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.