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.