Culture industries are dominated by a few big corporations that prefer to keep flogging old stories instead of taking a risk on something new. Creative workers can still produce fresh ideas, but they’re snuffed out before they get a chance to breathe.
Wait, Bob Chipman quoted Sony Pictures in a critique of the Mark Webb Amazing Spider-Man series. They used a phase something like content as product. Chipman noted the Webb movies were greenlit not because we needed another Spider-Man movie. In fact, they rejected Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 on the assumption that Spidey was getting stale. (Even though 3 was well received, just not as much as the moguls wanted).
But Disney was wanting Spider-Man in the MCU, and Sony wanted to preserve its rights in order to get a slice of that Disney pie. Marvel owns Spider-Man and was free to sell to Disney if Sony wasn’t going to make a movie. So they made movies to cockblock Disney. They didn’t have a story or a good idea, they just needed to make a movie, even a bad one, to evergreen their Spider-Man rights.
And this led to some ideas from Marketing / Accountancy: What if we extend this same notion of just making movies without inspiration or concepts the same way, since we know enough about what consumers will buy tickets for. (The movie market is mostly teens who don’t know any better, hence the 1980s trend of making sure boobs happened in at least one scene.)
Content as product, manufactured the way one manufactures turkey bacon, or Twinkies.
Curiously, we actually saw a similar trend in the music industry in the late 80s, where the labels decided they figured out the perfect formula to knock out hit after hit. (Patrick Bateman would talk about how totally amazing this music was as he was prepping to butcher his next victim.)
We’re also seeing it in strategic maneuvers like Warner shelving Batgirl as a tax write off, a maneuver that demonstrates even Warner doesn’t regard cinema as art rather than content to be consumed.
We’ve already seen this kind of devastation happen to the game industry, where AAA games depend on a publisher-proprietary platform, have an always-online mandate (even with single-player) and is loaded with microtransactions, and intentionally made less fun by making the grind tedious so that bypasses of parts of the game can be sold as time savers.
When art is no longer about expression but consumption, the producers have lost the plot. Much like the dusk of Classical Hollywood and the art-film age of the 1970s this is probably going to create an era of low-budget films that are actually good, while the big studios try to sue the snot out of the small production companies for trumped-up rights violations (think the Pokémon vs. Palworld litigation that is ongoing, and apply the same notion to cinema projects).
In film school (25 years ago), there was a lot of discussion around whether or not commerce was antithetical to art. I think it’s pretty clear now that it is. As “culture industries” lean more on AI, I hope the silver lining will be a modern Renaissance of art as (meaningful but unprofitable) creative expression.
https://youtu.be/PSmgNgsW3io?si=ZKYa9C3wViVabI1l
I just happened to see this
TL:DW Video essay about how skill learning has been crushed under the boots of capitalism, and the only path to self fulfilment is to steal minutes away from the megacorps and give them to your art. Not for content or for money, but for your soul.
Great video, super funny, unique editing. Highly recommend if you have the time.
How do we get boobs back in movies?
There are two noteworthy points in history featuring boobs in cinema.
The 1980s in the US is the era of the slasher flick, and the film student age, so Lucas, Speilberg, Coppola, etc.) when arty films started getting a (tiny bit more of) a budget. It’s also before the internet, so one is not able to just look for boobs on the internet.
As Sarah Marshall notes (discussing the history of porn) these R-rated movies are the only place where a fellow might see boobs other than his partner’s. The early internet (and its predecessor, usenet) provided a lot more boobs, and so boob content fell off from mainstream cinema in the late 90s and early aughts. DVD is also a factor, which not only didn’t require MPAA approval, but often advertised The Unrated Version and we got to see a lot more European movies which were a lot more relaxed about boobs.
Also, we get plenty of boobs in TV series on Netflix and whatever HBO is called now.
But then there’s what happened to Spanish cinema after the death of General Franco
He died, and his extreme censorship was quickly lifted. Spanish Cinema went through The Stripping Years in which films featured at least one gratuitous sex scene with boobs and pubes (we weren’t all trimmed French or Brazilian yet) simply as a celebration of freedom of expression. So if the Republicans succeed in taking away everyone’s porn, there will not only be extra-risqué black market films, but the US mainstream cinema will likely go through a boobalicious phase because now we can show this again!
I’d like to trade them for those exhaustingly unfunny one-liners
The only question worth asking, during any time