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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
Image you lived in a society that forgot how electricity worked. You still have all this stuff that uses electricity, and you have some memorized rituals around how to get the lights to turn on. But the rituals are... weird. They've drifted away from the mechanical acts of completing circuits, and become quasi-religious as to the spiritual significance of bringing light into this world. And nobody understands any longer which parts of the "turn on the lights" ritual are load barring or not. They mostly just blame the person for being immoral if the lights don't turn on for them.
This is more or less how I perceive the state of the media right now. They have no concept of the human condition. Of theming. Of universal human truths. They have no capacity to actually imagine a character's inner world. These are dead and hollow things writing about other dead and hollow things. What does an NPC know of the human condition? They aren't human.
So these projects lose money. Everyone hates them. The non-creative executives want to fix it. But they can't. We're 2, maybe 3 generations into the wanton destruction of our culture. It's dead and hollow things all the way down!
Every now and again they can rustle out a boomer to churn out one last, heartfelt, comprehensible script. Apparently the Top Gun sequel wasn't totally shit? And Tom Cruise actually cared about it a lot, worked really hard to have it made, and infused a ton of heart and sincerity into it? Plus real planes, really flying, giving the movie a feeling of, I donno, being real?
As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.
From time to time you'd read about some college stripping more and more of the western canon out of their liberal arts programs. And where they lead, everything else followed. It's dead and hollow things, studying the narcissistic pabulum written by dead and hollow things, churning out their own shallow nonsensical dead and hollow scripts. There is no path back anymore. It could take 30 or 40 years to reverse course if we began seriously focusing on rebuilding our culture today. We won't.
There are still good movies in theaters. There are even still good American movies. Watch stuff like Pig or I'm Thinking of Ending Things or whatever instead of stuff movie studios spent a billion dollars on.
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While I agree that the average filmgoer in earlier decades probably, on average, watched a better quality of film than today's filmgoer, the fault in my mind surely lies not with these imagined NPCs writing 'hollow' scripts - there have always been crap films on offer, there are today and there will be in the future - but the filmgoer himself. There are ample stimulating and interesting films released nowadays, as there always was, such that a person who watches an average number of films need never watch anything schlocky. Plus, I'm not entirely convinced that this is true to an enormous extent. Bond films regularly topped box office figures in the 60s and 70s, even the rubbish ones like Diamonds are Forever; I have nothing against the Bond films; indeed, I enjoy plenty of them myself, but they're hardly high art.
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Yes, you are touching on the worst aspect of modern media in general. Everything is being desconstructed and reconstructed on a flawed model on how humans work. It is inauthentic in the attempt to entertain, it is a lecture instead.
My personal pet hypothesis is that postmodern thinking has come to the conclusion is that no one can escape Plato's cave https://yale.learningu.org/download/ca778ca3-7e93-4fa6-a03f-471e6f15028f/H2664_Allegory%20of%20the%20Cave%20.pdf or enough people can escape to create change. So to change the power dynamics of the world we must reform the shadows and what we name shadows to make change in the world. The more I look into Focault, Derrida, Horkheimer and Baudrillard. It gives the impression that the human perception of reality is only programmed by the powers that run society and it has an unwavering belief that it can perception can be reprogrammed somehow to affect reality. It is the ultimate in the blank slate since it is not only the human mind but also reality is a blank slate. We can redefine reality by controlling the shadow puppeteers and what we name the shadows in the cave from the allegory. Like western canon is what defines the modern power structures in the postmodern view of the world, so if we redefine the canon we redefine how power works in the world.
To pick nits, everything is being deconstructed, and it's not being reconstructed at all more often than not.
I mean, lets take an old movie Halloween as a point of comparison. Supposedly Mike Meyers is terrifying because he has no motive. He just kills and kills and kills without any reason what so ever. Not revenge, greed, lust. He doesn't even seem angry when he does it. This is supposed to be terrifying.
Now it's hard to think of a main character in a modern series that isn't some variety of rebel without a cause. Every single fucking show is miles up it's own ass about how important it is to destroy society. What replaces it? Don't think too hard about that. Nothing as far as we know.
It actually reminds me of an episode of The Orville from this last season. The episode picks up after the MacGuffin has saved the day, which would have been the climax of any other episode of a Trek-alike. Then it goes into all the ways everything gets fucked after they used the MacGuffin. I sincerely fucking loved how bold of a choice that was. That is how you "subvert" expectations. Not by staring the audience directly in their dead and glassy eyes, sneering, and doing the opposite of what makes sense because "fuck you" that's why.
I wish a single one of these "We must destroy society root and stem" shows spent one single second on the hard work and overcoming disagreement it would take to forge their new utopia. There is plenty of history in this regard to draw on from the founding of my own nation, the United States. But I don't think any of these shitheads know history, or at least not anymore than nonsense the 1619 Project preaches about "muh slavery".
What about the Expanse? There is a rebel with a cause in that?
Altered Carbon? I don't think the deconstruction managed to wreak the story in my opionon. But they tried mightily hard but they didn't manage to do it.
But you are right. They don't know what their utopia looks like and they can't paint a picture and us with some kind of foresight knows that those who lecture leads us down a primrose path to a Huxlean dystopia.
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I like your premise. In a similar vein, I have been imagining reality as more of the blind men describing an elephant. The elephant represents reality, it's a violent force that acts as it wants and can stomp us dead at any time, and we are all the blind men trying to stay away from the dangers of reality/nature. I don't think the "powers that run society" are any better informed than any of the rest of us- they too are blind men, attempting to secure their safety in light of the elephant that wants to harm them. I don't really see the people redefining power as acting from malice, but rather they're working on a faulty conception of reality that they inherited from generations of faulty thinking that are metaphorically saying: there is no elephant, or the elephant can't hurt us, or the elephant is actually a horse, or hey don't you think we should befriend the elephant.... basically everyone has become so detached from reality that the elephant is thought of as something else. Now that we see nature rearing its ugly head (covid, war, breakdown of trust, lockdowns, everything else going on) it seems like the inteligentsia is quickly moving right ideologically to try to get a better understanding of reality rather than sort of lingering in the weird philosophical theory area that doesn't have a particularly firm grasp on reality on the left.
I believe the arc of the 2010s was basically an entire generation of people (millennials) raised on a flawed model of reality attempting to direct the world into its unsustainable idealized world and then clashing with the underlying fundamentals of nature that can't be theorized away. But perhaps I'm basically just describing my own personal experiences of becoming an adult and projecting it onto the broader culture- but more things seem to corroborate my position every day.
This is so gross and scary and horrible to me. It makes me feel like I'll never be able to commune with reality with everyone living around me and I'll always be doomed to pointing at the shadows on the wall. Everyone preaching blank slatism and gender theory makes me feel so gaslit when my lived experiences reveal time and time again that certain people are predisposed to certain behaviors and so on. This might be my paranoia talking but part of me is frightened that if culture doesn't steer things away from these lunatic blank slate conspiracies, humans using technology will conspire to enforce the ideologies until they've sanded away reality to the point of everyone actually becoming a blank slate. This will be sold to the people as a beautiful thing- everyone will be equal and have a perfect chance at happiness, and the class of people enforcing it will believe they're doing the right thing. But in my mind, it's completely degrading and dehumanizing and the worst possible route for humanity to take.
Excuse my ranting. I've been traveling internationally for the better part of a year and the new, different cultures and people I see in every country I visit is to me one of the most beautiful experiences I can ever imagine having and the thought of every person being degraded into someone without history or culture or context but rather is just a droid to sell netflix downloads to is truly the worst vision of the future I can imagine. And for what? So that rich Americans can feel great that they've created the shining tower on the hill that allows everyone to feel equal, and that they're not racist, because they've shoehorned every person into a box that says "person number 6,xxx,xxx,xxx" instead of some more humane and descriptive understanding of their unique history and place in the world. It works until everyone starts defecting and society starts breaking along tribal lines, which appears to be the current state of the US and perhaps the broader west. All I can do is hope that the powers that be start to see the horror they're directing us toward, maybe covid was a wakeup call for people, and I do feel hopeful that people are starting to have a more nuanced vision of things, but part of me isn't so sure.
It is not the first time I get this type of comment when I present my views on this topic. But these are thougts that originated back in 2014 when I saw what was happening in gamergate. I've since then expanded and learnt so much of where it originates and how it interacts with the algorithms of social media that, I simply had the time to make peace with the thought that people operate within alternate reality. It is also exacerbated by social media algorithm bubbles that doesn't correct them properly. So everyone lives in a slightly different version of the world designed to trap them in it with dopamine loops. But I don't get depressed over it anymore like the day I realized this pattern. My advice make peace with it and try to have authentic and genuine interactions with people. They where far and few between even before social media.
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Is the problem that the culture is dying, or just that the medium is getting stale and rote? As a parallel, let's look at the video game industry, which started a lot later than the film industry, and was doing novel and interesting things until a lot later. But more recently, games have felt more churned out and "by the numbers", at least from the bigger studios. I have a friend who works for Sega who tends to agree with this take. I think the problem is that we need new mediums, where people have to learn how to express something real again.
Are you talking about indie games or AAA games? Because both seem to be doing fine to me. Some AAA games are unispired, but not all.
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The easiest explanation is market dynamics.
Notice what these examples have in common: they were already capital intensive. Now the price has skyrocketed which has led to consolidation and blandness.
In the case of movies the middle class of film has mostly died (moving to streaming or just gone due to lack of DVD revenue) and big movies cost more to make now due to CGI and effects. So the movie budget has grown faster than inflation (compare Top Gu 1 and Top Gun 2).
In the case of games I don't think the pricing has kept up with inflation, let alone the increasing complexity (the better our TVs and graphics cards the more detail studios need to add) so game developers have become prone to all sorts of bad strategies to squeeze more money out of the gamers - which corresponding harm to the end product (games as a service and microstransactions are the obvious, loathed examples)
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To read a fun story built fully around the world/concept in your metaphor, check out A Canticle for Leibowitz
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Cruise sold out a long time ago. I wish he would quit the big budget movies and go back to his early career work which had great characters.
Yes cruise in a franchise makes a bag. But things like Risky Business was better.
Magnolia is my favorite Cruise performance.
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Tom Cruise is one of the few that makes franchise/action filmms that feel like they have some sort of care to them.
He could be a good character actor but there's plenty of those around. And he honestly has a limited window to be an action star but not to go back and be a more "serious" actor.
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I legit think Cruise is one of the best filmmakers of all time, at least within the role of "stunt actor." How many people have ever strapped themselves to the outside of a plane that was taking off, much less done it 8 times just for the sake of creating entertainment? Given the continual development of CGI technology, he also might be one of the last such figures, since it won't be too long before we can get literally identical results on video without putting real people at such high risk.
The results wouldn't be identical. The risk of each Cruise stunt is both a selling point of the movie (endlessly repeated at very talk show so Cruise never has to talk about something substantive and controversial like his religion) and knowing Cruise did it also probably helps suspension of disbelief/people convince themselves of the quality of what's on screen.
This is why I wrote that the results would be identical on video, not that the results would be identical as a film or as a piece of art.
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I predict that as he gets too old for leading man status, Cruise will be the new Eastwood: the Hollywood veteran who actually has a firm grasp on what makes a movie pleasurable for mainstream audiences, taking directing roles that give him lots of creative control and reliably turn solid profits, and the occasional vanity project to flex some underused acting muscles.
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A black pilled take, and sadly I cannot disagree.
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