I run into a piece like Jesse Hassenger's "Fallen Stars: Why Are Hollywood A-Listers Flopping at the Box Office?" which absolutely confirms for me that the extreme lack of insight I attribute to their writing is indeed evident in that very writing.

Perhaps the most obvious piece of silliness in this particular item is the writer's expressing surprise, or at least telling us that we should be surprised, that this season non-franchise movies starring "A-listers" have consistently failed to "open," with this silly because what they tell us is surprising is not really surprising at all--for have we not been talking about "the death of the movie star" for eons now? Prompted again and again by some round of disappointments of the kind that were always there, but which have become the norm in the twenty-first century so that we heard this again and again? "Despite Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp The Tourist didn't make as much money as we thought it would. Guess star vehicles don't go over the way they used to." "The combo of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt didn't make Passengers another Titanic. Guess it's time to rethink the draw of Big Names." Except that they didn't rethink anything, such that they have gone over it all again and again down to this less than sensational fall box office--just as they have also chewed over, in nearly the same degree, the decline of the mid-budget film, and of many a genre, from the "adult" drama to the big-screen comedy, high concept, romantic, or otherwise.

As one might imagine from this they are even more oblivious to the bigger picture and how it has evolved over that century they have so far missed. After all, any idiot should be able to look at the numbers easily available on a site like Box Office Mojo and do the very simple calculations (middle school stuff) that show the North American theatrical market for movies, already eroding in the wake of the Great Recession, after the pandemic stabilized at a level that in real, inflation-adjusted terms was 30-40 percent below what it had been before. Many factors have plausibly been at work in this temporary but sharp acceleration of the earlier trend, among them changes in habits as people stopped going to the movies for an extended period, dislocations in the theater market that left some areas less well-covered (with many people losing a favored theater, and finding too that a trip to the theater is longer or otherwise less convenient and more inhibiting), and how with the economic shocks of the last few years aggravating the long decline of the "middle class" have people are finding a night out at the movies a bigger indulgence than it used to be just as they are finding meals out and concerts a bigger indulgence than they used to be, etc.. However, the fundamental thing is that this is a structural shift which means that where people in North America on average went to the movies three to four times a year before the pandemic now one is very hard-pressed to get them to go more than twice (with the situation broadly paralleled abroad), and thus the studios competing for a pot of money about a third smaller than it was before.

Anyone who can figure that out should be able to imagine that this massive quantitative change in the market may also have qualitative implications for the market, not least with regard to how much money particular kinds of movies can be expected to make, especially in the Age of Streaming that has so many households spending the equivalent of dozens or scores of movie tickets a year on a service that didn't even exist two decades ago, leaving theaters offering very little that streaming doesn't (all as anything in the theaters will be on streaming within mere months anyway). This is all the more in as they have seen what kind of movies disappointed and what kind of movies have made money since the market assumed its (more or less) present shape in 2023, helped by the minute attentiveness of the relevant press to the trees if not the forest, with this exemplified by Deadline's far from perfect but still handy annual report on Hollywood's biggest profit- and loss-makers (the Most Valuable Blockbusters tournament). Thus have they had that much more opportunity to figure out that if you want a real return on your money you don't simply put up the tentpole and expect people to show, but rather carefully target your cinematic investments, making movies that it seems that some part of the public really, really want to see. (It doesn't have to be brilliant, just wanted, like the video game-based movies from Super Mario Bros. to Minecraft show, and Barbie showed, and the latest Deadpool movie showed.) And thus have they also had that much more opportunity to realize that this is exactly what the studio bosses refuse to do, instead continuing to give (and decline) the green light in the same old way hoping for the same result they used to get, or at least hoped for, as they refuse to admit that it's no longer 2019, when Disney, through years of shamelessly buying up and milking ruthlessly brand names and franchises, made the production of blockbusters on an assembly line look awfully easy by scoring seven billion-dollar hits in one year, including the apex of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's fortunes in the near $3 billion that was Avengers: Endgame, the one studio scoring in that one year almost as many billion-dollar earners as all of Hollywood has managed to produce in almost all the years since (with none approaching Endgame's revenue). Thus not only is it the case that they milk their own franchises by way of sequels no one ever asked for, get flops for their trouble, and tell us that, well, it's good for back catalog value as any sane person wonders "Is the back catalog value of some movie that was only a middling hit back in nineteen eighty-something really so valuable as to warrant endless sequels and prequels and tie-ins?" but even the non-franchise movies are frequently not that--and only rarely is this due to their being a genuine high-risk bet on what may have seemed at least artistically promising material like One Battle After Another, but rather a matter of their just not being all that well thought-out. (Roofman, the two Big Name leads apart, basically sounds like a quirky indie comedy, unlikely to be a box office colossus--and many a film of the season sounds even less promising--a lot less promising--as a contender for that kind of success.)

Moreover, if said writers aren't smart enough to work all this out (I realize that all the evidence points to these tiresome touters of degrees from "Good Schools" not being smart enough to manage the math, the inference-making, etc.), this humble blog can't be the only place to have written it all up for them. But then I guess that a little digging on the Internet is as far beyond them as the math, though admittedly that isn't the only disincentive. The plain and simple fact remains that the writers for the entertainment pages to admit what gets only reaffirmed ad nauseam with every passing month would leave them with very little to do but repeat themselves as the box office goes from flop to flop, the more in as even if the studio bosses were to suddenly see the light the film slate for 2026, and 2027 too, is already pretty much locked in (all as, of course, the courtiers and claqueurs who hold these jobs, if not smart enough to do the math, are street smart enough to know that saying the truth will not make Hollywood happy). And so instead said writers publicly scratch their heads as they think aloud about how much harder it is to "put people in seats," and for the umpteenth time work through a great many ideas, not all of them irrelevant, yet amid it all miss everything in the picture that really, truly, counts.

What Might Hollywood Rapprochement with China Mean for Movies?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

In a prior post I remarked Zootopia 2's remarkable gross in China--a reflection not just of the movie's genuine appeal to Chinese audiences, with which the first Zootopia really was a hit, but of the Chinese government's willingness to afford the release the opportunity for a gross such as no American movie in China has even come close to since Avengers: Endgame way back before the pandemic. I also suggested that this is not likely to be an isolated event, that a Hollywood facing sharply contracted theatrical attendance in America and elsewhere internationally is taking a renewed interest in the potentials of the Chinese market.

Of course, that said one may wonder just what effect all this might have on Hollywood's filmmaking. My guess is that it will not be very great, given how Hollywood made use of its opportunities before. Hollywood did well screening in China what it has to offer that China just so happens to want--as was the case with the Fast & Furious franchise, many a big animated family film, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe--and seems to have done less well when actually understanding the Chinse market in a deeper way than "That made a lot of money in China, maybe enough to count as a point in favor of a sequel." One sees this in a number of films that, if made for American audiences first and foremost, were thought likely to play well in China because of their particular casting and themes. That thinking consistently showed that they failed to understand that American identity politics are quite irrelevant to China--that for example the story of Mulan is for the Chinese a story about filial piety, not feminist exultation in woman assuming the traditionally ultra-masculine role of warrior (all as one could fill a warehouse with the easy mistakes that they made with the details of the story that meant a lot to a Chinese audience more familiar with the original story). Those who made "This will be a hit in China!" claims for such movies failed, too, to understand not only what really appeals to Chinese audiences, but what offends them, for instance that their casting for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings looked to at least some Chinese as a deliberate use of (to them) unattractive actors smacking of racist, perhaps deliberately insulting, Western stereotyping or even caricaturing of East Asian looks--all as, of course, Shang-Chi is a derivative of perhaps the most notorious of racist "Yellow Peril" fiction of all time, Sax Rohmer's Sir Denis Nayland Smith novels featuring Chinese supervillain Fu-Manchu, a figure Rohmer demonized specifically because he is a Chinese opponent of Western imperialism (guess how that plays in a China where the ruling party's fight against that imperialism is a source of not just political legitimacy but national pride!) even as the producers applauded themselves for their "wokeness" in making that movie, with the entertainment press clapping along. (At this rate they might make a historical epic about the Opium Wars lionizing the British assault on the country--glorifying what by the '90s even a James Bond novel had to acknowledge as a crime--and think themselves progressive for casting so many Asian actors in a movie!) And of course, the high hopes that Hollywood and its courtiers in the media held for Crazy Rich Asians as a moneymaker in Asia is a veritable monument to Hollywood's cluelessness all the way down the line (my remarks about which ran so long that I eventually decided to give them their own post rather than unbalance this one).

Really, the level of incompetence bespeaking stupidity was astonishing. And today I have no expectation that Hollywood, which has in the wake of the pandemic's shock to their business shown itself profoundly inflexible in all those ways boding ill for Hollywood doing better with specific appeals to Chinese audiences, will make much effort to do so. After all, in a time in which it seems that the path to profitability increasingly lies notthrough filling the market with tentpoles but targeting one's movies carefully, Hollywood is showing itself reluctant to pursue the targeted strategy with American filmgoers (horror fans apart), never mind foreign ones. The result is that I expect Hollywood will emphasize not blowing its chance to make money in China with those American movies that Chinese theatergoers genuinely want to see rather than fantasizing that American movies playing to American preoccupations will somehow connect with Chinese filmgoers just because, for example, they happen to have Asian-American actors in them--though admittedly even that may be overestimating the people who run Tinseltown.

A Hollywood Rapprochement with China? Thoughts on Zootopia 2's Gross

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Last year's box office was by most accounts a significant disappointment for Hollywood--most obviously for those stubbornly refusing to recognize the extent to which the American cinematic market had shrunk structurally, but this also going for those more reconciled to lowered expectations. By the same token it is evident that another year in which Hollywood stuck to its familiar franchise-mining, tentpole-centered strategy and was punished for it over and over and over again with underperformers has done little to prompt any serious rethinking on the part of the studio executives about how they go about their business. They seem more careful (or at least, penny-pinching) with their expenditure on production, more careful about non-production costs like promotion--but within the established framework. In a similar spirit of tweaking rather than overhauling they may be becoming more respectful of that market they treated rather high-handedly for some years, mainland China.

To recap the relevant history: China's sheer size, growing affluence and increasing openness to imports of foreign popular culture has made "the China market" a considerable prize for decades, with all of this developing to the point that it was rather an exciting prospect for Hollywood by the '10s. Thus did a Chinese company co-produce Iron Man 3, and the movie go on to gross $121 million in that country. Thus were movies that underperformed in the U.S. and elsewhere saved by their earnings in the Chinese market--in the case of Pacific Rim enough so to get the movie a sequel from producers banking heavily on Chinese revenues the next time (which was a hit in China if not elsewhere), just part of a pattern of making movies with China much in mind that saw a big-budget Warcraft movie made in 2016, while still other movies incorporated elements pointedly intended to appeal to Chinese viewers, like including Chinese stars in the cast of American productions (as seen in the Independence Day sequel of that same year). Thus was China also a crucial prop to major franchises such as Fast and Furious (installments seven through nine, plus the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off, all grossed more in China than North America), all as Disney had great successes there with its various films, including its Marvel movies (with Avengers: Endgame grossing a whopping $600 million in that market, as altogether the Marvel films of just that year grossed $1 billion in Chinese theaters). And thus was it the case that Hollywood became involved with Chinese productions at a high level, Hollywood A-lister Matt Damon starring in China's most audacious bid to be a player in the global film market to date, The Great Wall.

Of course, it wasn't all onward and upward. There were sneers in parts of the American press about "China pandering," in cases raising quite serious charges about Hollywood compromising its filmmaking to please Chinese officials, and especially the ways in which this might have been linked to genuine human rights violations, but the criticism much more often of a petty nationalistic variety (as seen in Vanity Fair), all as if the American media of course approved American movies doing well in China, it closed ranks against movies going the other way (as seen in the exaggerated criticism of The Great Wall). Indeed, amid trade war American observers accused China of becoming increasingly protectionist against film imports through backdoor ways like affording American films narrow, ill-timed release windows constraining promotion and distribution opportunities (with, of course, no one making the observation about stone-throwing in glasses houses), while suggesting that Chinese collaboration with American filmmaking had been in bad faith somehow, the Chinese interested in the relationship only insofar as they had occasion to assimilate foreign skills (again, rather sanctimoniously, as business is done out of self-interest rather than for "friendship's" sake). Meanwhile for its part Hollywood became less considerate of the Chinese market, with Disney exemplary as it released a slew of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that offended Chinese officialdom's sensibilities in various ways, with the pattern extending to Disney's animated releases as well--as seen in the inclusion of an LGBTQ+ element in Lightyear, and Galyn Susman's "woke cultural imperialist" sneer about "backward countries."

The result is that not only did Hollywood-China collaboration collapse, but one simply did not see Hollywood movies doing the kind of sensational business they did in China in the 2010s for many years. Indeed, in the whole 2020-2024 period only one American-made film made so much as $200 million, F9 in 2021, with even movies for which their producers would have plausibly expected robust earnings doing poorly, often enough so as to skew their overall business--underperformance in China having its part in the disappointment that was Ant-Man 3, while in spite of the colossal business the first Aquaman did in China Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom made a mere $65 million in that market. The result is that Disney's November 2025 release Zootopia 2 making Avengers: Endgame-type money in China ($583 million) is a big moment for Hollywood--one reflective of the effort Disney made to get back into the Chinese market (which included a personal visit by Iger himself). Contributing mightily to that film's total gross, such that it is my prediction for the winner of the "Most Valuable Blockbuster" title in Deadline's tournament this spring, its profits are sorely needed by a Disney which had to absorb the blows to its bottom line and its prestige represented by the failures of Snow White, Elio and three disappointing Marvel Cinematic Universe movies in a row. And if it seems the press is not making much of this yet, I cannot imagine this display of Chinese openness to American film, and reminder to Hollywood of just how well it can do in that market given the chance, are isolated instances--the more in as there are evidences that Washington's trade war-mindedness against China is losing some of its edge (consider the change in chip export policy), and a Hollywood which has been taking such a financial beating for six years that I can't help wonder if we won't one day find it a scene of abrupt Enron-like collapse, as even its dumbest decision-makers begin to admit that it desperately needs the market--the more in as ticket sales represent just a part of what is to be made in the age of television, streaming and to-the-hilt merchandising.

Of "Back Catalog Value": A Few Words

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

In the wake of the Enron scandal Emmanuel Todd speculated that the performance of the U.S. economy, whose late '90s-era dynamism he found suspect, might soon be revealed to be a fraud as more such scandals emerged, leading to a downgrading of the American economy's size and political-economic weight so radical as to significantly contribute to the end of the country's international hegemony in short order. Of course, as we know a quarter of a century on there was no mass of new scandal of the kind he expected, and no such downgrading of the U.S. economy. Still, Todd was right about the American performance of the late '90s not being some new normal, that it was indeed smoke rather than fire, all as the episode brought new attention to the business world's reliance on accounting whose veracity was not beyond question--a concern which has not gone away and which may well have grown in an age in which, as we see with firms like Tesla (which in spite of its small share of the auto market, has a valuation higher than all the major auto makers combined on the basis of promises of an imminent revolution in self-driving that have long since lost all credibility), valuations are out of line with fundamentals in ways that make one wonder if a very serious "market correction" is not coming after all.

For my part I wonder about the extent to which this may be the case in Hollywood specifically. After all, consider how that business has fared for the last half decade. We saw the collapse of filmgoing globally in 2020, and then recover only very slowly, with gross revenues stabilizing about 30-40 percent below the pre-pandemic level in real terms in 2023-2024 in North America, and plausibly the rest of the world as well. The result has been the studios being out tens of billions of dollars in movie rentals alone compared with what they would have hoped to make over this time frame, all as they bore increased costs as a result of higher interest rates with all that implied for servicing the massive debt loads they had amassed mindlessly pursuing the fantasy of boundless streaming income, and the additional costs of delays in film production and release due to the pandemic and to the 2023 strikes. Especially given the number of times we have seen the budgets of big Marvel movies prove to have been far larger than the studios initially owned, one can easily picture the gap between income and outgo, and a studio's being "in the black," as greater than admitted by the generally boosterish media coverage.

Where the situation's alleviation is concerned it does not help that while a plausible response for Hollywood has been to retrench in deep and fundamental fashion by going for the targeted hits that seem most likely to pay off in the shrunken (and fragmented) new market than ye old tentpole they have stuck with their franchise-mindedness, , but otherwise doing the same old thing while excusing it with references to "back catalog value," as in "Yes, this sequel no one asked for will probably not make a profit, but it will shore up the continued value of the movies that came before it." There may be something in that--but likely not so much as they imply in an age in which older movies are probably less and less seen, simply lost in an ever more crowded marketplace and ever more ignored by the young. (Consider, for instance, the James Bond franchise and its "youth" problem. The name "James Bond" meaning so little to them reflects their not having looked at the older Bond movies, and the reboot's having failed to get them to do so, or captivate them on its own terms.)

Indeed, especially given that the numbers in question are particularly inaccessible to the general public one may well picture "back catalog value" as something easily overrated, the more in as so much of the means of realizing such value is "related-party trade" as multimedia companies' production divisions sell rights to their material to the same companies' streaming divisions. (Thus we see the streaming rights for some movie sold for $50 million. Correct value, undervalued, overvalued? It is very, very hard for anyone to say much about that without very detailed insider knowledge, all as the potentials for abuse are enormous, especially in the streaming age with its new and perhaps poorly understood metrics and valuations.) Such overrating is likely to have the same effect on industry finances as the overvaluing of any other financial asset--until reality catches up with the overvaluation, perhaps after a very, very large edifice has been built up on that shaky foundation. Of course, even if this is the case it may be that Hollywood, like so much of the rest of the economy, will "defy gravity" for a long time--but I do not rule out its realizing Todd's prediction in miniature, with the current frantic merger movement that has Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery possibly being folded into bigger entities both testament to their vulnerability, and suggestive of how any shock could propagate more widely through the sector--and the broader economy.

Why Are People So Handy in Movies?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

You may have noticed that in films, and on television, it seems as if anyone and everyone, at need, suddenly becomes exceedingly proficient at carpentry, plumbing, electrical work and more specialized activity such as auto repair as well. Thus does, for example, Randy Dupree burn down part of his hosts' living room, and then (as we see in a montage, of course) in very short order restore it beautifully in spite of his not having been identified as practiced or even learned any of the relevant trades or crafts, and indeed the whole premise of the story his being a lazy, unfocused fool incapable of holding down the most mundane job for any length of time.

One would never know from such material that people take years to learn the trades of carpenter, plumber, electrician before they can do them professionally, and spend a lifetime mastering them (and that auto repair today is not what it was in 1955). Instead one would think them things that "everyone does" as a matter of course, the more in as, in contrast with many other misrepresentations of reality that get much more attention (such as the ceaseless caviling about Hollywood casting attractive people--at least until recently) this one gets almost no acknowledgment whatsoever from the commentariat. Still, it can seem telling of a great many things about Hollywood. Not the least of them is the ignorance of a great many of its writers and other "creatives" about the large and small things of life (don't buy that crap about how much "research" they do), which is profound enough that they don't know how ignorant they are, and this state continuing the more easily in this state because of just how much they simply write from other fiction they have seen rather than going on actual knowledge or experience of the world. This would seem to be reinforced by their propensity to conjure up omnicompetent figures, because of how unlikely skills are convenient for the advancement of their less than half-baked plots, and the too little acknowledged reality that so much creative activity is wish-fulfillment for them--and if they are at all successful, their audience--not least in regard to how capable they really are.

Still, it seems to me that this is far from all that is going on here, and there are at least two more aspects of the matter worth mentioning. The more obvious is that Hollywood presents such tasks as tasks "anyone can do" simply because they don't think much of them--not simply because of their ignorance of what goes into a piece of well-executed carpentry, for example, but plain and simple social snobbery. We live in a society which, tirelessly offering meritocratic justifications for extreme inequality, holds that occupation can be reliably correlated with intelligence (a priori the doctor is "smarter" than the nurse, let alone the janitor), and those who "work with their hands" rank lower on that scale than those who "work with their brains" (as if those who work with their hands didn't need their brains to tell their hands what to do!), such that those who work with their hands would be doing something else "for a living" if they were really intelligent--and their work not requiring great intelligence, "anyone" able to do it, especially from the standpoint of those who think in terms of skills in terms of prowess rather than learning, such as their social betters, who, if they can write software or sit behind a desk barking orders can surely do what a carpenter or plumber can do. (That Hollywood's writers' jobs have them working on sets full of stage workers whose practicing the relevant crafts is indispensable to the productions they work on does not disabuse them of such stupidities says a lot about how little interest they take in even their immediate surroundings and the people in them--identifying upward, with the Big Name Producer they hope to be rather than the working people whose lot they share.)

The other aspect of the matter, connected with this but subtler, is the way in which our Hollywood writers present "auto-subtopia" as the human norm--"everyone" a car owner living in a large, detached, home. Those who have cars and houses of that kind are obviously not all masters of the relevant skills, but there is somewhat more opportunity for them to learn something of those skills, and room for illusions about how much they have learned, than is the case with people who do not own vehicles, and live in apartments, especially rental apartments. The statistics indicate that such persons are a small minority of the population in the U.S. (one-sixth of the population), but small numbers are not the reason for their marginalization here. Rather it is that they are marginalized socially--people who live in apartments, especially when they do so not as people transitioning between one phrase of life and another (young people who have left their parents' home but aren't yet settled in one of their own, "divorced dads," etc.), or the occasional resident of a really luxurious city penthouse, but people who have known no way of life but car-less rental apartment living tending to be urban and relatively poor and therefore of no account so far as society and its "artists" are concerned. So it went in the pandemic, when the do-nothingism government favored and got hit the transit rider and the apartment dweller particularly hard. And so it goes in the crap that Hollywood smears across our screens.

Civilization According to George Friedman

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Over the years I have read George Friedman less because he was persuasive than because while he was being unpersuasive he at least managed to be interesting--from his prognostication about American war with Japan in the 1990s forward. It is far from irrelevant to that unpersuasiveness that Friedman put his rather conventional ideological biases before the facts. Thus, for example, his insistence in The Next 100 Years (which he has since carried forward from book to book, all the way down to his last, The Storm Before the Calm) that Ronald Reagan's supply-side policies achieved their aim of "moderniz[ing] the economy through investment" by "reducing taxes in order to stimulate investment" amid a dearth of such resources when in reality no such thing ever occurred--all the hard data on investment, assets and value added showing that rather than enabling the "modernization" of America's plant the way Reagan promised and Friedman insists happened instead the tax cuts (and deregulation and the rest) enabled the economy's financialization, and what goes with that, the stagnation of manufacturing and outright deindustrialization that has prevailed since. (In more precise terms, "nonresidential investment" did not go up, while the manufacturing sector's asset growth slowed to a crawl and, where its equipment stock is concerned, flatlined, even with the help of massive military-industrial spending and the shale boom.) For the same reasons his interpretations of the facts are similarly flawed, from his characterization of the 2003 Iraq War (as having been about blocking the action of terrorists seeking "empire," and strategically sound on those terms), to his contempt for China (which he predicted would collapse in the '10s), to his attitude toward climate change (which, whether he was smarmily complacent as remote, or smarmily dismissive of it as a problem too big to solve, always had him ruling out action on the problem, the reasons why ultimately irrelevant). That Friedman is so loyal to such myths, and makes such pronouncements, may have made him more successful career-wise (elites pay less to be truly informed than to have their prejudices flattered, and here we are talking about him because of the stature this enabled him to achieve), but not a better or more useful one for those seriously interested in understanding where the world has been, where it is now, where it may be going.

Still, now and then there is something in his work that seems worth a second look, with a notable example his classification of societies as barbaric, civilized or decadent. The "barbarian" respects only his own society's ways, but those of no other people; the "civilized" can respect those of their own culture, and those of other cultures; and the "decadent" respect nothing. There is more to the theory--Friedman seeing these as phases in a life cycle, with one phase leading to the other, the barbarian growing civilized with experiences, the civilized condition with its combination of "belief" and "skepticism" being unstable and leading to decadence in its turn. But it is the phases themselves rather than any teleology in them that matters for my immediate purposes.

Where the line between barbarism and civilization is concerned Friedman's schema strikes me as much less well-founded, rich, nuanced than that of a Thorstein Veblen, who drew a distinction between the settled, industry-oriented, pragmatic, comparatively utilitarian and egalitarian civilized society and the mobile/nomadic, predatory barbaric culture with its obsession with aggression, hierarchy, precedence, conspicuous wastefulness and the rest that made its survivals the essence of his famed thinking about the "leisure class." And again reflective of his biases, Friedman in his juxtaposition of a "barbaric" America with all the youthfulness and vigor of that state with a Europe (barbaric in the sixteenth century, civilized in the eighteenth) gone decadent aligning conveniently with his pretty standard "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" view, compulsive sneering at Europeans (or rather what he imagines Europeans to be), and expectations of America's being the leading power in the world for a long time to come--as well as the old right-wing view of rationalistic examination of the social world as a sign not of progress but degeneration. There also seems to me a certain obtuseness toward class in Friedman's system, namely in what he calls the "civilized" view, this less likely to be the property of a whole society than of its formally educated, office-holding elite--perhaps especially the elite of an empire self-satisfied about their management of a diversity of subordinate peoples through a hodgepodge of "pragmatic" arrangements they tell themselves are testament to their "genius" for ruling less breeds (as seen in, for example, the more romantic, "gentlemen's history"-type accounts of the Roman or British Empires which stress such "genius" over the harsh realities and extreme brutality of empire). By contrast one imagines that in the very same societies the "common man" (the Roman plebian, the Englishman on a farm in the provinces or the slums of the cities) leading a rather narrower existence remote from such education, tasks and authority had little of what Friedman calls the "civilized" view about him. Still, if Friedman's system is far less satisfying than others as a way of understanding what we call "civilization" and those states with which one may compare it the difference between those to whom Otherness is a thing one can only meet with hostility, and those who can deal with it in an urbane and practical way--and yet again, those whose views are simply nihilistic--seems to me of some usefulness when considering the variety of ideology and attitude today.

Amerigo Bonasera's Dilemma and the Petty Bourgeois' Lot

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

In both Mario Puzo's bestselling novel The Godfather, and Francis Ford Coppola's classic film adaptation of that book--for all the very important differences between them with regard to emphasis, structure, flow, even resolution--the drama begins the same way, with Amerigo Bonasera's woes sending him to Don Corleone for redress. In the more than half century since Amerigo's story was introduced to the world the meeting been endlessly referenced, not simply because it was the opening scene of what became a screen classic, but because of the particular power of that scene, which may have at least something to do with its eloquently summing up the dilemma of Mr. Bonasera not just in the wake of a particular crisis, but the course of his larger life that has all the more resonance for the ubiquity of what is most important in it--a petty bourgeois struggling with the reality that the society in which he believed is not what he had been told it was, thought it was.

The matter of trust seems a plausible place to begin--the propensity to trust other individuals, society's institutions, the received wisdom about "how the world works." It seems notorious among serious observers of social life that the lower one goes in the social scale the less trust one finds, and vice-versa, and it is not at all hard to imagine why. Those at the bottom know full well that they are "bound but unprotected." Thus they not only distrust each other, but Authority, from which they expect neither protection nor justice in a world in which their will is constantly thwarted, and they are used to not getting their own way. They are in fact likely to feel themselves living in a world determined to cheat them, use them, beat down on them while being denied a proper chance to defend themselves--punished if they defend themselves--with this state of being perpetually bullied the more galling because of how exposed they are to the dangers, and because of how little it would take to destroy them, a false accusation, for example, likely to suffice. And it is the opposite with those at the very top, the unbound but protected who, as unending corporate scandal demonstrates, break the law right and left knowing that if the government ever makes an issue out of those misdeeds of which they know themselves guilty the worst they are likely to face is a fine apt to be far smaller than the profit of their malfeasance, practically a modest tax on their "illicit" income, all as if they face worse they can count on government being afraid to "spook the markets" by coming after them, on passports that will let them relocate with their ill-gotten gains to a country from which their extradition would be exceedingly unlikely, and at worst, a short term in a facility far less fearsome than the hell-on-Earth in which a government preaching human rights to other nations keeps its Unwashed, with this perhaps shortened by a timely presidential pardon, after which they can simply go back to their old "onward and upward" path through life, as it were. Amid all that the rich don't trouble themselves much with how the world works--it works for them, after all--and anyway have others on the payroll doing for them the thinking upholding the status quo requires, as they question very little per se (indeed, often show themselves surprisingly naive generally, as when a con artist gets a hold of them, because they are so used to being protected rather than looking out for themselves). By contrast the poor, if not necessarily having much of a chance to put together a proper "big picture" of things, may feel they don't know much, may in fact be susceptible to all kinds of misapprehensions, but are likely to be sure that the official line promulgated by politicians and the media and the rest isn't the truth. All that talk of equality? Even just the "equality under the law" that right-wingers bitterly hostile to egalitarianism are usually prepared to countenance in a nominal way? Not only can't they take such rhetoric seriously, they would find it hazardous to do so, forgetting how things really work dangerous in an immediate, personal way--and the pretense likely to be intolerable given the bitterness and even rage that those who endure the lot of the bound but unprotected are likely to feel if they feel any human love for themselves at all (society's denial of their right to do which is still another source of bitterness and rage).

The petty bourgeois, as might be expected from their association with "middleness," stands in between those at the top and the bottom--but far from evenly. In practice they too are among the bound but unprotected. But they are not disposed to think much about disparities here, to think of themselves as at least not very much bound while being reasonably protected, and indeed to identify with those above them and despise those below them. It helps that the System does seem to work for them--at least enough for the pieties to have some credibility, such that they are prone to believe what Authority tells them, about, among much else, equality, and of course, opportunity. Rather than bearing out homilies about how "hard work gets you ahead" the painful experience of the poor is that hard work is likely to merely allow people to survive, and often enough fail to do that, as their "hard work" enriches those above them and not themselves. But the petty bourgeois' conditions of life have them believing in the prospect of upward mobility, and the good petty bourgeois that if they are not billionaires they have more in common with billionaires than the poor, that they are like them upstanding "makers" rather than "takers," and that they have a fair chance of elevating themselves, or their children, into the ranks of the truly privileged if they just try hard enough, with this only the just reward of their upstanding, making-rather-than-taking, hard work. (Indeed, if it is really the case that "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" syndrome is a force in American life it is plausible that it is most significant at this level.)

Of course, for all that the petty bourgeois is far more likely to come into contact with working class persons than they are billionaires, with their common attitudes toward each other underlining the disparity. The working class man is apt to regard the conventional petty bourgeois as simple-minded where a great many things are concerned, with an exaggerated idea of how high he stands in the world. Meanwhile the petty bourgeois sees the suspicious, cynical, view of the world common among the socially disadvantaged not as a plausible response to their conditions of life but the paranoid idiocy of the "uneducated," and sure that they have only themselves to blame for this foolishness, that they ought to be more like themselves, that if they thought and acted as they did they too would be "successful." (The petty bourgeois is a great believer in their ways being the right ways for everyone, ever commending their own "aspirationalism" to those they see as beneath them in a spirit of "Perhaps this will have a humanizing effect on the dog-stealers!") But all the same, realities being what they are they do, now and again, make the petty bourgeois themselves face the hollowness of their pieties. They "did everything right" and worked hard, but didn't get as far ahead as they thought they would--or at all--and if their accustomed response is to blame the so-called takers for their not being a billionaire yet (must be all those welfare queens living high on their tax money!), this is not always their response, realizing as they might that if the System seems to work for them it does so only incidentally, its real purpose serving others far more privileged than themselves. They might find as Amerigo Bonasera did who the law really works for, and that it's not them.

It is a powerful shock to experience what people lower in the social scale than themselves experience all of their days--but the response to being faced with the question "Little Man, What Now?" is hardly universal among people, and still less so across groups. If one possible reaction is to say that the System must be changed, as the history of movements for change of the past several centuries show, the reaction of "rebellion" is less automatic than the left hopes and the right fears--and especially unlikely among people of Mr. Bonasera's strata. There is the alternative of private, sullen apathy, which has people going through the motions as they do their bit within a System in which they no longer believe, and this "ritualism" would seem common indeed among the "middle class" in Robert Merton's analysis--but for Mr. Bonasera in the circumstances this is too much. There is also the alternative to either looking to "change the System," or disbelieving in the System but going through the motions it requires, accepting the System, accepting its goals and values, its structure and essential functioning, but being ready to break the rules to get their way, with, indeed the petty bourgeois notorious for that response (this, in Merton's vocabulary, "innovation"). Hence the famous fascination of the petty bourgeois with the successful criminal who breaks the law and gets away with it. (Thus their brains all but breaking with delight as they watch Tony Soprano on the screen, or, in a moment in which the government has just sacrificed "Main Street to Wall Street" on an historic scale in the wake of irresponsibility, stupidity and criminality that broke the world, rather than being revolted by the lionization of a self-satisfied vulgarian jackass grifter when looking on Martin Scorsese's dramatization of the antics of Jordan Belfort fantasize about being a "Wolf of Wall Street.")

So does it with Mr. Bonasera. He speaks the first line of the movie, which is "I believe in America" and there is never any reason to doubt him when he says so, his whole life testimony to that, evident even in his dealings with Corleone in the scene that follows, as we have every reason to think he goes on believing in America. But all the same, in this specific crisis, his daughter ruined by a politician's son, this very allusively named man (Amerigo evoking Ameriggo Vespucci and the continent he "discovered," and Bonasera the Italian Buonasera, "Good Evening") goes in his grief to a man who owns politicians likely more senior and powerful than the reprobate's father but whom he had, in spite of the man's wife being godmother to that only daughter over whose suffering he now agonizes, earlier spurned in his desire to be a good citizen and a good man--for he now finds it unbearable to let the injustice done him and his stand, and sees no alternative to, reluctant as he was to come to such an accommodation, plead for that other man's friendship, knowing full that it may mean repaying a very great favor far beyond his own powers someday.

The Glasses Wearer in Anime: A Few Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Those who have watched much anime (or read much manga) are likely to have noticed that in that medium a character's wearing glasses does not have the same significance that it would in the United States. Where here it is common to associate glasses (especially when they are not presented as a marker of aging) with infirmity, unattractiveness, studiousness--and with the combination of all three qualities in "nerdiness"--it is not always so there. Certainly anime does have its recognizable nerd stereotypes, most often a very skinny or very fat guy with glasses who is apt to be indifferent to his dress, physically unattractive, prone toward "techie" skills and occupations, given to geeky pastimes, and likely also a "creep." There is also the nerdy girl, more likely to be very skinny than very fat, and less likely to be poorly dressed, and perhaps not so strongly associated with "techy-ness," but also unattractive, given to geeky pastimes, and also creepy. Yet a great many glasses-wearing figures do not fit that mold. Rather more than in American productions a male with glasses may still be thought athletic, a dominating Alpha male, even handsome--a "megane" a formidable adversary in physical as well as mental pursuits, a serious rival for a woman's affections. At the same time a woman with glasses will often be presented as very beautiful, and very feminine--especially if the glasses go with striking curves and a gentle, shy, demeanor in the manner associated with the "meganekko."

That said it is worth pointing out the limitations of the difference. As many will rush to point out, American fiction has its "hot librarians." And so far as I can tell while a protagonist's circle in a "harem" comedy is likely to include a "glasses girl" of the meganekko type, for example, the principal love interest of the protagonist in stories for male and female readers alike tends not to have glasses. Indeed, that the only exception I can come up with is Boruto itself seems to underline the point Sarada Uchida (who at least early in the series appears the stereotypical smug "know it all" who enjoys seeing the male protagonist at a disadvantage of the type much more enjoyed by female than male readers) seems yet another example of a shonen series making concessions to female readers in ways that, in America at least, are prone to start a culture war rather than an example of a meganekko as the female lead in an anime. Still, the difference in attitude is there, the meganekko far bigger than the niche character of anything comparable in American pop culture.

Ghost Whisperer and the Politics of Crossover Appeal on TV

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

I suspect few think Ghost Whisperer a touchstone for the discussion of television. Yet it seems to me notable because of the elements it brought together. Consider how here we had a show with a female protagonist (Melinda Gordon) who was the independent owner of an (apparently) successful business of a relatively "romantic" and "fun" type, an antique store. She is happily married to a man who is at once from a rich family but also a handy blue-collar type making a good blue-collar living as a firefighter/paramedic and a doctor (one night they are talking about him going back to school, then fast-forward five years and BAM! he's a white-coated M.D. at the local hospital), a bro who plays poker with other bros but is also Mr. Sensitive and all in all the perfect "supportive" husband. All this is convenient because she happens to have a psychic ability that lets her see and hear the souls of those who have passed but not yet "walked into the light," for being her own boss, with said supportive husband, she has the time and freedom required to help those ghosts settle their affairs so that they can move on, which going by the frequency with which these have to do with family affairs, romantic relationships and the like make her a sort of therapist to the dead, which, in spite of darker moments, means lots and lots of touchy-feely stuff in an essentially soothing show.

In all this one can see a fair amount of material that is conventionally expected to appeal to a female audience--but not necessarily much conventionally expected to appeal to a male audience, which may indeed find significant elements of all this off-putting. (If in respectable mainstream commentary it is women's resentment of men's desires and expectations that gets aired, men too have their resentments of women's desiderata in men, especially their being a good many unlikely, frequently difficult and often contradictory things at once--like all the things Jim Gordon happens to be. And of course, the stuff of the average Ghost Whisperer plot was exactly the kind of thing to make a certain sort of male stereotype say "Feelings? Ugh!") Still, if the show could seem very, even exceptionally, female-oriented in these ways it was not wholly without its element of male appeal, most obviously in the producers making the actress playing Melinda Gordon, Jennifer Love Hewitt--one of Hollywood's last true sex symbols, with the considerable male fan base going with that (certainly, going by what we see in Internet searches), with the show (within reason) giving that fan base their share of "eye candy." One might add that if Melinda certainly qualifies as a Strong Female Protagonist, in contrast with those Strong Female Protagonists whose writers endeavor to prove to the viewer that they are strong by having them be insufferable to everybody in that my-rudeness-is-proof-of-my-strength way to which American culture is so addicted today (indeed, Hewitt had played characters like that before, as in the underrated Jackie Chan action-comedy The Tuxedo) here she is in "cute and likable" mode. The result was that the show was not wholly ignored by male viewers, a fact which likely helped keep it on the air for five years.

Such a blend of appeal and audience is rare today, female-oriented shows much less likely to make such concessions to male viewers in the hope of broadening their audience. Quite the contrary, female-oriented shows today often seem to shout "I don't care if men like it or not!" or even "Part of the fun here is making something men will hate!" (with Bridgerton, for example, the go-to case). At the same time it is hard to think of male-oriented shows quite so cavalier about potentially alienating a female audience. Much as some prefer not to have such things pointed out there is an undeniable asymmetry in that, and especially in light of how much time and energy the pop cultural kulturkampf absorbs, and how much ill will it may be generating (less significant in my view than many others have it, but still, not helpful . . .), also something to be said about it. Where this is concerned those who regard Hollywood as captive to "woke lunacy" see such an asymmetry as reflective of the fact. Yet, while there is no denying the extent to which elites, especially in the creative industries, have been identity politics-minded (because of their conservatism rather than in spite of it) I find hard interest a far more plausible explanation for what people in business (for TV production is a business) than decision makers' views on gender. Simply put, the obvious, easy male concession that makers of female-oriented fare could make to a male audience--Ghost Whisperer-style indulgence of the male gaze with sexy images of sexy women--ceased to be so amid the intensity of feminist flak over it, especially post-#MeToo, as the flak got more intense, and some viewers more sensitized. This was in fact such that even the makers of material for men are now squeamish about it, with this reinforced by the hope of drawing a female audience for their own fare--the conventional wisdom holding that women are more easily drawn to male-oriented material than the other way around, though it is also the case that, especially with women having more alternatives than before, they are more demanding and less forgiving (such that men's fare is now obliged to have Strong Female Characters as well). This does not change the fact of an asymmetry, but it is a matter of commercial imperatives--and of ideology only insofar as ideology becomes a factor from the standpoint of money--in a reminder of what in the end drives politics in this sphere as in every other.

Corporatization and the Decadence of the Superhero Comic

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

America's long superhero-oriented comics industry affords a spectacle in many ways familiar to those at all attentive to the business behind pop culture. It has become more thoroughly corporatized and concentrated, with creatives overshadowed by company management obsessed with control, and keeping the artists on a short leash, as they focus on the ruthless exploitation of old--often exhausted--franchises rather than creating anything new, with an eye to holding onto old fans rather than winning new ones, and scoring multimedia success rather than producing for their own humble medium per se, the more in as this aligns with the concerns of the new owners. Thus compared with a few decades ago the smaller imprint, the star talent, that helped keep the field interesting are scarce on the ground, with the likes of Wildstorm and Malibu Comics not only long since swallowed up by the giants that are DC and Marvel on the way to their being swallowed up themselves by the Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery empires, but not all that much being done with them, certainly to go by those broader media profiles by which company managements set such great store. (Consider how back in the '90s Malibu Comics saw its series' adapted to offer a Men In Black feature film that launched movie and TV series', a Gary Larson-produced Night Man live-action TV series, an Ultraforce cartoon, all as we had major feature films based on comics from other labels ranging from the now-defunct Mirage's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Dark Horse's Barb Wire to Image Comics' Spawn. What can anyone compare to that today? Meanwhile in this generation of comics what creator has the standing of an Alan Moore? Or even a Rob Liefeld?

The comics business' path to this point admittedly had its idiosyncratic features. There was the bubble in comic book collecting and its bursting, the decline of the specialty comic book store, the extreme direct competition that superhero comics faced from the superabundance of superhero fare in other media the twenty-first century brought--and from Japanese manga that, bringing a distinctive visual and narrative style and a far greater range of theme made many a fan of people who never looked at an old-fashioned American comic book. Comicsgate may have played a part as well. Yet in the end the forces of corporatization and consolidation, of overweening Suits keeping the power in their hands as they favor old ideas over new with the spin-off, the tie-in, the adaptation much in mind ultimately led to the same corporatized, concentrated, old success-exploiting, innovation-averse pattern we have seen in film, and television, and book publishing, and even gaming. Indeed, even the seemingly novel features of the situation in comics seem to fit the old pattern, with the comics collecting bubble arguably part of the speculative mania that became the driver of the American economy in the '80s; the decline of specialty stores part of the crisis of retail; the competition of print with electronic media all too familiar in book publishing, and of media of every kind finding it harder to make its products stand out in an ever-more crowded and cacophonous scene; and the "graying of fandom" so many have observed that may be suggestive of intensely attentive fandoms themselves becoming a thing of the past in a scene where, with so much on offer, slighter attention to more enthusiasms is the norm. And of course, the way the culture wars color everything these days hardly needs expansion here . . .

Considering all that it seems fair to acknowledge that by the time all this was happening comics was already an aging, even decadent, medium, well into the late treasured family story-inside joke-virtuosity displaying phase of its life cycle. (It seems symbolic of this that Moore's Watchmen, which, brilliant as that work is, is also the kind of thing that can only appear in that late stage of a genre's life cycle, and that not as a source of renewal but as a portent of its ending, is now four decades old.) In even the most favorable circumstances the genre's age, telling decades ago, would have been that much more evident now. Still, especially given what the trend of corporatized franchise-exploiting has meant elsewhere it is hard to picture it having been a positive factor in the situation. Indeed, the fact that the superhero comics genre was so old and weary may have made it the more vulnerable to the damage that the kind of short term-minded, play-it-safe mentality of the executives can do to a field with what they flatter themselves is their brilliant "leadership."

Larry Summers' Scandal and the Biases of the Media

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Some years ago I started taking up the subject of media bias in my working papers in a serious way. The ground, of course, had already been covered by a great many observers--I myself mentioning Thorstein Veblen's discussion about the matter way back in his Theory of Business Enterprise , and later reviewing Upton Sinclair's seminal The Brass Check, the latter of which seems to me fairly describable as a prototype of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's famous "propaganda model" of the news, in which market forces and the broadly prevalent ideology together quite suffice to keep the media business pushing the elites' preferred line, even without, as we so often see, the bosses' direct interference in the matter on particular points of concern to them. Still, it did seem there was something to be said about the matter of ideology here, and how its assumptions filter the content that reaches the public, such that I wrote about how centrist politics--long the politics of the American mainstream, and especially its educated elite--determined journalistic practice. I specifically held that this centrism's conservatism, and especially its hostility to dissent, its epistemological pessimism, and its elitism had its reflection in its views of the bounds of the legitimate discourse (extending much further right than left) and exclusion of what it did not see as legitimate; the combination of a complexity-shy aversion to "connecting the dots" with respect for "established" knowledge that on most issues translates to the treatment of elite opinion as authoritative rather than helping the public attain a deep comprehension of matters--in the main "one sideism," with "both sideism" apt to be a case of either minor differences among elites, or an attempt to, reflecting a greater respect for power than for expertise, push into the conversation elite positions flying in the face of the facts and any rigorous interpretation of them (as seen with climate change); and their extreme attention to politics, as against policy.

These tendencies--which the critically-minded do not hesitate to characterize as failings on the part of the media evident in their coverage of every significant story, with their treatment of scandal apt to be exemplary, and recently their coverage of Larry Summers' connections with his "wingman" Jeffrey Epstein no exception. That media, which on the whole treated Summers a lot more gently than it might have done, did not consider whether Summers' conduct in public life was perhaps not so very far removed from his conduct in the private life of which he confessed himself "deeply ashamed"; or what his conduct suggested about the elite layer from which he hails more generally. Instead it was content to retail a piece of seedy gossip, never mind what it and the other revelations about the "friends of Jeffrey Epstein" suggested about the "big picture," precisely because that is exactly what the center never discusses before the broad public, and at every turn discourages that public from ever considering--those who get into trouble apt to be Great Men who erred and are not to be judged too harshly for it, whom we are enjoined to consider empathetically the way they are never asked to do with the Little People--or at worst bad apples whose badness says absolutely nothing about the "very fine people" who are their colleagues. The obvious fact that the Great Men are anything but Great, just mediocrities who got all the breaks and made the most of them in advancing themselves to very high places, and certainly any suggestion that the problem is not a few bad apples but a barrel itself rotten, is never to be breathed, such thinking instead the mark of an insane "ideologue" and "extremist" of the kind not to be countenanced for a moment by right-thinking people--all the better, of course, to facilitate the inevitable rehabilitation of such figures who remind us that what the great Scythian philosopher Anacharsis said of written laws most certainly applies to "cancellation" in our time. Like cobwebs, anything small that gets into them will be hopelessly entangled and unable to escape, but anything large and weighty will go right through--and this reality all too consistent with the glaring distinction between the bound but unprotected, the protected but unbound, staring us in the face every time we look at the news.

Why Do Adjuncts Put Up With Their Conditions?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

These days the unattractions of the adjunct professorship, and certainly teaching as an adjunct "full-time part-timer" in the way so often seen in, for example, English departments, are pretty well known these days. There is, most obviously, the contingent nature of the work, the adjunct hired by the class with no security existing whatsoever against termination that is the extreme opposite of the tenure that is for many one of the attractions of an academic career. There is the notoriously dismal pay relative even to other educators in a country notorious for not paying them well, and the lack of fringe benefits in an economy where workers are highly reliant on job-connected health, pension and other protections. (Indeed, rather than getting health insurance they may find that if they take a sick day they are billed the fee for the substitute for that hour, which is likely to be more than they would have made teaching that hour--and rather than getting a pension they may even be cut out of the Social Security system if state law allows it, their contract instead shoving them into a privatized arrangement all too likely to be a simple forced savings scheme to which their employer will contribute absolutely nothing.) There is the fact that in return for this lack of protection and compensation they do the grunt work of the college--teaching the classes the better-protected and remunerated full-time faculty do not want because of the subject (first-year courses, grading-intensive courses, like English composition 101--yes, faculty hate it as much as students do) and the timing (early morning classes, evening classes), a situation the more exploitative as these classes are likely to be the department's great financial justification (as composition certainly is for English departments). There is the fact that they do all this with less access to facilities and support generally. (They may have to do office hours without having an office, or even a cubicle, maybe not even able to find a spare chair to sit in when they are obliged to be there--all of which makes a most dignified impression when a student comes to see them, of course. The situation which also necessitates their carrying all they might leave in an office with them--in a briefcase or backpack. They get the classroom assignments others don't want, too--like the one where the audiovisual equipment is apt to be busted, or which may be subject to noise from construction just next door.) There is the fact that an adjunct paying their bills in just this way is likely to need more than one such job, forcing them to commute between far-flung campuses, perhaps on public transport in an area poorly supplied with it because they cannot afford a car (with their office strapped to their back as they stand on that overcrowded bus). And there is the fact that there is no pathway leading from all this to anything better within the system. (After all, the reason there are so many adjuncts is that the corporatized university is less and less inclined to hire full-time faculty with all the privileges pertaining to them generally.)

What has been much less discussed is why adjuncts tolerate all this for the years and decades and even whole careers they so often do; why they do not take their degrees elsewhere, not least because, much as STEM cultists sneer at English degrees as worthless from an employment perspective they are not wholly without options, perhaps not enviable by the standard of the American professional, but still better than this. Indeed, even the proverbial barista job may look better than what an adjunct has from the standpoint of pay, security, demands, while someone with a graduate degree in English and years of teaching experience can always seek a job within the K-12 teaching system. I suppose that when people who are far removed from that world think about the matter they chalk it up to those who do this work for long being obtuse or impractical in these matters--for instance, a newly minted English Ph.d doing the job as they search for a more permanent position, and then failing to find one sticking at it for year after year, even after they should have realized the pursuit is hopeless and that they ought to go do something else. Perhaps, they think, these people are afraid of leaving the familiarity of the college campus for the "real world." Perhaps especially where adjuncts eschew public school teaching they may think the adjunct a snob who feels that it would be déclassé to go from teaching people who were in high school four months earlier to teaching people who are still in high school (an adjunct professor still a "professor," as against a mere "teacher"). There is a certain amount of caricature here, and not a little unkindness, but I will not wholly deny that all of these factors may be operative to some degree in particular cases, and perhaps many of them. However, I think that focusing on these factors overlooks a good many factors that are probably much more important in their tolerating their condition. Not the least of these is that as an adjunct they have a measure of control over their time such as they are unlikely to have in another line of work. They can, for example, accept or refuse particular assignments. And when they do accept an assignment they teach their classes, if they are required to do so put in their office hours, and then having done their duty, go. They may have to take with them a stack of papers to grade, but they get leeway regarding exactly when they have to deal with that chore. This matters the more in as for many of them teaching is just a day job, the adjunct having another activity they consider their real vocation--in the English department, quite likely as a writer of some sort. It is also the case that teaching as an adjunct spares the teacher some of the annoyances that go with most other jobs. Certainly they are not unsupervised, department heads mandating curricula, requiring the submission of syllabi in advance, getting student evaluations, conducting classroom observations, etc., but it is a different thing from the minute-to-minute everyday oversight characteristic of so much white collar work, while they need not involve themselves with colleagues and, for example, the office politics that go with them. This makes for a relatively solitary existence, but the introvert, made especially uncomfortable by authority and eager to avoid peers generally, may prefer it to the alternative, and writers are far from unknown to be that.

Is this really satisfactory compensation for the lack of security, pay, benefits, etc.? No, especially because in practical terms the "compensation" tends to be slighter than those who go down this path tend to hope. If they have more control over their time than they would in a "regular job" they probably do not end up with much more control, given the labor-intensiveness of the courses they pull, and the inconvenience of the time slots they draw and all the commuting they have to do, and the fact that simply trying to get by on little money means a more harried life in innumerable ways, with the extra hours the transit-riding adjunct holding down even one teaching job, let alone two or three, must spend commuting compared with someone who had a car telling. (Going anywhere else, after all, is similarly inconvenient.) Equally if they get to avoid many of the annoyances of other jobs, and an introvert often finds this attractive, teaching is hardly an ideal career for a person with such a personality, and teaching on these particular terms still worse. After all, teaching is not only intensively interpersonal, but often rancorous, with this especially the case with those first-year courses that get dumped on adjuncts, which have them dealing with students barely out of high school over whom they are required to exercise authority from a position of no security whatsoever--any complaint, however unsubstantiated or unjustified, potentially a firing offense. (And there is of course what poverty means for the introverted. Few people would consider being cooped up in an overcrowded bus for hours each day pleasant. For the introvert it is that much more of a hardship.) Indeed, I suspect that most adjuncts would prefer many another teaching position to their present lot, the measure of control they lose taking on a tenure-track job, or even a lectureship, the measure of sociality demanded of them in it, the measure of added obligation they take on doing it--unattractive, but not so bad as in, for instance, the typical office job--would be worth giving up in exchange for the advantages of pay and security and the rest.

Altogether this makes adjunct teaching not a question of their "best" choice, but merely their "least worst" choice from a very limited and generally unappealing list of options testifying to how very unattractive the world of work is in our time--how little freedom it affords people in arranging their lives, certainly if they work to live rather than live to do the kind of work for which an employer is willing to pay them, how few are the options for those who are not naturally extroverted in the way that "society" so snarlingly demands of its members, and certainly how little support society provides those who want to participate in intellectual or cultural life, precisely because those in charge so little value those things. The result is that its being slightly less forbidding and onerous in ways that some will find hard to give up in turning their hand to something else--something, again, likely to be other than what they really want to be doing (again, this is the day job)--really just leaves them susceptible to extreme exploitation. Indeed, considering the situation I find myself reminded of something Upton Sinclair wrote in Mammonart, that culture is not for the "peasant slaves" in this hierarchical order, and if they endeavor to attain to it, to participate in it, "it is at the cost of health of mind and body." So does it go with many an adjunct in this corner of the teaching world, with the situation all the sadder because, here as elsewhere, very few of those saying to themselves "This is just a day job" are likely ever to find the measure of success in their true vocation that will make them no longer need to endure the drain on them that is having a day job, the belief in the end just another iteration on the cruel lie that the chase after success forced on everyone not born to a "competence" has always been, and the ways in which it makes those disadvantaged in the game acquiesce in their own ill use.

Of the Term "Woke Cultural Imperialism"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Back in 2022 when the Toy Story prequel Lightyear hit theaters much was made of the film's gesture toward LGBTQ+ inclusiveness by making Buzz Lightyear's comrade Alisha Hawthorne a woman in a same-sex relationship (with which partner, whom she is seen kissing, and to whom she seems very married, she apparently has a child). The decision led to fourteen African and Asian countries refusing to screen the film, including what had then recently been considered the hugely important Chinese market. Asked about the decision Galyn Susman said that while they "had been warned this would be a likely outcome" it was also the case that "[w]e weren't going to change the movie we wanted to make just because of a few countries with--for a lack of a better term--backward beliefs."

Ms. Susman's response generally went uncriticized in the mainstream media, which often did not bother to report the more inflammatory parts of Ms. Susman's statement (one may imagine, because they were broadly aligned with her view), but commentators on the right, for example, The Spectator's Rod Lampard, had much to say, Mr. Lampard noting critically the inconsistency by a representation of a supposedly anti-racist and anti-sexist tendency championing the LGBTQ+ in the very same breath that they denounced non-Western cultures as "backward" in a manner worthy of a pith-hatted colonialist. In fairness, one can argue that coming from right-wingers hardly famed for their cultural sensitivity to those societies, or their condemnation of the imperial-colonial past, this was just cynical point-scoring by the anti-woke. Yet one can only score genuine points when there are points to be scored, and critics like Lampard were quite right to note the juxtaposition of a "progressive" attitude on LGBTQ+ issues with a bigoted and reactionary one on the relation of "the West and the rest"--but at the same time wrong in thinking this a case of plain and simple hypocrisy such as one would imagine if, as they did, insisting on the equation of "woke" with "left." Instead the episode seems an excellent example of the falsity of any such equation.

As a great many observers (many of them people have actually heard of, not just somebody on a blog like this one) have pointed out again and again to absolutely no effect whatsoever on the mainstream conversation wokeness is not a left political tendency. After all, leftists know full well that a government (for it is they who banned the film in every case) is not its people, and the latter not to be judged by the deeds of the former given the hard realities of who has power and who does not, period, all as they know full well that a people are not the organic unity sharing a consensus of thought and feeling so often seen in the propaganda of conservative nationalists. There are always divisions and disagreements (not least along that line the woke like to ignore, class) that mean one ought to be very cautious about generalizing here--the more in as not every opinion is equally expressed in even the most "democratic" society, some voices heard above others, namely those most congenial to those in power.

Moreover, even where the people as a whole may be demonstrated to hold a view that a leftist would regard as, "for lack of a better term--backward," they do not moralize at that people for being so in the contemptuously dismissive way that Ms. Susman at least appeared to do in her quoted remark. The leftist, after all, believes in a common humanity rather than in the all-importance of "difference," while in their view what differences there are between cultures are a far from mystical thing, conditions creating consciousness and the former changing the latter, so that what may seem oppressive is not a matter of the implicit, inherent, eternal wrongness of another culture--all as the triumph of what some may be tempted to call "backwardness" is often a matter of the play of interests and forces apt to go far beyond the bounds of the nation. Just as imperialism can make a country economically backward ("underdevelop it," as it were, establishing modern transport systems to exploit its resources but otherwise standing in the way of its fuller development) the associated politics has commonly seen big powers align themselves with and throw their weight behind the most reactionary of local forces (unreconstructed fascists, racists, religious fundamentalists, military juntas, etc.) to get their way, with all that implied for the evolution of those societies. As a result, if backwardness reflects "traditionalist" views backwardness today apt to be at least partly a product of what the leftist sees as the long list of imperialist crimes, to which they are highly sensitive, and which they will not slight or compound by insult (the kind of psychic wound to which the woke are supposed to be sensitive), or sanctimoniousness given the history of their own societies (for such feeling against the LGBTQ+ is, of course, far from unknown outside those "Other" societies Ms. Susman sneers at as backward, as the box office receipts to her own movie demonstrated). Leftists also know how such attitudes can easily be exploited to support and cover for foreign policies of a far from "progressive" and peaceable nature, often in the most hypocritical fashion (as seen in right-wing politicians opposed to LGBTQ+ rights exploiting the records of foreign countries in regard to LGBTQ+ rights as excuses for demonizing them, often as a prelude to dropping bombs on them). Accordingly rather than sneering at a people as backward the people of all nations are the left's hope, in which, as their striving to persuade them shows, they are bound to believe--and in which the right disbelieves, the sneers of the misanthrope and the pessimist that utterly pervade contemporary culture bespeaking not the influence of the left, but the ferocity and success of the right in crushing the left; in, as Philip Cunliffe had it, creating a society organized around the defeat of the left.

As all this implies the thinking of the woke derives not from the left but from the right, though one would do well to be clear on what kind of right-wingers they are. They are not the sort of cosmopolitan--in George Friedman's terms, "civilized"--conservative inclined to say of other peoples "They have their ways which suit them, just as we have ours which suit us, and we must respect that." Rather they are the sort of nationalistic--to refer to Friedman again, "barbarian"--type who regarding their ways as the only ways worthy of respect, and others' ways as worthy only of contempt. (One should not mistake this for a leftist's universalism. The "barbarian" believes in the importance of difference as much as their cosmopolitan counterpart does, and is emphatic as anyone else in insisting on the Other's difference and its importance--they just can't deal with them in a civil, respectful, way.) This should not seem very surprising. After all, high postmodernist theory would seem to conduce to a cosmopolitan sort of conservatism. Yet its popularization saw that fall by the wayside amid an exaltation of subjectivity and difference that have been married to a strident and often hysterical politics of identity and status, which are often replete with inconsistencies, members of one marginalized group often despising others just as or even more marginalized than themselves in the selfish scrum that is their politics. What we call wokeness is respect for, accommodation to, the unwieldy, contradiction-riddled mass of these claims, which given the intellectual premise can easily see demands for justice for one group go hand in hand with the most utter--and truly backward--bigotry against another group in that way epitomized by what some have called "femonationalism" or "homonationalism." Bespeaking the woke's parochialism in mentality, extending the status and identity politics of American life onto a very different, much more diverse, world (as they show no knowledge of, curiosity about, respect for that wider world); and the hierarchy of priorities that, as the existence of terms like femonationalism and homonationalism shows, ranks gender higher than ethnicity, and LGBTQ+ rights rank far higher than fighting racism, religious bigotry, xenophobia (and especially certain species' of them); the combination of LGBTQ+ championship with denigration of foreign cultures that would be a contradiction in a leftist's view of a kind forcing them to do some hard thinking is for the woke not even second nature but first, and what one may call "woke cultural imperialism" with its punching down at people treated very brutally in the past perfectly consistent with the woke view of the world--and wokeness, like its cultural imperialism, all too consistent with the regular kind in a way with which no leftist would align themselves.

The Friends of Jeffrey Epstein

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:18:47 +0000

I generally have little patience for the news media's hastening to lavish breathless coverage on scandals of the more "personal" type--their doing so almost always an obvious effort to block attention to what is important using what is trivial, with the seediness of the particular trivia they use to this end making it the more distasteful. And certainly we have had even more than the usual of this dreck in the decade since #MeToo hit the scene with its particular version of "the personal is political." The revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his innumerable low friends in high places is no exception--making it the easier for that media to, for example, not report on such matters as the hunger crisis in the country and how an historic interruption of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits worsened it, or the continuing-bloodbath-that-may-mean-it-is-already-World-War-Three in Ukraine it seems to forget is even happening for long periods of time, or the way in which just about every major Western government is doing its utmost to crush all hope in any meaningful address of the climate crisis we feel the more viscerally with the record-breaking heat of every new year. Still, many of the Epstein revelations--not the ones the mainstream media cares to attend to, but evidenced in the material released all the same--show that loathsome figure to have been personally involved in high politics in ways that those who care about such matters cannot ignore. Meanwhile, rather more than is the case with a Monica Lewinsky-style indiscretion, the involvement of a rogue's gallery of senior politicians, business executives and other such Establishment figures is a window into exactly the kind of people they are--and what is far more important than that, the character of the social stratum and the system of which they are examples, representatives, servants. The best and brightest, as the courtiers of these figures tell us? Hardly. Indeed, far from being best and brightest they are by any reasonable measure pretty execrable and dull, perhaps as much so as a human being can get, with their conduct in their personal lives relevant not because it is at odds with their public conduct but because it is exactly in line with it, these "men of affairs," as "men of affairs," living down to a standard in every area of their existences that makes it impossible to speak of anything but kakistocracy as the order of the day.

Take, for example, Lawrence "Larry" Summers. The pseudo-intellectual idiots and bullies of the "But He's So Smart!" brigade invariably rush to his defense when anyone asks the basis of his admirers' high estimate of his intellect--but never have anything to say that would mean much to an intelligent layperson, or for that matter, a professional economist capable of speaking forthrightly about the discipline. After all, can they point to any achievements in his field of economics whose significance they would recognize as meriting the accolades? Of course not. This is partly a matter of Summers' actual career as an economics professor having been so brief before he moved on to "bigger and better" things--but also a matter of the ultra-specialized how-many-entrepreneurs-can-found-a-startup-on-the-head-of-a-pin Scholasticism that characterizes academic economics in our time. (Have you seen the inanities that the Swedish central bank hands out its pseudo-Nobel Prizes for? Yikes.) One can more easily make a judgment on the basis of his career as a policymaker. As it happens, this has consisted mainly of displays of contempt for working people (whose deteriorating living standard is in his view a matter of their being "treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"), his ostentatious groveling before Wall Street at even the most inopportune moments (consider what his colleague Joseph Stiglitz had to say about his conduct--and his mentor Robert Rubin's conduct--in White House conferences), and consistent issuance of neoliberal prescriptions whenever it counted as he proved wrong on any and every issue of consequence (as Greg Palast shows, backing financial deregulation that paved the way for the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, then adhering to the same line, crippling government rescue of the economy amid the crisis). Indeed, what we see in Summers is a beneficiary of nepotism which has likely seen him not only derive enormous direct advantages from his "choice of parents" (the son of two Ivy League economists, one the brother of Paul Samuelson, the other the sister of Kenneth Arrow, Summers was born the economics profession's equivalent of a prince of the blood), but very likely some of the "reflected glory" of relations rightly or wrongly thought illustrious within their particular academic community; and building on that foundation, unswerving deference to higher-ups generally and elite interests as the elites themselves see them particularly, such that they can count on his judgments being exactly those that they would want the individual in his position to make (as, of course, the record described above testifies). It is all exactly in line with what, a C. Wright Mills made perfectly clear, makes for a member of "the power elite"--a mediocrity who got the breaks and made the most of them from a careerist standpoint in that way that Mills characterized as the "higher immorality," which attitude toward career is of course apt to be paralleled in the attitudes of those in such strata toward not just other elites "having a good time," but "having a good time" oneself, as revealed in those e-mails he exchanged with Monsieur Epstein. That Larry Summers, not as a callow young man, or coming apart at the seams in mid-life, but a man in his autumn years, endeavoring to pursue an extramarital affair with a "protégé," turned for "dating advice" to his "wingman" Epstein (Summers' term--not mine), seems to me relevant not because it is a shocker but rather because it is, for someone who can see things as they are, the absolute opposite of a shocker, being so entirely consistent with what we have seen of Summers' morality, character, intelligence, judgment (and even discretion)--or lack thereof.

Yet that, of course, is not the story the media tells. Indeed, all things considered it has treated Summers rather gently through the affair compared to how it might have done (for instance, digging into just how far Summers' association with his "wingman" went), with this, too, entirely consistent with what we have seen of their record. By and large the media never hold such figures accountable for "bad calls," or even outright corruption, certainly not for long, and not when they have been supporters of right-wing policies. (Thus Summers' protection of Andrei Shleifer in his time as President of Harvard, his role in the financial deregulation that led to the 2008 crisis, his role in Harvard's losing billions in endowment money in said crisis, did not in their eyes any more than those of the folks of the Beltway and their "campaign contributors" disbar him from his role in the Obama administration as Director of the National Economic Council in the early days of the "Great Recession." Equally his conduct in that capacity--his hostility to counter-cyclical action, and more generally anything that would help working people, in the face of economic downturn, which proved another "bad call" at best--did not keep him from having been in the running for that highest of offices in the financial priesthood, the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.) Relevant to this, too, is how averse that media is to connecting the dots, as seen when one considers how, after in line with its measure of sensitivity to certain forms of identity politics, eagerly reporting the storm Summers raised when explaining the comparative scarcity of female scientists in terms of "innate" differences in "aptitude" he held to be scientifically evidenced, it did not bother to remember this to its viewers, readers, listeners as being of significance for his larger view of the world as a place where people are generally getting what they "deserve," and his brushing off the troubles of the less privileged in those terms, his attitude toward women, in this case, seeming very reflective of his attitude to working people ("treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"), and in general everyone outside the all-sure-they-are-there-because-they-are-so-much-better-than-everyone-else-in-every-way "superclass" comprised of the ultra-privileged 0.0001 percent of humanity that considers itself to be the true population of the planet. And of course, for all the hubbub about personal indiscretions of a certain nature, those on journalism's commanding heights are rather less ardent about going after the Friends of Epstein than it is, say, Harvey Weinstein (or even smaller fry like a Justin Baldoni), the figures involved being far more consequential individually, and from the standpoint of what looking at them closely would reveal about things as they are, than is the case with some mid-level (or lower) Hollywood player. Thus have they, for years, respectfully convey the denials of those with which Epstein kept company as they say over and over again "Yes, when I went to his island and flew on his plane there were girls around, but I didn't have anything to do with them. I didn't even have any idea what that was all about. Honest! I was there to raise money for my charity! Charity! Because I'm a philanthropist. PHILANTHROPIST!" (I have never had anything but contempt for the insistence that these people are "the smartest guys in the room" and the people who keep repeating it, but such utterances now convince me that they must be the dumbest guys in any room.) Meanwhile, of course, the fearless reporters of the mainstream media studiously ignore the more substantive of the recent revelations, like the recently released e-mails, precisely because those, again, happen to show that Epstein was involved with much more than "girls." Indeed, given how that media has lionized Summers in the past (exemplary of which good press is how one issue of TIME Magazine back in 1999 had his face on the cover with those of Rubin and Alan Greenspan as the "Committee to Save the World," practically making of him a superhero member of a superhero team, a Justice League of Superfriends--where so many would see instead a Legion of Doom), they will, when all this blows over, doubtless be doing so again, and likely before long. Indeed, Summers may get his crack at the Federal Reserve chairmanship just yet--and precisely because he can be counted on to be the same old Larry while holding that office.