I've begun to make a point of reading A.S. Hamrah whenever something of his becomes available (his Baffler write-up on this year's Oscar movies is just about the only thing worth reading on the subject), and while his Bookforum review of a dismal-sounding New Hollywood lament doesn't have much material with which to work, I did perk up at this accident of crossing currents, featuring Michael Eisner and Don Simpson:
Simpson I've written about before. Eisner I haven't paid as much attention, but considering the shape Disney has since taken, this statement of intent on his part seems like a prophecy that grows more powerful by the day. I'll have to take a closer look at his place in US film history soon.
I don't hate-read things anymore. But sometimes something I read will induce hatred in me, and unsurprisingly, The Baffler tends to do this pretty well. I got a lot of enjoyment out of the spleen vented toward IP that prioritizes "a well-written story" over style, politics, and morality. Also known as "content," as empty and interchangeable as that corporatized non-word implies.
Lately it just seems like there are just so many stories out there that so many people want you to read, and the thing is, I don't want to read (or watch) any of them!! I'm still reading even if I don't follow the @Longreads account on Twitter, I promise! Keep the true-crime documentaries, books, and podcasts far away from me, thanks. The essay also gave me the pleasure of throttling a question I recently asked of myself: whether or not it might be worth pursuing an MFA. Looks like the Iowan, CIA-funded, endlessly workshopped "quality fiction" model still predominates, so again, no thank you!
If anything, I'm surprised that niche film success is the jackpot to which most online magazines and content curators are aspiring. That's the world I know best, and film critics routinely describe it in just about the same language of terminal crisis as is used in this essay.
(Also kind of a relief to learn I can skip the Killers of the Blood Moon book, one I'd considered reading, and just watch the film instead, which will surely be a massive improvement on its source material)
Nice interview of Julia Reichert via Eric Hynes...though unfortunately I ended up disliking AMERICAN FACTORY very much. Between the Obama endorsement and the sinophobia, it gave off the air of state propaganda, which was the opposite of what I'd expected from a documentary filmmaker who'd come up through the labor and women's movements -- as this interview does a fine job of laying out. I have UNION MAIDS bookmarked for another time, because I like to think AMERICAN FACTORY was just one wrong turn after a lifetime of acclaimed work.
Haven't been following Reverse Shot much lately but there's some great stuff on last decade's best films: Violet Lucca on the incongruities and elisions of THE MASTER, Farihah Zaman on the interrogative sweep of CAMERAPERSON, Shonni Enelow on Joanna Hogg's grappling with privilege in THE SOUVENIR, Clara Miranda Scherfig on BOYHOOD (a film that I think has become rather uncool to like, but which I still love), Kelley Dong's sensitive examination of Lee Chang-dong's POETRY, Chris Wisniewski on the beautiful CAROL, and Julien Allen on Kiarostami's wonderful LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE.
(Eric Hynes also makes a good case for the bracingly defeatist INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, a film I enjoyed forever ago, before my aesthetic sensibilities grew repelled by the Coen style. I think this one could still work for me, thanks in no small part to Delbonnel's textured cinematography.)
The problem with bringing back blogs...this is all, sadly, very true. Even blogging here feels like a quixotic attempt at preserving some lost ideal combining introspection and a publicly accessible database -- which is also why I haven't done that e-mail Newsletter/Substack thing other people are doing, because it seems too much like throwing my writing down a bottomless hole in vain hopes of someone seeing it on the way down. I don't begrudge other people for going that route, and in fact I subscribe to three Substacks from three writers I like a lot, but something in me just feels too attached to the blog form, imperfect as it is...
(I will say, though, that Letterboxd seems to me like a promising hybrid, in that it allows for sociality and the guilty serotonin pleasures of more established social media while also giving room for lengthier, more considered writing than Facebook posts or Tweets)
More magisterial work by Kate Wagner, this time on aesthetic pleasure and its relationship to "ruin porn," viewed historically, architecturally, and culturally.
Short profile of Jason Blum, whose thrift has triumphantly cut through the bloat of contemporary Hollywood and found a winning 'formula' for popular genre films. I scare-quote the word formula partly because it feels unseemly when applied to art, but the fact remains: unless you have a strategy for navigating a studio system polarized between micro-budget and mega-budget, it's hard to finance any kind of original work that stands a chance in theatrical release. Years ago I suspected Blum had the right idea, and time has borne that out spectacularly, although I wouldn't say I like all -- or even most of -- the films he's produced. Yet with A24 pumping out Yorgos-inflected pseudo-horror, I much prefer Blum's straightforward approach to genre. The easy money subsidizes occasional risk-taking, and it seems he wants to tilt further in the direction of artistic freedom, despite his skill lying more in the assemblage of talent than any personal auteurist vision (as he himself appears to acknowledge). Also, like with Soderbergh, I enjoy watching the ripple effects of a surprise financial success, something that only real experimentation can produce, and which has grown rarer and rarer as brand-based intellectual property devours US cinema.
Wikipedia, last and best outpost of a non-corporatized internet. Of course it's not totally utopian, as the article admits. Social hierarchies still reproduce themselves there, and if the page-top banners are any indication, they seem permanently in need of donations. Yet it's somehow gained critical mass where imitators have failed, and the engine has begun running itself, to the general benefit of humankind. Hard not to feel moved!
Corey Robin and the fast-growing danger of white minority rule. It's interesting that the Electoral College was apparently a non-issue for most of US history, only revealing its undemocratic roots recently. This also pairs nicely with Jamelle Bouie's look back at the Democratic South's authoritarian enforcement of Jim Crow, elements of which could resurface depending on the levers of power that Republicans decide to utilize in the 2020s.
I hate Piketty, but he's not going anywhere for now, and if I have to deal with that, I'd rather have Will Davies sizing up the new work than break it open myself.
The ambivalent nostalgia of Mike Leigh's CAREER GIRLS, which more and more seems just as impressive an achievement as its more-acclaimed predecessor.
Read everything Robin James writes. This Real Life essay flips the romanticized notion of artistic independence on its head, arguing that so-called independence represents the privatization of risk and thereby making artists the optimal neoliberal subjects. That alone would be a piercing insight, but James also suggests that the ideal of "interdependence" floated by some artists as an alternative is still too intersectionally exploitative, due to its incomplete emancipation from the private property relation. Wow. This is the type of work Terre Thaemlitz regularly produces, which is just about the highest compliment I can give.
Almost finished making my way through this massive look at Japan's pop cultural decline. What's written here ties in quite well with Hiroki Azuma's book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, although this five-part essay is more like the base to Azuma's superstructure. Otaku may be dominating Japanese pop culture, but it's only because the rest of Japan has been suffering three decades of economic malaise, the effects of which have devastated its young generation (I worry more and more about my step-siblings, who'll soon have to confront this crisis). Less disposable income means less cultural production -- except for consumerist sub-cultures, which the essay somewhat oddly fingers as being maladjusted individuals spending their way to group identity. I wouldn't say I disagree with that generalization...but it seems too blunt to see it spelled out like that, so maybe I need to interrogate it a bit more myself. Anyhow, the rise of sub-cultural influence has led to groups like AKB48, powered by fandom and obsessive purchases into mainstream success. I hadn't thought to view AKB48 that way, probably because I never bothered to look beneath the surface of their popularity. But this is a point well worth considering, because I think the same process is underway in the US (Japan, as McKenzie Wark* has said, always seems to be several steps ahead of global trends). Stateside otaku are replacing popular culture with their own obsessive interests: Star Wars, Batman, Marvel, Disney animation and live-action.
I guess now would be a natural segue into the legacy of Bob Iger, ex-CEO of Disney. For that I have an overview from Scott Mendelson, a writer with whom I have a strained relationship. There was a period of time in the mid-10s I read his columns nearly every day because I was interested in keeping up with Hollywood's evolution. Mendelson would zero in on case studies and suggest emerging trends and curtailed possibilities; this I found useful, and it kept me from actually having to see most of the movies. But after a while I found his authorial voice very annoying, heavy as it was on franchise lore and spurious meta-narratives of his own making (often based on some milk-and-water ideas on representation and social justice in mainstream cinema). Reading his work at such a high frequency became an enervating chore, so I jumped ship and have mostly kept away since. But I'll check back in occasionally when other box office articles aren't available, and if someone points me toward something like this, I'll give it a shot, because I know he can crunch numbers and throw together some crude media history if needed. So, circling back to the point at hand, Mendelson's thesis here is that Disney's current empire came about through acquisition, not any kind of pioneering successes Iger can call his own. It's an incredibly conservative legacy, which at first seems to contradict a winning streak one would guess is based on peerless expertise. But these qualities can in fact coexist. Craven calculation and shrewd marketing go hand-in-hand at Disney, and now other studios -- not to mention US film culture as a whole -- survive at the margins of this titanic branding exercise, so impressive in so many ways but always fundamentally dull and depressing at its core.
*Great little interview with her here, btw.
I enjoyed these two articles and think they play well together. There’s another one too that builds on these ideas from another angle, saying that socialism in the West has always been expressed racially, which is why top-heavy governments like Hitler’s Germany actually *are socialist* (even though conservatives misinterpret this point on purpose to discredit socialism/communism). Lotta good stuff!! I really like Mudede.
I've had some occasion recently to reflect on Frederick Douglass, surely one of the most fascinating figures in US historical, intellectual, and political history. As this Jacobin article suggests, there's no easy way to reduce his politics to a handful of agit-prop quotes, but even with the limited excerpts on inequality we have from him, how anyone fail to recognize the moral force of arguments made by a once-enslaved African-American? At the very least they deserve profound respect and consideration; really though, the beginner-level exposure to Douglass provided by the US education system should be deepened over years of intensive study, a lodestar around which all subjects of this infernal slave empire should orient themselves.
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