Well, of course, it’s Dracula.

Notes on a French love letter to a Wallachian prince.

I thought I might write about Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale, which came out in 2025. But, as I read the reviews and interviews published since then, I realized most of the things I wanted to say had been said. The weight of vampire scholarship, specifically centered on the Dracula story, is vast, ponderous, and more than a little tedious.

It seems like any Dracula review has to navigate existing impressions and ideas built up around Stoker’s (essentially boring) Victorian novel and somehow reach a Jungian conclusion—archetype, collective unconscious, mythos, trope, this is who we are when we’re denying our desires, etc.

At least, that typifies the genre of pop-culture vampire criticism. I’m not very interested in that (even if I won’t be able to avoid doing some of it here). So this can’t truly be a review in the “Dracula genre” sense. It can be akin to “notes,” which puts it more in line with Besson’s movie, also something that can only be described as “notes.”

My lasting takeaway after multiple viewings is that everything Besson does is self-consciously derivative. Nevertheless, like M. Night Shyamalan, he’s one of those directors who picks your pocket while you’re aware he’s doing it and you still love him for it.

That’s something about the director, not the movie, but it needs to be said. Maybe it’s all we can say, since Dracula: A Love Tale really does seem like a love letter to other, greater creations and creators. It cannot stand on its own as a coherent statement. But maybe that’s okay.

A funny thing happened on the way to Henry Spencer’s house.

Dracula: A Love Tale works best as a lesser reprise of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but without the round character development, stunning editing, and multi-dimensional plot work. In nearly every scene of Besson’s movie, one thinks, well, of course it’s happening like this, it’s Dracula, after all (or it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula after all, remade by a keen student of the master).

Besson merely gives end notes to the Stoker myth as powerfully articulated by Coppola. In order to appreciate each of the scenes, you have to understand the comparable scenes in the earlier work. Otherwise, Besson’s seem flat, rushed, telegraphed through cinematic shorthand.

His films always have an irresistible boyish infatuation with their subject matter, even if, in each of his big splashy movies (thinking especially of The Fifth Element, The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), the spit and bailing wire holding up Field Marshal Potemkin’s village is inevitably exposed.

The idea of Besson’sDraculaas a creative love letter—a derivative work suffused with so much adoration that it passes beyond the delicate boundary of homage into worship—is appropriate. And that also makes it resonate, at least in a spiritual way, with Stoker’s epistolary form; though, Francis Ford Coppola adapted that better, too.

This doesn’t mean Besson’s movie isn’t worth watching. As Christoph Waltz puts it in a 2024 interview with Collider, “I always think comparing directors or comparing actors or comparing people, really, is a little unfair because, of course, they are all individuals. . . . They have their method and their vibe, if you want, their specific energy that makes them unique. . . . Luc has a very specifically French [energy], which I admire and enjoy a lot.”

And that tracks to how, for example, The Fifth Element felt with Jean Paul Gaultier’s costume design, the heavy Moebius influence, and the “Federated Territories” warships that seemed a lot like “French Navy in Space.” In other words, Besson’s Frenchness is part of the draw, part of his ever-present Metal Hurlant vibe. We can love his movies for that, if nothing else.

*The Fifth Element* / Moebius: all the *Metal Hurlant* you’d ever want and more.

We should, of course, take note of the celebrity voltage brought by Christoph Waltz. For all his humor and magnetism, he seems trapped in the psyche of Colonel Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds, another far greater film.

Here, Waltz, as the vampire-hunting priest, is meant to embody the Van Helsing principle. As with Anthony Hopkins in Coppola’s movie, Besson seems to hope that Waltz will ground the story in a modicum of seriousness or at least wizardly fascination.

Compare this to Dolly Wells’ impressive Van Helsing as “Sister Agatha,” the vampire-expert nun in the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Dracula—much more of a comedy than Besson’s, yet she seems to out-Hopkins Hopkins. In every Dracula story, there needs to be a least one person with some magic who understands the horrible stakes and reminds us that this is still Gothic horror.

But Waltz, true to form, brings a weird mirth to the role that diminishes it. On one level, it’s delightful because it’s Waltz, but it exemplifies what’s he’s talking about in the Collider interview—different energies, different people, different performances. Unfortunately, his doesn’t fit very well with the overall movement.

It comes off a little too much like What We Do in the Shadows. Too much airy Taika Waititi, not enough gravely Hopkins. That would be great for a different movie, but not here. Waltz doesn’t want us to draw this comparison (or any comparisons), but how can we avoid it?

The merry inquisitor, first for the Reich, now for god.

Then there are the ham-fisted attempts at humor, which are never a good thing because when they fail, they wreck immersion. Ewens Abid goes through his paces as Jonathan Harker, but the role is so bumbling that it verges on Jerry Lewis and Mina’s dismissal of him seems like an afterthought. Dracula hesitates to eat him in the beginning because “he’s a funny man,” but he’s not written as funny, just pathetic, nervous, and bewildered.

Ewens Abid doing his best with what he was given.

Ultimately, what’s true for Jonathan Harker is true for every supporting role in this film. Zoë Bleu (Mina-Elisabeta) and Matilda De Angelis (Maria) are undeniably gorgeous (thank you kindly, M. Besson). And it’s true that Dracula must always be surrounded by horrors and beauties, but Bleu and De Angelis don’t get to act.

They come across as just another principle in the dominant formula—the shopworn embodiment of what we’ve come to think of as the bipolar Victorian dynamic of the feminine, the uncorrupted virgin vs. the fallen sexual beast. Winona Ryder
(Mina) and Sadie Frost (Lucy) did it far better because they were given individual arcs. Coppola allows us to see the evolution of Mina’s chaste inner torment and Lucy’s depraved seduction and victimization at the hands of the Count. They’re real people.

Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra / Matilda De Angelis as Maria.

And, after all, what remains to be said about Caleb Landry Jones’s portrayal of Dracula? Should we compare him to Gary Oldman (or, for that matter, to any of the very impressive “master vampire” performances delivered by Christopher Lee, Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, even by Antonio Banderas, who did more in his small part as Armand in Interview with the Vampire than is done by anyone in Besson’s entire film)?

We should, if only to get a sense of what’s missing. But perhaps we can leave that to the vampire scholars and professors of pop-culture. No doubt, a year after its release, there are books being written about how this movie fits into the Dracula legendarium. For now, as with Ewens Abid or any of the cast, we can only say, yes, Jones did his best.

Ultimately, I will never stop loving and feeling shortchanged by Luc Besson’s movies. So when he inevitably remakes Lord of the Rings as the story of two plucky soldiers in Napoleon’s Armée de Réserve française marching into Great St. Bernard Pass in the War of the Second Coalition, I’ll be present for it.

Monsieur Gandalf, I’m ready for an adventure.

I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write. And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it. We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared. People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated. Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss. We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!” Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul. He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen. Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me. But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford. And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable. One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar. That’s bullshit. You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves. So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’” Maybe so. Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock. Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you. Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul. I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared. I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am. The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me. It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation. I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings. Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage. Nothing. No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation. You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work. There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions. Turn up the amp. Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right. Too bad for you. You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

The Adderall Diaries Revisited

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone. I was an underachiever and a social outcast, who lived primarily through his imagination, and I read constantly and widely. I’d impersonate my father in order to call myself in sick—my father rarely ever knew or cared when I was sick, but the school secretary had a different impression—then head down to the public library’s central branch to read all day. I learned more that way, mostly about arts and humanities subjects, than I ever did in my depressing cliquey high school.

One of the books I encountered was Dali / Miro: Masters of Surrealism. It was a good read and I thought Dali was weird and cool. Like a lot of teenagers just learning about art, I thought you had to be weird and cool to be an artist. And when I read the book, the idea that artists were different made sense to me on a higher level. They were a unique species.

Both of my parents were serious artists (my father a writer, my mother a painter and sculptor) and they were definitely not weird and cool. They were just mom and dad. I didn’t put them in the same category as someone like Salvador Dali, Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Joan Miró, Hemingway, HP Lovecraft, Picasso, or Jack Kerouac—all illustrious weirdos on whom I’d developed a teenage obsession at some point.

Also, less illustrious but no less weird: Robert E. Howard, Jim Starlin, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Robert Aspirin, Lynn Abbey, Dave Sim, CJ Cherryh, and many other sci-fi / fantasy people, who were great in pop-culture, but who were a bit too lowbrow to garner respect from anyone in my family.

To be fair, like any teen, I didn’t understand that these “names” were the product of intense cultural mediation, specifically economic and industry concerns, their greatness established and maintained, by multinational media organizations. As Foucault writes in “What is an author?” “an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. . . . [I]ts status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.”

Instead, I mistook marketing for mystery and felt the answer to my suffering was somewhere far away with these special people—maybe in a comic book, a fantasy novel, or whatever esoteric elephant vapor held up Dali’s melting art chateau. I had to Find The Others. But at that time in my life, I would have had to borrow the car to do it.

One day, I asked my mom to explain the weirdness to me and why she wasn’t like that. Her answer was something I’d never forget. You can’t generalize about art and artists because everyone is different. But there are such things as posers and they are numerous.

A poser is someone who takes his creative energy and puts it into his appearance and identity instead of into his work. She added that some people are posers and artists at the same time. Warhol, Basquiat, Hemingway, and Dali are good examples. Others are just framed by the media in colorful ways for author-branding purposes. Hence, the Hollywood image of the artist as a flamboyant weirdo. Hollywood understands this pose because the poser-weirdo artist is an evergreen role that makes conventional Joe Sixpack comfortable.

Artists are people willing to dwell in the imagination. They’re indulgent, often emotionally arrested in some ways and hyper-developed in others, and they’ve given themselves certain inner permissions to an unsettling degree. This might be generally true. But if we can put them in a container, labelled FREAK, we can feel less threatened by their existence.

At least from the standpoint of values and expectations, this is what Hollywood is usually about: reinforcing dominant social attitudes and trends and making lots of money as a result. Sometimes, Hollywood stumbles into art and makes something amazing. But most of the time, it recycles garbage. And one of its often-recycled garbage products is James Franco playing a writer.

It seems like he does this far too much. He’s an actor, so a creative person by definition, and he actually does have an MFA in creative writing (not making him a writer by definition, which is something for a different essay), but he seems to be suffering from the actor who really wants to be the thing he portrays syndrome.

Yes, Franco has published multiple books. And I feel sure it was as difficult for him to find a publisher as it was for Jewel, if anyone remembers her as a literary sensation. Some of his material might be good. I haven’t made a definitive study of the Franco corpus. And I don’t want to bag on him as a writer or as a person. But I do think he does a disservice to the discipline of literary writing by reinforcing Hollywood’s poser-weirdo artist stereotype. Then again, he’s an actor. Posing is his primary skill.

So I watched The Adderall Diaries after a nine-year cleansing period. It has not aged well. The story, in case you wisely abstained the first time around, is that Stephen Elliott has writer’s block. He’s on the verge of a big deal with Penguin for a creative nonfiction book on his late, abusive father and shitty childhood. But it all falls apart when the supposedly dead dad (Ed Harris) shows up at a very posh, exclusive publishing-industry reading and calls Elliott out as a fraud.

Cue Cynthia Nixon, playing a literary agent but really just reprising her Distressed Middle Management Lady role from Sex and the City: no one wants anything to do with Stephen Elliott now that he hasn’t really been chained up in a basement like he claimed and his dad is still around. He’d better produce hard evidence that he was a messed up kid and fast.

Then we get Amber Heard, a spectrum of drugs appearing out of Elliott’s pockets, and multiple S&M intercuts with hookers throughout the greater New York metropolitan region, representing to Joe Sixpack the Decadence And Depravity To Which An Artist With A Wounded Soul Can Descend. In movies, you never see an artist washing the dishes unless she has a needle hanging out of her arm. And yet, the dishes do seem to get washed. Who does them? Maybe “Dobby the House Elf,” since this is about as realistic as Harry Potter.

You never see the high cost of the rock-and-roll lifestyle supposedly led by creative people because, much like me as a teenager, Joe Sixpack must have certain assumptions reinforced. Artists are “other.” The normal rules of human life don’t apply to them. If they debauch themselves, the consequences are largely aesthetic, quickly forgotten by the next scene.

They drink whiskey like it’s apple juice. They’re pursued by modelesque beauties or hunky men, who find them incredibly interesting. They engage in a smorgasbord of extracurricular porn sex. And they rarely need to consider whether such a lifestyle might interfere with their writing. In reality, if you’ve got a headache, you’ll notice you typically write fewer pages that day. If you’ve got a hangover, the manuscript can wait.

James Franco is an attractive man and Amber Heard, even post-Depp, is gorgeous. I have no doubt they are in the right field. They should be looked at for money. But being able to strike a pose is not the same as being able to work with lousy source material or function effectively as a different type of artist. It’s definitely not enough to turn you into the real thing. The difference between Franco and, say, Salvador Dali, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Andy Warhol is simple. They were exceptional because they had enough creative energy to weave self-aggrandizing image-myths while also making real art.

But most artists want to live quietly. They want their energy and attention to go toward one thing. In the meantime, the movie industry (and, to a certain extent, the publishing industry) chugs along, recycling comfortable stereotypes so that everyone can feel a little less bad about the poems they wrote at age 14.

How to Be Good

Black Swan is Midsommar. Stop talking, Winston.

Hollywood has never seemed more Orwellian in its insistence that it is the repository of everything admirable in culture and that it represents the right side of history. We know Hollywood will hold its own mother down and pull the gold out of her teeth with a pliers, but it prefers to pretend otherwise. And no one wants to dwell on this as long as the entertainment keeps coming. With streaming, the rapaciousness of the entertainment center of the world is even harder to see. Hollywood says it’s your friend. In reality, it’s INGSOC conformity and you’re awful if you disagree.

Streaming technology is as 1984 as it gets.

The tragedy of streaming content is that it never goes away. It’s in your house, up in your perceptual field, at all times. Even when you’re not watching, you’re getting emails reminding you to log back in. Back in the halcyon days of Blockbuster Video, a pretentious, emotionally manipulative stinker might show up on VHS, but there was a bit more personal agency involved in renting and watching it. It wasn’t accessible unless you physically sought it out. It was a tangible thing and you weren’t quite such a passive blob of content consumption—seeing the movie demanded that you get up, at least temporarily, from the couch.

You also didn’t have the same plausible deniability if you found yourself watching a lousy film. At some point, from the rental store to the final credits (if you made it that far), you had to remind yourself that you put down good money for the thing and brought it home. You did it to yourself, friend.

In the worst cases (Tree of Life? Vanilla Sky? The English Patient? Legends of the Fall? Crash? Life as a House?), you may have admitted that you were powerless against the overwhelming pretentious hype-suction and were thereafter drawn into a vortex of melodrama against your will. Then you may have made a searching and fearless moral inventory and resolved never to relapse again. Sometimes, bringing back drippy garbage from Blockbuster could be a cathartic, healing experience, like going out with the guys while on Antabuse. The best lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

But now, with streaming television and movies, everybody’s on the juice 24/7 and done learning. You can now quietly demean yourself with bullshit Hollywood affectation and faux-political posturing every month for a discreet subscription fee. Nobody has to know. You don’t have to look the Blockbuster cashier in the eye and say, yes, I want to rent The Fountain. You can violate yourself, from beginning to end, with all the pungent streams you desire in the privacy of your home. Draw the curtains. Click on I Am Love. It’s okay.

You might occasionally feel a twinge of self-criticism—why have I watched Babel 15 times and The Maltese Falcon only twice? What does this say about me? But there are certain politically coded stinkers that remain beyond criticism, no matter how fetid and endless their streams may be. Those are the films you are permitted to enjoy without needing to painfully reflect on why you are doing it to yourself. Or if you do happen to wonder, the Party has provided a simple thought-stopping idea: because I am a good person.

The Party tells me I enjoy Magnolia for its drawn out emotional exploration of human meaning and compassion in the San Fernando Valley, a concept which, in itself, is astounding. Thankfully, it’s streaming right now on Netflix. I watch Magnolia because I am good. It provides an emotional release and ultimately represents the best parts of me. I enjoy what is good because I am a good person. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Thank you, Netflix. I feel happy. Let’s watch it again.

What’s going on in my brain? Why is George Orwell haunting my laptop?

Ideally, a movie will go through a production funnel that starts with a compelling idea, and ends with a completed feature. Along the way, there will be setbacks and workarounds, windfalls and compromises. And as Rachel Ziegler, the most likeable actress in Hollywood, has so famously put it, “That’s Hollywood, baby.” * But we do not live in an ideal world, which means the “completed feature” can come into being before its concept. That, too, is Hollywood, baby. In fact, that’s even more Hollywood than Hollywood. **

A film is sometimes made and then the hype apparatus around it tries to make it into something. Is it a trenchant commentary on the state of race relations in inner-city schools? It could be. Is it a masterwork of ironic feminist critique? It could be. Is it a moving historical epic in which unrequited love is cast against a tapestry of chaos and war? It could be. Let’s see. And if we can’t “position” it—

A book publicist once asked me how I’d position my second short story collection, Cruel Stars. I said, “Wut?” She took a deep breath and said, “What are the books on either side of it in the bookstore?” Then I took a deep breath and said, “Well, the one of the left is, of course, my first collection, Gravity. The one on the right is the collection I’m just finishing, Living the Dream.” She nodded slowly at something over my shoulder.

—does it even exist? Art is nothing without the marketing because marketing is what communicates The Message, the values of the Party. It explains why you are good, why certain things should make you feel happy and sad, and why this should matter to modern audiences. And if such an explanation is impossible or requires too much scaffolding, the Party might want to delay the release or even consign it forever to the vault.

But those of us who are not Party members, who are not on board with what passes for the New York Times concept of the right side of history, may object that this seems untoward for everyone concerned—like pushing a baby back in so the birth might be restarted more strategically, in a more profitable and impactful time.

Most unfortunate. When something is created, you can’t uncreate it so it can hit the zeitgeist more advantageously. You can only change it. And generally the more post-hoc changes and delays you make to a creative product, the more it becomes a horrific golem, an accidental parody of a commercial concept, instead of a coherent piece of art. Put differently, one usually does not do a thing and then justify or position it without making a mess. No, no, I’m not criticizing the Party. Don’t look at me like that. I’m merely making a small, harmless observation . . .

This brings us to the example of Black Swan and Midsommar, which is the same horrendously pretentious, emotionally coercive movie.

Black Swan is now available again on Netflix. We might say it’s been raised from the dead one more time thanks to the always-already necromancy of streaming video. It’s definitely a film approved of by the Party: a break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character, Nina, is romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.

There are certain inchoate feelings loudly expressed. There is a certain amount of weeping and there are various episodes of emotional violence that we are encouraged to think must mean something. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) means you are good. You get the message. You are indeed on the right side of history.

Midsommar is the same break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character is also romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) also means you are good. Criticizing this Frankenstein’s monster of highly telegraphed political position statements means you are a counter-revolutionary, a subversive, not of the Party. You are bad.

To be fair, there are some hapless men who travel through the scenes of these movies like runaway spaceships soon disappearing beyond the rings of Saturn, behaving awful or squeamish or unreliable according to the plot-furniture needs of the moment. At least one of them is immolated in a bear suit, which might be interesting if we could bring ourselves to give two shits about him. Instead, we think, well, there he goes. He’s a crispy critter now, kids. Woo.

The reason Black Swan-Midsommar is a good example of Hollywood’s shallow, monosyllabic politics is that these films (or we might say, this film) are actually very overt in their need to seem right and to make you agree that they are. They’re the same yoked-up melodrama we’ve always gotten only now repositioned as edgy and essential, now back in our homes, telling us about politics and social justice, and not going anywhere.

They’re pretending to be one thing (folk horror) as a container for another thing (third-wave feminist critique) and are actually neither. They’re telling us that if we like this, if we watch it many times, if we digest it, if we approve of it, we “get it.” We’re in the know. We’re correct. And so we are good human beings. 2 + 2 = 5. Of course, this is abject bullshit.

Why is Florence Pugh having a hysterical meltdown throughout the movie? Stop talking, Winston. It doesn’t need to make sense. Just go with it and you’ll be safe. There is no need to think critically or make small, troubling observations. All you need to do is accept that she is sad. You may cry with her if you wish. That shows solidarity and that you are loyal. Yes, you are a true believer . . .

Unintentional Orwellian patterns are ubiquitous, especially in the pop-culture mediated by Hollywood, which is most pop-culture. Orwell wasn’t just concerned about totalitarian communism, his deeper project was criticizing thoughtless social conformity in general.

For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, one of his largely forgotten novels (perhaps because it cuts a little too close to middle-class status anxiety and the obsession with money), the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, gives up on art to make a modest living in advertising. What is art without marketing, the novel asks? In the end, when he discards his poems, Comstock concludes it really is nothing.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste. There is also no accounting for technology. And when taste and technology coincide, there is no accounting at all. Black Swan and Midsommar would have flashed through the pan with a lot less “positioning” had the big streamers not put them in perpetual rotation—unlike many far superior and less ideological films, which blink out of existence on streaming platforms all the time.

We hope Hollywood goes on a retreat in the mountains and finds itself, comes to terms with its pathological need to always be class president, and decides to stop bullying its audiences. But the aspidistra’s airborne and, let’s be honest, nobody knows how to land.

—

* Interestingly, it’s the same when writing a novel, only you get to create all your own obstacles, betray yourself, meddle with your own story, make all the compromises, and know from the beginning that you’re not going to get paid.

** There is no point in arguing that a particular production “isn’t mainstream” or isn’t influenced by Hollywood in whole or in part. The global movie industry in general and streaming technology in particular has had an enormous centralizing effect on film. “Indie” is now a flavor. It is not a substantial alternative.

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.