Hollywood’s Burning? Let it.

The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. “I’m not looking for a dude,” the actor said. “And even if I was, you’re not him.” In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn’t comply I would try to make sure he wouldn’t get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, “Let’s roll.” I couldn’t tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night.

— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

In the eighties, we had the Cold War. I was in high school. Alexandra, my perpetually sullen, perpetually goth lunch companion—rebel enough to be seen eating with me five days a week but not rebel enough to date me—liked to dwell on the prospect of imminent nuclear armageddon. It’s what she talked about more than anything else.

There was something cleansing about it for her, imagining what would happen nationally, locally, and biologically as nuclear winter enveloped the globe and fallout slowly poisoned everything. Alexandra might have been unhappy, might have had eggplant-purple hair and a certain amount of fishnet on her at all times, but she also had a great imagination and a gift for describing the creeping symptoms of radiation sickness.

She could quote made-up facts and bullshit statistics on the inevitability of the Soviets nuking us within five years. She did so loudly in our American Government class when the hicks on the football team said anything remotely respectful or patriotic about the country. Alexandra loved the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis’ faces melt off and, of course, she’d tell everyone this was bound to happen, since we lived in San Diego and there was a major Naval base and training center there. Boom. And our faces would just melt off. You think the Russians care? They’re targeting our subs. They don’t care about your stupid family.

I went along with it everyday at lunch because of course I did. It was self-consciously morbid meets hypersensive and lonely at 12:30 on the bleachers of the upper field. And it was a time before the internet, before smart phones, and before elaborate plagiarism software that can almost pass the Turing test. We seemed to bullshit each other more and draw less prepackaged bullshit from the inexhaustible media sewage-flow we enjoy today. And the bullshit wasn’t so monetized.

It was a time when zombies were starting to move out of niche horror and into the mainstream as a purgative for middle-class anxiety. It was the era of The Terminator, Rambo, and Rocky IV. Sensitivity was not an issue. Feeling victorious was. Dolph Lundgren was supposed to catch a beating by Sylvester Stallone like the Soviet Union was supposed to eventually catch a beating from the west; though, it’s worth noting that Lundgren actually put Stallone into real-life intensive care as a result of his in-scene punches.

We all felt, at least from our teenage high school perspective, that the USSR was mostly genocidal scientists, hulking super-soldiers, and spies. Those were the movies we saw. If we thought critically about them, it was about how the films were put together, whether they were unbelievable or dumb or boring. We never said, you know, I think the Russians might not all be evil, sadistic, and obsessed with world domination. Why are we constantly being shown this? Dolph Lundgren was born in Stockholm, dude.

This was because the movie industry existed behind its own iron curtain. Or maybe a better metaphor would be Macbeth’s Birnam Wood. One moment you’re looking in the arts section of the paper for when Red Dawn is playing at Cinema 21 in the mall. Then you’re coordinating with your friends (or in my case, just getting in the car and going by myself). Then you’re sitting in the dark, eating your bucket of oversalted popcorn, waiting for the movie to start. And then, all of a sudden, Birnam’s come to Dunsinane and Colorado is being occupied by a commie invasion force: In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now. God bless the USA. It could happen right here.

You didn’t know how they came up with such a propagandistic idea or really anything about how movies are born, live, and die. You didn’t know much about Red Dawn other than the poster outside made it look like some kind of action film and maybe someone you know saw a trailer of Patrick Swayze holding an assault rifle and screaming about wolverines. It was six years before IMDB. All you had was Siskel and Ebert’s At the Movies or selected reviews in the paper.

You definitely didn’t know Hollywood was, is, and always would be terrified of being on the wrong side or maybe terrified of being unpopular or maybe just terrified of losing money. And in 1984, that meant the Soviets had to be evil, ruthless, baby-eating devils. They’d replaced the evil, ruthless, baby-eating Nazis dispatched from central casting since the end of WWII. Though rooting out Nazis and crypto-Nazis would make a comeback in 2016, we didn’t notice any of this in the 1980s the way we do now.

Alexandra, for example, had no idea that her fears and desires, a good part of her teenage pain, even her style of speech and choice of wardrobe were mediated almost completely by Ally Sheedy’s image in The Breakfast Club and a growing fascination with Robert Smith’s depressed-electrocuted-kabuki look in The Cure’s post-1982 goth phase. At lunch, we didn’t talk about the subtle influence of pop-culture or the movie industry because its machinery was invisible to us. We talked about our faces melting and whether we’d resort to cannibalism to prolong our lives after 90% of the country turned to irradiated ash.

But Hollywood was constantly whispering. It was obsessed with us. It wanted our attention. It wanted to hold our hand through our nightmares. It wanted to be the object of our desires, the interpreter of our dreams, the focus of our worship. Above all, it wanted us to love it more than anything or anyone else. And it was willing to make certain demands. Like a lingering house demon in some proto-Ugric folktale, it started off only wanting to help churn the butter. But we couldn’t give it enough affection. And so it killed little Vanya in the shed out of spite. That was almost four decades ago. It’s been mutating in the dark ever since.

The movie industry—at least since the eighties but probably since the rise of talkies—has always been a cruel, neurotic presence, glorifying consumerism, ridiculing the life of the mind, punishing promiscuousness while transforming our sisters and daughters into horror fetish objects, and holding up the impedimenta of suburban life as the ultimate in personal achievement. Feminism never made a dent. Early diversity and inclusion efforts gave us lame racial tokenism for 30 years before metastasizing into the story-wrecking virtue signaling we have today. And the vague materialism of Alex P. Keaton stayed with us, though whispered by ever-stealthier avatars in ever more camouflaged forms.

TV started as a way to sell Buicks but has become a way to sell a certain range of political opinions. Money is still the point. At the beginning of our new, not so roaring 2020s, 39 years had gone by since Red Dawn suggested Russian paratroopers could occupy the mall where Cinema 21 used to tell us how to think and feel. We got where we are today by lingering at a three-way crossroads: Donald Trump unrest, a weaponized bat virus from China, and a highly publicized moment of police brutality in Minnesota. Then everything started to burn. And so did the propaganda machine.

The mall had already died. Cinema 21 was already disrecognized space. Someone threw a brick through the Overton Window and certain conversations became impossible in public. So Hollywood had to change once again to stay on the right side of profitability. But the new woke lip service is already falling apart along with revenue and, possibly, the entire streaming model, which Steven Soderbergh has rightly called “the crypto of the entertainment business.” Watch the wreck catch fire and sink. It’s already well underway.

Now the most important audience demographics are the investors in corporate streaming and, ironically, the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, said corporations would love to utterly replace creative labor with AI, which isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better. Said creatives are striking, which also isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better. Ted Hope, “a producer on over 70 films, studio exec on over 60, [who] launched Amazon’s foray into feature film production,” argues in “The Coming Cinema Apocalypse (is Here)” that we’re completely controlled by “surveillance capitalism” and “AI is a real threat to all film people’s jobs.” And he should know. Beijing certainly does.

Current Hollywood remains a vile changeling, still willing to say anything, fixated on being cool enough to keep getting paid above all else. It’s Dorothy Thompson’s “Mr. B” from her acidly satirical 1941 essay, “Who Goes Nazi?”:

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, he fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Whatever pattern is successful, whatever needs to be said, whatever constitutes a growth mindset—no matter how moronic or destructive—is what Hollywood will voice and therefore transmit as cultural propaganda. The problem is that attitudes (and economics) are transforming faster than the movie industry can effectively track. As the medium and message of the movies becomes ever more ephemeral, abstract, supercilious, and politically homogenous, the industry is beginning to seem more volatile than Chinese Ethereum.

So is Hollywood burning? Yes. Should it? Certainly. At least in its present state. As Vecna puts it in the season four finale of Stranger Things, “There is nothing—nothing you can do to stop it now. Hawkins will fall, then the rest of this senseless, broken world . . . and I will remake this world into something beautiful.” It’s the clichéd mission statement of every two-bit canned Hollywood warlord, commie, evil wizard, and garden variety baby-eater since movies began. Burn it down so we can rebuild. It’s Ming the Merciless for modern audiences. And unfortunately it’s the most optimistic sentiment available to us at the moment.

Given Russia’s war with Ukraine, we might still get nuked, rendering such criticism as relevant as brass sconces on the Titanic. But I don’t think most teens these days are as afraid of nuclear war. It’s not as real to them as it was to us because the messaging, the propaganda, is different. Gen-Z, in particular, doesn’t seem to be very worried about foreign paratroopers landing at the capitol building. What’s a “capitol building”? They haven’t gone outside in six months.

If Alexandra and I were having lunch on the bleachers in 2023, she wouldn’t be draped in black and I wouldn’t be tolerating her in silent desperation. We’d be sitting quietly, passively, barely aware of each other, tapping on our phones, waiting for the next reboot of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, written by a computer to avoid offending anyone about anything (so as to maximize global streaming revenue, even from certain high-population totalitarian regimes).

We wouldn’t be feeling upset because we wouldn’t be feeling very much at all. But I’m too old-fashioned for that. Give me some face melting and a story that doesn’t require me to hate myself. I’ll take corny Rocky Balboa or the Terminator. At least those stories were vaguely more real than the spineless, self-consuming, fake puritanism we have now.

Social Justice and Online Zen

Just about every day, I see idealistic, well-meaning people online proposing solutions to social problems. Many of those solutions reflect utopian, siloed thinking, requiring highly unrealistic, comprehensive overhauls to systems that have been in place for a long time.

It kind of breaks my heart. I know people want positive change and improvement. And I’m not so cynical to think that their ideas are always about online clout chasing and virtue signalling; though, there does seem to be a massive amount of that. But I do think the world is an extremely complex, interdependent web of interests, necessities, and dependencies. It’s usually not possible to accomplish anything even marginally helpful without some degree of compromise. Unfortunately, compromise is messy and doesn’t look cool in an online rant.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is that if you really care about something, go about changing it for the better in unromantic, stable increments. Adopt more of the “community organizer” model and less of the Marvel Superhero model. And learn to get excited about those powerful, local, mature, solid improvements instead of the grand cinematic ones that are unworkable long term and probably impossible to even undertake from the beginning. You might not see a total solution in your lifetime, but you might do way more good than a showboat looking for acclaim and overnight change.

I’m not trying to be depressing, overly critical, or defeatist, just realistic and hopeful that someone, somewhere is coming up with more than just romantic, utopian solutions. I also try, when I can, to walk this walk. But I’m just as limited in time, reach, and resources as the next person.

In the meantime, I’ve decided not to argue with people online about their reactive social nostrums. That doesn’t help, either. I’m maintaining as much of a zen calm about things as I can these days. This post is as far as I go.

Convicting Kyle Rittenhouse Shouldn’t Be Easy

Read my latest on Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/convicting-kyle-rittenhouse-shouldn-t-be-easy

Reading the News with a Gelid Eye

Sam: Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That’s the first thing they teach you.

Vincent: Who taught you?

Sam: I don’t remember. That’s the second thing they teach you.

— Ronin (1998)

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, guess what? For all intents and purposes, it’s a duck. Constructively, it should be treated like one. We don’t have to ask if something’s really going on or if someone’s really behaving a certain way or if some horrific event is really happening according to plan and it’s all fine so just relax. We don’t have to probe for sincerity and reasonability. We only have to accept one truth: people hide, lie, and attempt to cover their horrific mistakes.

The truth gets obscured behind spin. Sometimes, people get killed. Sometimes, they disappear. Sometimes, Jimmy Hoffa gets buried under the 18th hole of a Florida golf course. It comes out years later, but by then, everybody just shrugs. Some things are so well concealed that we’ll never figure them out. And sometimes it’s better not to know.

We don’t have to waste time and energy speculating and trying to sift truth from falsity. All we have to do is look at intended and actual outcomes. If your partner comes home smelling like a strange cologne, you don’t have to ask whether she’s cheating or whether some bizarre twist of fate led to her getting sprayed with random eau de toilette on her way to the metro. You only need to note the instance and keep your eyes (and nostrils) open. If it happens a second time, it’s a case of “fool me twice, shame on me.” But let’s be honest: you already knew from the beginning.

It’s the same with political events. If it looks like someone’s lying or prevaricating or taking some other sort of evasive action, you don’t need to engage with the reasonability of their countermeasures. You only need to ask two questions: what does it look like on the surface? And who stands to benefit? Note the instance. Keep your eyes (and nostrils) open.

If you do this, fake news has no power over you. Fake news is momentary lying and you don’t care about the lies of the moment. You only care about what you see over and over, which fake news cannot affect as easily or as consistently. Note that the accusation of “Fake news!” is also a form of media gaslighting and damage control. Whenever you notice people screaming that, look at them more critically than before.

But we don’t need to dwell on the concept of fake news. We only need “news” and a bit of critical thinking. Here’s an example from the Vietnam era (since Saigon just fell all over again): “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” a statement most commonly attributed to journalist, Peter Arnett.

What you should take away from this statement: the village is (probably) destroyed.
What you should disregard: “We had to” (abdication of responsibility for the decision) and “in order to save it” (moral justification).

Responsibility shifting and self-justification on moral grounds are classic rhetorical countermeasures when large groups of people have been or stand to be murdered for the sake of someone’s re-election strategy or financial profile.

Don’t you believe it. Read the news, but read for that nugget of information embedded in the spin. Just remember: ask what it looks like on the surface and ask who stands to benefit from it. Then disregard everything but what might be the facts. You don’t have to be a detective. You merely have to see the duck flapping away.

Maybe You Can’t Handle the Truth

Today, after all the Covidy Trump ups and downs, the questions about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, and the hard questions about whether there should even be a VP presidential debate, I’m thinking again about Chris Beck’s excellent piece in Splice Today, “The Media Reports Narratives, Not Facts.”

We all live online now. We look at the world through electrified windows. All we see in our non-digital lives is our homes and immediate neighborhoods. Maybe we travel some, but we don’t get much of an overview of what’s going on unless we use digital media. This is good and bad.

The Good: we live in an information society where communication, news, and knowledge can be produced instantaneously.

The Bad: we live in an information society where communication, news, and knowledge can be produced instantaneously.

He / She / It who controls the location and size of the digital window (and do take a moment to learn about the “Overton Window” as well) controls what is seen. Is it true that the United States is collapsing? What does the New York Times say about it? More importantly, how, when, and to what end does the NYT cover the “decline of America”? You can’t just think about the content; you have to think about how it’s framed and marketed to you.

All media is a product. This is capitalism. And the truth (often much more complex than how it is presented in one “window” or another) is out there, but it is always, always beholden to the bottom line for any media platform. Of course, they all say they’re dedicated to the truth.

Is Fox News a legitimate news source? Sure. It’s about as legit as CNN. But it will seem more or less reliable depending on your assumptions about the world, your values, your community, and your culture. How about the Daily Wire? Take a look at it (especially if you consider yourself a liberal) and you won’t see a whole lot of variation between what’s in there and what’s showing on the Wall Street Journal on a given news day.

You might notice that certain stories are emphasized more than others or are framed to imply certain conclusions (the “secret message” in a news story that used to be called “slant” or “an angle” but which is now called “news bias”). But the Daily Wire is considered to be much farther to the political right on the American spectrum than the WSJ. Why? Probably because conservative pundit, Ben Shapiro, founded and until recently ran DW. But that really isn’t a good reason. It’s just perceptual media bias.

Do this comparison between The Washington Post and Mother Jones. How about The Daily Beast and Vox? How about any of these and Breitbart or The Drudge Report? Products. Marketing. Stoking controversy in targeted audiences. Know why I don’t watch Russia Today news? Google it and the reason should jump off the screen. Even search engines have slant, bias, implicit preferences that show the world a certain way. You can’t escape slant.

But you can do this: read conservative news if you’re a liberal along with your liberal stuff. Read liberal news if you’re a conservative along with your conservative stuff. Look at Media Bias Fact Check and search your favorite media sources there. Do this in order to see the world through more windows, even though you’ll never get a comprehensive view of anything.

Don’t let any media source trick you into thinking that what you’re seeing is the whole truth or the entire scope of something. You have to work to get that on your own. As Beck puts it in his Splice Today piece: “It’s no surprise that Americans’ trust in the media is minuscule. The New York Times can’t even recognize third-rate journalism. As a consumer of media, the only way to be well-informed is to remain skeptical about the media’s competence, understand that they’re reporting a narrative instead of the facts, and get your news from a variety of sources.”

Here are some questions to ponder for yourself:

Is there a problem with the stories on Zero Hedge? What might it be?
What makes The National Review a “libertarian” publication? Is it?
Why aren’t more writers for Quillette publishing in The New Yorker and The New York Times?
Is the NYT’s “1619 Project” history or speculative fiction? How can you tell?
What is the primary difference between Rachel Maddow’s and Ben Shapiro’s coverage? Why might this be a pointless question to ask?
I say above that “you can’t escape slant.” So why do all this thinking and reading about media? If bias is inevitable, why try to see past it?
Does believing a QAnon conspiracy theory indicate that you are intelligent, stupid, or just misinformed? How do you know? How about believing in the tenets of the religion of your choice? Smart? Stupid? How about believing that Critical Race Theory realistically depicts power relations in the world? Smart? Something else? What do these three belief systems have in common?

Rhetorical Edgelordism and the Summary Dismissal

[Edgelord:] Even from its earliest uses, the word carries the connotation of eye-rolling skepticism. The edge in edgelord comes from expressions like cutting edge or the idea of being edgy, applying a sense of boldness or unconventionality to such behavior; the lord half elevates such a person ironically with the rank of a deity or member of British nobility, with echoes of Voldemort, Sauron, and other dark-spirited, villainous characters who hold that title. — “Doing the Work of the Edgelord,” Merriam-Webster.com

Lately, on political news blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, we’ve been seeing a lot of summary dismissals of arguments, particularly those which are racially or pandemically charged. This might suggest people are more stressed out than ever. One rarely sees argumentative moves like this when times are calm, even in the divisive cesspools of social media and in the freewheeling comments areas still permitted by news sites.

Only when people begin to crack under sweeping emotional strain do they start to become rhetorically evasive and nihilistic. They want to appear as though they’re open to reasoned discussion and debate, but really they want to close down the conversation and talk about their cats. In a sense, I don’t blame them. We’re in a very emotionally difficult moment right now. And no one wants to admit to having an exploding head.

We might classify this particular evasion as a form of “rhetorical edgelordism”—an attempt to disingenuously self-protect by dismissing an argument while also trying to seem like the smartest, most incisive person in the room.

If someone says, “It could be A or it could be B,” the edgelord adds, “No, A and B are a false choice because C,” which invalidates them, ostensibly ending the discussion. Usually the person bringing C is upset with having to choose between A or B and wishes to redefine the choice as (A vs B) vs C—where C is much less controversial, threatening, or applicable.

C is usually something exotic. In order to function as a blanket dismissal, C can’t use the ideas from A or B (because then it falls into the scope of original discussion). It has to be from a distant discipline or sphere, so far outside the purview of A or B that the core argument gets derailed.

Here’s an example: “COVID-19 originated in fruit bats” (A) vs. “It was bio-evolved in a Chinese lab” (B). Then (C) pops up: “Actually, statistics have shown social attitudes to pandemics track according to political party affiliation, if you want to talk relevance when it comes to the virus.” Ironically, C itself is immensely and obviously irrelevant to what’s being talked about. But unless it is instantly ignored by everyone, it’s work is done.

People who see this move might point out the scope creep. But by then the thrust of the original discussion has already fractured. In our example, we’re now talking about at least 3 issues: (1) the bat theory vs the lab theory, (2) the new political party theory, and (3) whether the new political party theory matters or is an irrelevant digression. Now it’s much easier for the edgelord to divert the argument, self-soothe, and still pose as the edgy freethinker not caught up in the preoccupations of A vs B conformist thinking. At this point, we’re about three or four rhetorical steps away from looking at a jpg of his cat, Waffles.

In healthy discussions (with psychologically healthy people), this is sometimes called “reframing the issue,” and it’s a perfectly legitimate way of clarifying a subject under consideration—when it focuses on getting at a deeper point significant to A and B. In the example, this might be something like, “The issue of whether the virus originated in fruit bats or in a lab actually raises the deeper question of whether determining the origin will matter to developing a vaccine.” Here, the reframe is aiming at a link between both A and B and trying to enhance and clarify the discussion by pointing that link out. The test is relevance: A and B are both compelling because they are interested in how we know and therefore can control the global outbreak. But when reframing is done as a way to distract and dismiss by bringing in an extraneous consideration, there are usually disingenuous motives at work.

People who didn’t live through the online evolution of bulletin boards, newsgroups, and discussion forums (all of which disappeared eventually into the reeking maw of social media), might not recognize this tactic as a largely online way of posturing and pseudo-arguing. Like most rhetorical strategies born in the disinhibited, critical-thinking-starved world of the internet, it’s largely an empty, counterproductive tactic, an emotional time and energy sink best avoided.

Still, during a lockdown, when we’re spending more of our lives online as opposed to in person, pointing these things out might be worthwhile. They’re no longer the sole province of trolls, basement dwellers, loudmouths, and fakes. As we move toward the 2021 US Presidential election, social tensions flare, and the virus dances in the streets, stress levels are likely to soar. And, in cases where public discourse is critical, we might even see close friends and family posing as the edgelord in the room while surreptitiously looking for the exit.